What is confirmed
There is no general legal requirement in Great Britain for a construction product to carry a QR code. That is the confirmed position, and it is worth stating plainly because a great deal of marketing implies otherwise.
What the Construction Products Regulation does require, for products within its scope, is identification and accompanying information: a type, batch or serial number that identifies the product, the manufacturer's name or trade mark and a contact address, and — where a declaration of performance has been drawn up — that the declaration and the required safety information accompany the product. Those duties have the status LAW. None of them specifies a data carrier.
What the 2026 reform documents signal
The Construction Products Reform White Paper and the general safety requirement consultation, both published on 25 February 2026, point the same way: a unique product identifier, and a data carrier such as a QR code linking a product to its digital product information.
Neither is a legal requirement today, and no identifier scheme has been mandated or endorsed by government. We record that direction as EXPECTED. Anyone putting a date on it is going beyond what has been published.
Where a QR code is already useful
The delegated regulation on making the declaration of performance available on a website means the declaration does not have to travel as paper in every crate. Conditions attach — the content must not be altered, the page must remain available for the required period, and access must be free — but the route exists, and a QR code is a sensible way to reach it.
In the EU, Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 goes considerably further, with a construction digital product passport reachable through a data carrier. That is EU law, applying from 8 January 2026, and it reaches Northern Ireland under the Windsor Framework.
Where a QR code is required by contract, not by law
Specifiers, main contractors and social landlords increasingly ask for a scannable link as a condition of supply. That is a commercial requirement, enforceable through the contract, which in practice means it arrives sooner and with less notice than legislation would. It is a reason to have the underlying record in order — not a reason to describe the requirement as law.
What a QR code cannot do
A QR code is a pointer. It carries no information about your product, proves nothing about performance and confers no status. Everything that matters is on the other end of the link: whether the record is current, whether it is versioned, whether the claims on it are supported by evidence you can produce.
A code printed onto a product may be scanned in fifteen years. What it points at has to be built to still be there, and to still be right.