How many years of software updates do you guarantee? From 27 September it must be said before the sale

For how many years will your connected product receive software updates? If the answer is written down nowhere, in five days you are missing information the consumer is entitled to have before being bound. If it is written down, from that day it enters the contract and you no longer change it alone. A low figure loses you the sale; a high figure commits you for every year you stated, and proving that you said it is on you.

Five new lines, the same in store and at a distance

Yesterday we wrote about the prohibitive half of this reform: the environmental claims that can no longer be used from 27 September. This is the other half: it adds lines instead of removing them. It sits in consolidated text 02011L0083-20260927 of the Consumer Rights Directive, where every insertion carries the ►M4 marker — Directive (EU) 2024/825 — and, in Italy, in articles 48 and 49 of the Consumer Code as rewritten by legislative decree no. 30 of 20 February 2026.

The same five items apply in store (article 48) and at a distance or off premises (article 49): the reminder of the legal guarantee of conformity, to be given “in a prominent manner, using the harmonised notice”; the harmonised label where the producer offers a free durability guarantee covering the entire good for more than two years; a separate reminder for digital content and digital services; the minimum update period; the reparability score.

The last two force you to look inside your own data. In the words of the directive, the minimum period must be given “for goods with digital elements, for digital content and for digital services, where the producer or the provider makes the information available to the trader, the minimum period, whether expressed as a period of time or by reference to a date, during which the producer or the provider provides software updates”. On reparability the duty cascades: where the harmonised score does not apply, what falls due is “information about the availability and estimated cost of, and procedure for ordering, spare parts that are necessary to keep the goods in conformity, about the availability of repair and maintenance instructions and about repair restrictions”. Not delivery times: the estimated cost, the ordering procedure and what you do not allow to be repaired.

The notice and the label are not designed in-house

Article 65-ter, introduced by the same decree, refers to annex II-octies of the Consumer Code. On Normattiva that annex is split into part 1, the notice, and part 2, the label, and the text of both is a single formula: «Parte di provvedimento in formato grafico» — part of the measure in graphic format. It is a graphic template, not a text to rewrite in your own words.

The design comes from Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960 of 25 September 2025, adopted under article 22a of the directive and applicable from 27 September 2026. Its notes are typographic constraints: “None of the elements of the harmonised notice can be edited”, “The minimum size of the harmonised notice is A4”, in colour or black and white in store, necessarily in colour online. The durability label — the GARAN title, the calendar symbol, a QR code to the Your Europe portal — never drops below 95 × 100 mm and reserves 80 points for the number of years alone. The Italian Ministry for Enterprises and Made in Italy has put the files online, on a page updated on 27 July 2026. The ministerial decree under article 65-ter, paragraph 3, aligns the annex with any amendment of the implementing acts: we did not find it in the Official Gazette, and while the European regulation stands unamended it has nothing to align.

The figure you state becomes part of the contract

Here is the part you pay for over the years. Article 49, paragraph 5, makes the information listed in paragraph 1 an integral part of the distance or off-premises contract, and adds that those items «non possono essere modificate se non con accordo espresso delle parti» — cannot be changed except by express agreement of the parties. The update period written on the product sheet on 27 September 2026 is therefore content of every contract concluded that day, and stays so even if the roadmap changes in 2029.

Paragraph 10 closes the circle by putting the burden of proving compliance with the information duties on the trader: «L’onere della prova relativo all’adempimento degli obblighi di informazione di cui alla presente sezione incombe sul professionista». Publishing it is not enough: you have to show what was displayed on a given day. And online, article 51, paragraph 2, requires some of these items — the durability label among them — to appear «direttamente prima che il consumatore inoltri l’ordine», directly before the consumer places the order: not on a detail page, on the final screen.

Two Italian details shift the perimeter. The domestic definition of a software update also covers a functionality update: wider than the European text, which stops at conformity. And a producer is the manufacturer, the EU importer, or anyone presenting themselves as the producer by putting their name or brand on the good. Many manufacturing firms that believe they are mere distributors are producers: the condition about the producer making the information available filters out nothing when the producer is you.

Why a closed system

The new items do not sit in a document: they sit in the data you hold most tightly. The duration of updates depends on component life cycles, on the arrangements with whoever supplies your firmware and on maintenance contracts; the estimated cost of a spare part is a margin; future availability is a stock forecast. Handing them to an external service to generate your product sheets means handing a third party your cost structure and your supply chain.

Then there is the date. Pre-contractual information stands in the form in which it was given: you need to reconstruct it as at the day the customer read it, because that text entered the contract, and the burden of proof is yours. And you need the reverse direction: when the period moves from five years to seven, you have to know within an afternoon on which product codes, sheets, catalogues, marketplaces and languages the five still appears. It is the propagation problem already seen on technical files, multiplied by the number of shop windows.

The two axes, applied to this case

Complying. The control we put into operation is a versioned register of pre-contractual statements: per product code, the update period, the score or spare-parts information, the presence of notice and label, with the date of every change and the internal document justifying it — the trail to produce for anyone asking what was displayed in a given week.

Deciding. The same architecture holds management systems, documents, archives and plant data together in a single operating model, on which AI agents execute decisions with an operator in command — for large enterprises, manufacturing, public administration, healthcare and defence. On-premise on self-contained machines that do not require deep integration into your network, or a dedicated cloud with a data centre in Italy staffed by us, always under shared management: you do not need people in-house who administer models.

Can you say today, for each of your product codes, how many years of updates you have promised? Thirty minutes with one of our engineers is enough to find where that figure lives.

What we do not know

We do not know how the Italian competition authority — competent for these sections under article 66 of the Consumer Code — will read the producer-availability condition when seller and producer are the same party. We do not know whether an update period longer than two years also extends liability under article 133, paragraph 2, which speaks of continuous supply provided for by the contract and not of declared updates. In the texts we read there is no list of the goods for which a harmonised reparability score already exists. And the ministerial decree does not appear to have been published as at today: we cannot rule out that it is in preparation.