What changes on 20 January 2027, and how the Regulation differs from the Directive

On 20 January 2027 Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 replaces the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC. Most summaries of it try to cover everything at once. This one covers documentation: what has to travel with a machine, in what form, in which language and for how long. That is the part that changes most and the part that is easiest to get wrong quietly.

A regulation, not a directive, and that alone changes something

The Machinery Directive had to be transposed into national law, so what a manufacturer actually had to do was twenty-seven national implementations of one text. A regulation takes effect directly in every member state. There is one text now, and an obligation you read in it is the obligation that applies, without a national statute standing in between.

Instructions may be digital. That is the headline change

Under the Directive the instructions travelled with the machine on paper. They may now be digital instead. The permission is real, and it is what most machine builders have heard about, but it is conditional.

Four conditions follow, and all four have to hold at once: the instructions must describe the model they correspond to, access has to be marked on the machine, the user has to be able to print and save a copy, and it has to stay online. Meeting three of them is not compliance.

Declarations may be digital too, and the retention rules are not identical

Read those two next to each other. The declaration of conformity is tied to the expected lifetime of the machine with ten years as a floor beneath it. The declaration of incorporation, for partly completed machinery, is a flat ten years with no lifetime clause. They are written as one rule in a great many internal policies, and they are not one rule.

The language duty is unchanged in substance and easier to get wrong digitally

The language is determined by the member state the machine is placed on the market in, not by the manufacturer and not by the reader's browser. On paper this was obvious, because somebody had to decide which booklet went in the crate. A single digital address makes it easy to forget, which is why a page reached from a machine should list every language it was published in rather than guess from the device that scanned it.

Paper did not disappear

This is a right exercised at the time of purchase, not a standing right to demand paper at any point in the following decade. It is narrower than it is often described. It still has to be honoured, free of charge, within a month.

Importers and authorised representatives are named directly

This is the change that gets the least attention and lands hardest on anyone who does not manufacture. The duty is not inherited from the supplier and it does not end when the machine is delivered. It runs per machine from the moment it was placed on the market, and it survives the supplier going quiet, changing hands or closing.

What this guide does not cover

Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 changes more than documentation. Annex I, conformity assessment, the treatment of substantially modified machinery and the new requirements around software and connected products are all outside the scope of this page, and we are not the right source for them. For those, read the official text or ask a notified body. Everything quoted above is reproduced from the Official Journal so you can check it against the source rather than against us.