Revoking a digital EU power of attorney

Revocation follows the same national-law path as the grant: verified by courts, notaries or other competent authorities, compatible with the EUDI wallet, optionally filed with a register. What the Directive does not create is a Union-wide, real-time way for a relying party to learn that an instrument was revoked this morning. That gap is the most consequential open question in the whole regime.

Who this page is for

Companies that need to cut off an authorisation cleanly, relying parties deciding how much to trust a presented instrument, and engineers designing the check that runs at the moment of reliance.

What the law says

Revocation is a national-law act with a verification floor. The instrument "shall be drawn up, amended or revoked in accordance with national requirements", which must at least include verification — by courts, notaries or other competent authorities — of the identity, legal capacity and authority to represent of the person revoking [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(1), second subpara.]. The same three checks as at the grant: revocation is not a casual click, it is a verified legal act.

Revocation must be wallet-compatible. Member States must ensure that the instrument's "granting, amendment or revocation is compatible for use with the European Digital Identity Wallet" [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(1), third subpara.]. The lifecycle, not just the issuance, has to work in wallet terms.

Filing is optional, Member State by Member State. A Member State "may require that the digital EU power of attorney, any amendment to it, and any revocation of it, is to be filed with a register", with access fees capped at administrative cost [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(3)]. The recitals leave the choice of register — business register or another under national law — to the Member State [Directive (EU) 2025/25, recital 28].

If the instrument is a qualified attestation, revocation is final. Where the power of attorney is delivered as a qualified electronic attestation of attributes under the eIDAS framework, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 is blunt: a revoked qualified attestation "shall lose its validity from the moment of its revocation and its status shall not in any circumstances be reverted" [Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS 2), Art. 45d(4) of Reg. 910/2014 as inserted]. No un-revoking. A restored authority means a new instrument.

What the law does not say

How a relying party finds out. Article 16c(2) obliges acceptance of the instrument as evidence of authority "as specified in the document" [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(2)] — but a document, once issued, does not know it has been revoked. The Directive's answer is partial at best:

• Filing with a register makes revocation discoverable — but filing is optional per Member State, so discoverability will vary across 27 legal systems.
• The technical specifications in the Article 24(2)(e) implementing act, and the wallet's attestation machinery, could carry revocation status — the eIDAS framework knows the concept of a revoked attestation losing validity at the moment of revocation. But as of this page's last verification we have not seen an adopted template act, so how status-checking will actually work is unknown.

We flag this because it is where paper-world assumptions break. A paper power of attorney is "checked" once, by a human, on presentation day. A digital instrument presented to an online procedure can and should be checked at the moment of each reliance — if the rails to do so exist. Whether they will, per Member State, is precisely what our transposition table will track.

Practical consequences you can already bank on

1. Revocation requires the same institutional path as granting. Plan for it: if your national transposition routes granting through a notary, expect revocation to go through one too.
2. Filed beats unfiled. In Member States that require filing, the register becomes the authoritative place to check; fees for access are cost-capped [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(3)].
3. Scope-limiting beats revoking. Because the instrument is accepted only "as specified in the document", a tightly scoped, short-lived instrument needs revoking less often than a broad one. The template's mandatory "scope of representation" field [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(4)] is the risk-control surface.

Common confusions

"Deleting it from the wallet revokes it." Nothing in the instrument says that. Revocation is a verified national-law act; removing a credential from a device is housekeeping.

"Revocation takes effect when the relying party learns of it." The qualified-attestation rule says validity is lost "from the moment of its revocation" [Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS 2), Art. 45d(4)]. How that interacts with a relying party who reasonably relied in ignorance is a national-law and case-law question the instruments do not answer — and this site will not pretend they do.