EUDR competent authority: how to find and register yours

Your EUDR competent authority is the one designated by the EU member state where you are established, under Article 14 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1115. It checks your due diligence statements, runs inspections, and handles corrections. If you place products on the market in other member states too, those authorities gain jurisdiction over those products, and you must notify them.

How member states designate their competent authority

Article 14 requires every member state to designate one or more competent authorities to carry out the regulation's obligations, and to give them "adequate powers, functional independence and the resources" to do it. A member state can split the job by commodity or by function rather than naming a single body — several have.

Each member state must notify the European Commission of the name, address and contact details of every authority it designates, and report any change without undue delay. The Commission is required to publish the resulting list on its website and keep it updated. The current list — "Find your Competent Authority" — sits on the Commission's deforestation regulation implementation pages; treat it as the source of truth over any third-party summary, including this one, because designations have continued to change since the regulation's first wave of notifications in 2023.

Examples of how member states have split the job

No two member states have organised this identically. Some examples, current at the time of writing:

Member state	Competent authority	Notes
Germany	Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE)	Single national authority
Belgium	Federal Public Service Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment	Single national authority
Austria	Bundesamt für Wald (forestry) and Agrarmarkt Austria (agricultural commodities)	Split by commodity type
Bulgaria	Bulgarian Food Safety Agency (cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soya); Executive Forest Agency (wood)	Split by commodity
Spain	Dirección General de Biodiversidad, Bosques y Desertificación nationally, with separate regional authorities for checks	National plus regional split
Netherlands	Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit (NVWA)	Single national authority

If your commodities and your member state don't match this table, or you're established somewhere not listed, go to the Commission's published list rather than guess from a pattern — the split-by-commodity approach Austria and Bulgaria use is the exception, not the rule, and several smaller member states finalised or changed their designation well after the regulation's original 2023 notification date.

Which authority is yours if you trade in one member state

Checks under Article 16(1) are carried out "within [the] territory" of the competent authority — for an EU-established operator or trader, that means the authority of the member state where you are established has jurisdiction over you. That is also the authority that handles your corrective-action notices under Article 24 if an inspection finds a problem, and the one whose contact details you need if you have to raise a query about your own due diligence statement or a competent authority inspection.

If you place products on the market in more than one member state

Jurisdiction under Article 16(1) extends to products an operator has placed, or intends to place, on the market — not only to where the operator is established. In practice this means authorities in every member state where your products actually reach the market can check them, even though your home authority is still the one you are primarily accountable to. Article 4(5) makes this an active duty rather than a passive risk: you must inform the competent authorities of each member state where you have placed a product on the market. A business selling the same consignment into Germany, France and Poland is not just exposed to three sets of checks — it has a positive obligation to notify three authorities, not one.

This is distinct from a group with entities spread across several member states: there, each entity answers to the competent authority where it is itself established. The multi-state notification duty under Article 4(5) applies on top of that, to the products a single entity places on multiple national markets. A UK group selling through separate subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland has three competent authorities, one per subsidiary; a single Irish entity shipping the same product line into all three has one competent authority but three notification duties.

What your competent authority actually does once you're registered

Registration is the start of the relationship, not the end of it. Under Article 16, each competent authority has to draw up an annual control plan setting out, at minimum, the share of operators and traders it will check and how it selects them — weighted, under Article 16(1), by the risk tier of the countries a business sources from. The checks themselves run under Articles 18 and 19 and can be desk-based, on the business's premises, or at the point of entry into the EU for imported goods.

If a check finds a problem, Article 24 gives the competent authority the power to order corrective action: withdrawing or recalling non-compliant products from the market, or ordering the operator to remedy the deficiency within a set deadline. The authority can also impose the administrative penalties set out in Article 25 — see what EUDR non-compliance actually costs for the detail — and these decisions are taken by whichever authority has jurisdiction over you under Article 16(1), not by the Commission. Member states also have to report annually to the Commission on the checks they carried out, which is one reason the Commission's own list of authorities needs to stay current: it is also the list of bodies feeding that enforcement reporting.

None of this changes because your registration sits in an EU-wide IT system rather than a national one. The system is shared infrastructure; the legal relationship — who checks you, who corrects you, who fines you — stays with your own member state's designated authority throughout.

How registration actually works: EU Login and TRACES NT

The due diligence statement itself is filed in the EU Information System, built on the TRACES NT platform, which is a single EU-wide system rather than something run separately by each competent authority. Registering means:

1. Creating an EU Login account in the name of a real individual, not a generic company mailbox — the account carries legal weight once it starts filing statements.
2. Signing in to TRACES NT and requesting the operator role, searching for your company by country and name, or creating a new operator record if it does not already exist.
3. The first person to request the role for a given company is validated and receives administrator rights, and can then add colleagues.

None of this asks you to pick a competent authority from a list — the system already knows which authority covers you, from your country of establishment. Where your competent authority actually matters operationally is corrective action, inspection follow-up, and the multi-state notifications above, not the TRACES NT sign-up screen itself. See filing a due diligence statement in TRACES, step by step for the filing process once you're registered.

Non-EU businesses: the EORI and validation step

An operator or authorised representative not established in the EU (Northern Ireland is treated separately under the Windsor Framework arrangements) goes through an extra validation step. You request the EUDR operator role, add an EORI number issued by a member state or UK(NI) authority to your operator record, and email the Commission's TRACES support desk (SANTE-TRACES) requesting validation, copying a competent authority of the member state that issued that EORI number. Until that validation completes, the account cannot file.

This is one of the clearest practical reasons a non-EU supplier ends up working through an authorised representative established in the EU rather than registering directly: an authorised representative with its own EU establishment has a home competent authority in the ordinary way and skips the EORI-validation step entirely for filings made on your behalf.

Downstream operators and traders

Since Regulation (EU) 2025/2650 removed the obligation for most downstream operators and traders to file their own due diligence statements, you might assume registration no longer matters to you. It still does for anyone above SME size: downstream operators and traders that are not micro or small undertakings must still register in the EU Information System, even though they pass along upstream reference numbers rather than filing their own statement. The competent authority that covers you for that registration is, again, the one in your member state of establishment.

What to do if your member state's designation looks out of date

Designations have moved since 2023 — several member states changed or split their authority after the first wave of notifications, and the Commission's list is the only version that is definitely current. Before your application date, confirm three things directly against the Commission's published list rather than a cached blog post or supplier questionnaire:

• The name and current contact details of the authority covering your member state of establishment.
• Whether your commodity sits with a general authority or a split one, in member states that divide the role by commodity.
• Whether you place products on the market in any other member state, and if so, that you have a process for the Article 4(5) notification to that state's authority too.

Check what your business's EUDR obligations are, including who you are likely to answer to once you are registered.

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