The EU guarantee notice and GARAN label are in force: the exact rules, and the mistakes they rule out

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960 was adopted on 25 September 2025, published on 2 October 2025 and has applied since 27 September 2026. It introduces a harmonised notice about the two-year legal guarantee that every seller must display and the GARAN label for commercial guarantees of durability. This article summarises the Commission’s rules on Your Europe, together with details reported by PPC Land and the Romanian business press.

The notice: who, where and how

• The seller, rather than the producer, must display the notice. The requirement applies to physical shops and e-commerce websites.
• It must be displayed "in a prominent manner", such as on a shop wall, next to the checkout counter or as a general reminder on a website.
• A printed notice cannot be smaller than A4 (210 × 297 mm) and may appear in colour or black and white. Online, it must appear in colour.
• The QR code is mandatory. Neither the wording nor the design may be changed. The notice is available in all EU languages.

Based on its reading of the rules, Romanian e-commerce platform MerchantPro says the notice should appear before the customer completes the order, in the order confirmation e-mail and in the language of the contract. A compliance guide published by Compliance Gate in August identified no exemptions, including for second-hand goods.

The GARAN label: when it is mandatory

The GARAN label applies to a commercial guarantee of durability offered by the producer. Your Europe states that if the guarantee is free of charge, covers the entire product and lasts more than two years, "use of the GARAN label is mandatory". A guarantee covering only part of a product cannot use the label.

• Only three fields may be changed: the duration in years, the brand or trademark, and the model identifier. The GARAN title, tick, calendar icon, legal guarantee reminder and QR code are fixed.
• The duration must be shown in whole or half years. Values such as 2.5 or 4.5 are allowed, but 4.1 is not. The year numeral must be set at 80 pt and the translation block at 7 pt.
• A printed label cannot be smaller than 95 × 100 mm and may appear in colour or black and white. Online, it must appear in colour. A compact nested version that expands to the full label is permitted.
• No later than delivery, the producer must also provide a commercial guarantee statement on a durable medium. It must state that the consumer’s legal rights are unaffected and specify the producer’s name and address, the goods covered, the guarantee conditions and the steps the consumer must take.

According to the Commission’s practical guidelines, as reported by PPC Land, producers must supply the guarantee information to sellers; sellers are not expected to obtain it themselves.

Enforcement in Romania

National consumer authorities are responsible for enforcement. In Romania, Business24 reported on 30 September fines of up to 35,000 lei for missing or incorrect labels and consumer information. A legal opinion by Alina Pleșcan of Corugă & Prodescu, published by Wall-Street.ro on the same day, stresses that the label does not replace the guarantee certificate. The two obligations apply independently.

Mistakes the rules exclude

• Displaying a black-and-white notice or label on a website. Both must appear in colour online.
• Redesigning the label with the shop’s colours or font. Only the three specified fields may be changed.
• Using a GARAN label for a guarantee that costs extra or covers only one component of a product.
• Giving a duration such as "3 to 5 years" or "4.1 years". Only whole-year and half-year durations are allowed.
• Displaying the label without the notice. Every seller must display the notice; the label is an additional requirement for qualifying guarantees.

Managing labels across a catalogue

The notice is a single document, while labels are specific to the producer, product model and country. A shop with thousands of products may need to collect guarantee terms from multiple producers, generate a label for every eligible model and update those labels when the terms change.

garandb.eu provides a shared public database for this information. A producer or seller publishes a label once, including the brand, model, duration, country, validity period and a link to the official guarantee terms. A shop then adds one script or installs the WooCommerce, PrestaShop or OpenCart plugin. On each product page, the script reads the brand and model, looks them up and displays the appropriate nested GARAN label for the shop’s country. It displays nothing if no qualifying guarantee is listed. The same script opens the official notice in the page language wherever the shop places its link. Visitors can vote on entries, and disputed entries are delisted.

The script sets no cookies and sends only the shop’s hostname, brand, model and country code. Shops that do not want to load third-party code can call the lookup API from their own backend. For an individual label, the generator inserts the three editable fields into the Commission’s SVG templates and exports the result as SVG, PNG or a print-ready PDF.

We are developers, not lawyers. Consult the regulation, the Commission’s practical guidelines and your national consumer authority when assessing your own obligations.