The Labour Mobility Package in detail
Stronger European Labour Authority (ELA), stronger enforcement
The European Commission identified a need to strengthen ELA’s strategic and operational capacity. The targeted revision would:
- Strengthen cross-border inspections by giving the ELA tools to run better risk assessments in support of concerted and joint inspections
- Explicitly define the ELA’s role in providing information and supporting inspections involving third-country nationals in the EU labour market
- Improve information, guidance and support through direct and tailored provision based on the needs of workers and employers
- Strengthen and simplify the mediation function, reducing litigation risk and cost in cross-border disputes
- Improve mobility support through EURES, while simplifying the framework and cutting the administrative burden for national administrations
The Communication states that concerted and joint inspections remain voluntary and at the initiative of the member states concerned. The ELA is being equipped to target and support inspections, not to run them on its own authority.
The third-country national element responds to a documented gap: in 2023, one in five posted workers was a third-country national, a group the Commission sees as more vulnerable, from a lack of information about their rights to gaps in enforcement.
The e-declaration for posting
Of the measures aimed at improving compliance in cross-border work, the central e-declaration for posting is the furthest advanced. It is a separate proposal from 2024 and is already provisionally agreed, while the rest of the package is only starting its legislative journey. It provides a single EU interface, built on the existing Internal Market Information system (IMI), through which a posting is declared on one standard form.3
Use of the interface is voluntary. Member states are not obliged to join. A member state that chooses to use it must use it exclusively and cannot require an additional national declaration. Member states that do not opt in continue to apply their own portals and requirements.
Key features of the provisional agreement:
- A multilingual public interface for posting declarations, hosted on IMI, which member states may use on a voluntary basis but must then be used exclusively
- A standard form, annexed to the Regulation, which caps the data and documents an opting-in member state can require
- A document upload function within the interface
- Scope extended to non-EU service providers
- A Commission report on effectiveness five years after the tool becomes operational
The digital A1 certificate (ESSPASS)
ESSPASS will let workers and employers request and receive social security documents online. This includes the A1 certificate, which shows the country whose social security rules apply to a cross-border worker, and the European Health Insurance Card.
Workers will keep these documents in the EU Digital Identity Wallet on their phone and show them when asked. Authorities will be able to verify them on the spot. Secure paper versions will still be available.
The Commission’s own framing of the business benefit is simpler, standardized digital procedures when workers travel abroad, with administrations able to verify status in real time, which it presents as the fraud detection lever.
Implementation begins once the ESSPASS Regulation is adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, with the first stage starting one year after entry into force. Because the clock runs from entry into force rather than a calendar date, no fixed date can be given yet.
Other highlights in the Labour Mobility Package
The remaining proposals are about skills and qualifications. Diplomas and other qualifications would be issued in a standard digital format and held in the EU Digital Identity Wallet, so employers and authorities can confirm they are genuine.4 A new EU online tool, linked to national databases, would let qualifications from different countries be compared.
For regulated professions such as doctors, nurses, engineers, and teachers, recognition would move to a digital procedure with binding deadlines, cutting the wait from around three months to five weeks, with no translations or certified copies required.
For the first time, there would also be common EU rules for recognizing qualifications obtained outside the EU, with decisions within four months.
The Communication also sets out two things the Commission intends to propose in 2027. Both are worth noting now.
1. More social security coordination changes in 2027
The revision provisionally agreed in April 2026 is not the end of it. According to the Commission, the rules still assume a worker has one employer and one place of work, and much cross-border work no longer looks like that. The next proposal is expected to cover, among others:
- People who move constantly and have no fixed place of work, for example artists
- People who move in and out of employment, self-employment, and unemployment
- Self-employed people working across borders
The underlying questions are: Which country is paid the contributions? Who collects the contributions? When that is unclear, three things go wrong: workers pay twice or lose rights they have already built up, employers cannot tell which country’s rules apply, and authorities lose money to avoidance and fraud.
The Commission also wants to improve EESSI, the system national authorities use to exchange social security information about individual workers. The longer-term aim is for countries to send each other certain data automatically, for example when someone starts working again, rather than asking for it case by case.
2. Cross-border telework rules in 2027
The Commission wants to make it properly workable for a company to employ someone who lives and works from another EU country. This forms part of its wider work on an optional single set of EU-wide rules that startups and scaleups could choose instead of dealing with 27 national systems.
The financial case
The Commission presents the package as a competitiveness measure: an estimated €5 billion in benefits by 2040, of which €1 billion comes from simplification and the rest from faster recognition of qualifications and fraud avoided.
On digitalization of social security documents, costed over 12 years, the gains sit largely on the authority side:
Beneficiary | Estimated saving |
Healthcare providers | up to €69 million |
Labour inspectorates | up to €72 million |
Fraud avoided through digital signatures | up to €277 million |
Two points stand out. Labour inspectorates and healthcare administrations are the main beneficiaries, and the saving is in verification effort: capacity currently spent checking documents can be put to better use. And fraud avoided is by far the largest single line at €277 million, which is what makes the financial case: documents that are harder to falsify and faster to verify.
