TALLINN, Estonia — With less than three months until a European Union deadline requiring every member state to offer its citizens a digital identity wallet on their phones, 11 countries have launched working versions, nine are in public testing and seven, including Germany and Austria, have acknowledged they will miss the Dec. 31 date, according to a progress report published Friday by the European Commission.
The wallets, mandated under the bloc’s revised electronic identification regulation, are designed to let citizens prove who they are, show a driver’s license, present a university diploma or pick up a prescription using a single app whose credentials are issued by their national government and recognized in every other member state. Unlike commercial login systems, the wallets are built so that a user discloses only the specific fact a transaction requires, such as being over 18, without revealing a name or date of birth.
“The idea is very simple and the engineering is very hard,” said Liis Kaljurand, who leads Estonia’s wallet program and has advised several other governments. “Every country has its own registers, its own legal definitions of identity, its own card formats. We are asking all of them to speak one language by New Year’s Eve.”
Estonia, which has used digital identity since 2002, launched its wallet in March and reports that 61 percent of adults have activated it. Italy, which built on an existing national app, has about 22 million users. Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries are also live. The laggards cite different obstacles: Germany’s program was delayed by a procurement dispute and by the country’s decentralized registry system; Austria is awaiting legislation; Poland said its wallet would launch in February.
The Commission’s report also found that adoption among businesses, which must accept the wallets for strong authentication once they are available, lags well behind government readiness. Only about 4,000 private-sector services across the bloc have integrated the wallet, most of them banks and telecommunications firms.
Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about function creep and about the risk that a single app becomes a de facto requirement for daily life. “The design is privacy-preserving on paper, and we have been pleased with how seriously the engineers have taken that,” said Dr. Marek Nowicki of the Panoptykon Foundation, a digital rights group in Warsaw. “Our worry is not the technology. It is the moment a landlord, a pharmacy or a train conductor says, no wallet, no service.” The regulation prohibits making wallet use mandatory, but Dr. Nowicki said enforcement of that principle would be the real test.
In Tallinn on Saturday, Kaljurand demonstrated the wallet at a pharmacy, where a pharmacist scanned a code on her phone and dispensed a prescription without seeing her name. “Twenty years ago we did this with a chip card and a reader the size of a brick,” she said. “Now it is the phone. In ten years it will be something else. The principle is the thing: you prove what you must, and nothing more.”
The Commission said it would begin infringement proceedings against countries that miss the deadline “in the course of 2027.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the European edition with the headline: Europe’s Digital Identity Wallet Nears Its Deadline With 11 Countries Live and 16 Lagging.
