How to Document an Article 14 Assessment: Retention and Renewal Rules
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — gives your business a way out of certain accessibility requirements, but only if you do the paperwork. Article 14 lets you claim that meeting a specific requirement would either fundamentally alter your product or service, or impose a disproportionate burden. Making that claim on paper is not optional for most businesses, and once you do, the clock starts on a set of retention, renewal and notification obligations that the Directive spells out in detail.
If you are a compliance lead, agency account manager or in-house accessibility owner responsible for an online shop or consumer-facing digital service that sells into the EU, this guide tells you exactly what must be documented, how long you must keep it, when you must redo it, and who you must tell. Nothing here argues for or against claiming an exception — that is a business decision. This is the paperwork that decision requires.
When Article 14 Allows You to Deviate
Article 14(1) of Directive (EU) 2019/882 sets the boundary: accessibility requirements apply only to the extent that meeting them does not require a significant change that results in a fundamental alteration of the basic nature of your product or service, and does not impose a disproportionate burden on your business. Those are two separate grounds, and your assessment must address each one separately if you rely on either.
A fundamental alteration claim says: making this aspect accessible would change the core identity of what we offer. A disproportionate burden claim says: the cost, effort or technical difficulty of making this aspect accessible is unreasonably high relative to the benefit. Neither is a blanket exemption — they apply to specific requirements for specific products or services.
The EAA has been applicable since 28 June 2025. If you were trading before that date and are now working through your compliance gap analysis, Article 14 is one of the tools available to you. But the tool only works if you fill in the correct forms and follow the rules that come with it.
What You Must Document
Article 14(2) and (3) is explicit: an economic operator that invokes fundamental alteration or disproportionate burden must carry out and document an assessment. That assessment must cover the specific accessibility requirements you are not meeting and the reasons why. Your documentation does not need to follow a government-issued template — no official EAA form exists — but it must contain the reasoning.
At minimum, your documented assessment should record which requirements in Annex I of the Directive you are not fulfilling, what the barrier is (technical, financial, operational), and why the barrier meets the threshold for either fundamental alteration or disproportionate burden in your specific situation. If you considered alternative solutions and rejected them, record that too — it shows the assessment was genuine and thorough.
Microenterprises dealing with products have a lighter touch under Article 14(4): they do not have to document the assessment in advance, but must provide the relevant facts to the market surveillance authority on request. If you are unsure whether you qualify as a microenterprise, the definition in Article 3(23) sets the thresholds: fewer than 10 persons employed and an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2,000,000.
The 5-Year Retention Rule
Once your assessment is complete, you must keep the results. Article 14(2) and (3) requires you to retain all relevant results for 5 years from the last making available of the product or the last provision of the service. That period is measured from the end of your commercial relationship with a specific product or service, not from the date you wrote the assessment.
For a product, the 5-year clock runs from the last unit placed on the market. For a recurring service, it runs from the last time you actually provided that service to a consumer. If you discontinue a service entirely, the clock starts from the final provision date and the 5-year period applies to everything connected with that service.
During that 5-year window, you must be able to produce the documentation without delay if an authority asks for it. Member States are required under Article 23 of the Directive to establish procedures to check compliance, follow up complaints, and verify that corrective action has been taken — and that includes checking the Article 14 assessment itself. Being unable to produce your documentation when asked is its own problem, separate from whether your underlying compliance decision was right.
The 5-Year Renewal Rule for Service Providers
The assessment is not a one-time exercise if you are a service provider relying on disproportionate burden. Article 14(5) requires you to renew the assessment for each category or type of service when the service is altered, when the authorities request it, and in any event at least every 5 years.
The trigger events are threefold: a material change to your service (a new feature, a redesigned checkout flow, a shift in the technology stack), a request from the market surveillance authority, or the simple passage of 5 years. Any one of those is enough on its own to require a fresh look at whether the disproportionate burden claim still holds. If multiple triggers coincide, you still do one assessment — but it must address all the relevant changes.
Note that this renewal obligation applies specifically to service providers relying on disproportionate burden. If you are a product manufacturer relying on fundamental alteration or disproportionate burden, the 5-year retention rule still applies but the mandatory renewal every 5 years is not spelled out in the same way for products in Article 14.
If you did not previously need to claim an exception but your situation has changed — perhaps a cost estimate that once seemed proportionate now looks different — you can conduct and document an assessment at that point. The obligation to renew applies when you have already made the claim, not when you have not yet made it.
Who Must Be Told
Article 14(8) creates a notification duty: if you rely on fundamental alteration or disproportionate burden for a specific product or service, you must send information to that effect to the relevant authorities of the Member State where the product is placed on the market or the service is provided. This notification does not go to your customers or appear on your website — it goes to the national authority responsible for enforcing the EAA in that country.
Microenterprises are exempt from this notification requirement. If you are not a microenterprise, failing to notify the relevant authority when you rely on an Article 14 exception is a separate breach, even if your underlying accessibility decision was defensible.
Be aware that Member States each set their own penalties for non-compliance under Article 30 of the Directive. The Directive does not specify any particular fine amount — it requires penalties to be effective, proportionate and dissuasive, and to take into account the extent and seriousness of the non-compliance, the number of non-complying units and the number of persons affected. The actual penalties in force depend on the Member State where you sell.
What to Do Now
If your compliance review has identified gaps that you intend to address through an Article 14 exception, do not delay the documentation work.
Start by listing the specific Annex I requirements you are not meeting and why. Build a dated record now, even if your systems are not yet fully mapped — the act of writing down your reasoning while the work is fresh produces a more accurate document than reconstructing it later. Note the version of your service or product, the date, and who conducted the assessment.
Set a reminder for your renewal date now. For service providers relying on disproportionate burden, the 5-year cycle means marking a date in your calendar and reviewing before it arrives. If your service has undergone or will undergo material changes before that date, treat each change as a trigger for an immediate review, not a reason to postpone one.
Check the national authority in each Member State where you sell for their notification procedure — Article 14(8) requires you to send the information to the relevant authority, but the Directive leaves the format and channel up to each country. Some authorities have published guidance or online notification forms; others have not.
Finally, retain everything for at least 5 years after you stop selling the product or stop providing the service. Cloud storage, a dedicated compliance folder with a retention policy, or a document management system all work — the format is your choice, but the record must be accessible and intact for the full period.
For a broader view of where the EAA applies and what the enforcement landscape looks like, see our guide to The European Accessibility Act for online shops: 2026 practical guide and What you actually risk if your site is not accessible.
Source: Directive (EU) 2019/882, AccessibleEU on EN 301 549 v3.2.1