The EU's new formaldehyde limit takes effect in 11 days, and most compliance teams are still reading it as a furniture rule — it caps every indoor-use article that off-gasses formaldehyde, at two different thresholds

What actually changes on 6 August

The European Commission adopted Regulation (EU) 2023/1464 on 14 July 2023, amending Annex XVII of the REACH Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 by adding entry 77, a new restriction on formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing substances in articles. The restriction sets two emission limits, measured by a chamber test defined in the regulation's Appendix 14, which references the reference conditions of EN 16516 (23±0.5°C, 45±3% relative humidity, a loading factor of 1±0.02 m²/m³, and an air exchange rate of 1±0.05 h⁻¹): a 0.062 mg/m³ ceiling for wood-based panels and furniture, and a 0.080 mg/m³ ceiling for all other in-scope articles. Both apply from the same date, 6 August 2026. A third, separate limit — also 0.062 mg/m³ — applies specifically to the interior fittings of road vehicles, but not until 6 August 2027, a full year later. Three categories of article fall outside the restriction: those where formaldehyde is exclusively naturally present in the material the article is made from, those intended exclusively for outdoor use under reasonably foreseeable conditions, and those intended exclusively for industrial or professional use, unless that use still exposes the general public to the emissions.

The numbers behind entry 77

One figure is the stricter ceiling that furniture and wood-based panels face. One is the looser, but still mandatory, ceiling that catches everything else. The third is the gap between the general deadline and the one carved out for vehicle interiors.

The real subject: a hazard-based restriction, not a product-category rule

REACH restrictions under Annex XVII don't work like a vertical product regulation that names a category and stops there. They attach to a substance and a use — here, formaldehyde released into indoor air — and then sweep in every 'article' that meets that description, regardless of what industry code it sits under. That is structurally different from reading entry 77 as 'the furniture rule': the operative question for any given SKU is not which product category it belongs to, but whether it is wood-based (0.062 mg/m³), falls into the broader 'other articles' bucket (0.080 mg/m³), qualifies for one of the three narrow exemptions, and — either way — whether there is Appendix 14 / EN 16516 chamber-test evidence on file to prove which side of the relevant threshold it sits on. That is a material-composition-and-test-data question, resolved SKU by SKU, not a checklist a brand can clear by confirming it doesn't sell sofas.

Why it matters for brands

This reaches far beyond furniture and homeware brands. Toy makers, appliance and electronics brands with wood or laminate housings, and any consumer-goods brand using foam, adhesives or resin-bonded components are directly in scope of the 0.080 mg/m³ tier, whether or not 'furniture' ever appears in their product taxonomy. The task before 6 August is not reformulation for most SKUs — it is classification: knowing, at the SKU level, which products are wood-based and face the stricter limit, which fall into the general 'other articles' bucket, which genuinely qualify for the outdoor-only, industrial-only or naturally-occurring exemptions, and which of those SKUs already have current chamber-test evidence on file versus which don't. Brands that manage material composition and test documentation as structured, queryable SKU data can run that classification as a single check across the whole catalogue. Brands that manage it as static spec sheets and PDFs have to open every product line by hand, including the ones that were never flagged as 'furniture' in the first place, with eleven days left before the general deadline lands.

Two ways to read 6 August