eIDAS 2 for Education

Education is named in eIDAS 2 as a sector that must accept the EUDI Wallet. Public universities and schools have to be ready by the end of 2026; private providers by the end of 2027. eIDAS 2 requires institutions to accept wallets — but it also opens the door to issuing verifiable credentials of their own: diplomas, student status, micro-credentials that graduates carry with them and anyone can check in seconds. We'll get to why becoming an issuer is worth considering even where it isn't required.

Education is also the one sector that already had a European credential standard before the EUDI wallet. Thousands of institutions issue European Digital Credentials for Learning today. So an important question to ask is "what happens to what was already built?"

What eIDAS 2 changes for education

eIDAS 2 entered into force on 20 May 2024. For education, four changes matter most:

1. Wallet acceptance, on two different deadlines. Education is explicitly named as a sector that must accept the EUDI Wallet. Public institutions are also public sector bodies, which brings their deadline forward to the end of 2026. Private providers have until the end of 2027.
2. Diplomas become instantly verifiable. A degree issued into a wallet can be presented anywhere in the EU and verified cryptographically in seconds, without anyone contacting the issuing institution.
3. Verification stops being a service to be provided. Institutions currently spend resources confirming that graduates hold the degrees they claim. That work largely disappears.
4. Short-form learning becomes portable. Micro-credentials, professional development and course completions can be issued in the same way as degrees, and carry the same verifiability.

The compliance timeline:

Micro and small enterprises — fewer than 50 employees and at most €10 million in annual turnover — are exempt from the acceptance obligation. This matters for small private training providers. It does not exempt universities.

Two deadlines, one sector

eIDAS 2 treats public and private education institutions differently. Private institutions have a three-year transition period, which ends at the end of 2027. For public institutions the obligation applies as soon as wallets are available, which is the end of 2026.

Most European education is public. A state university, a public school or a public VET institution is a public sector body, so the earlier date applies. For a private university, a corporate training provider or a commercial certification body, the 2027 date applies.

The roles education institutions play

Under eIDAS 2 an organisation can issue credentials, accept them, or provide a wallet.

Issuer: the role that matters

As an issuer, an institution places credentials into students' and graduates' wallets. Nothing in eIDAS 2 requires this. Institutions do it because the current alternative — printing, posting, storing and re-certifying documents, then answering verification requests about them for decades — is slow and expensive.

Public institutions have an additional advantage. As public bodies responsible for their own official records, they can issue credentials that carry the same legal value as the paper original.

Verifier: the role with the deadline

As a verifier, an institution accepts credentials from wallets. If a service already asks people to identify themselves electronically, it has to offer the wallet as an option too.

This means registering as a relying party with the national registrar, declaring which data each service will request, and being able to check that credentials received are genuine, still valid, and belong to the person presenting them.

Wallet provider: probably not for education institutions

Providing a certified wallet means meeting the EU's highest security requirements and passing a formal certification audit. Every Member State must provide at least one, so students will already have one. There is little reason for an individual institution to add another.

Core education use cases at a glance

Issuing diplomas and qualifications

Today a diploma lives in two places that don't talk to each other: a record in the institution's system, and a paper copy in the graduate's drawer. Whenever a third party needs to confirm it's real, someone has to bridge that gap by hand.

Issuing into a EUDI wallet closes the gap — the graduate's copy and the institution's signature are now the same object. The graduate holds the credential. An employer or another university requests it, checks the signature against the trust list, and gets an answer immediately, without contacting anyone.

To become an issuer. The institution registers with the member state, obtains a certificate to sign its credentials, delivers them into wallets over OID4VCI, the standard issuance protocol, and operates a revocation mechanism so a credential can be invalidated if it needs to be. Credentials are issued in the formats the regulation mandates: SD-JWT VC and ISO/IEC 18013-5.

How this fits with Europass and European Digital Credentials

If your institution already issues European Digital Credentials for Learning, this is an important section.

What you have today. European Digital Credentials for Learning (EDC) are built on the European Learning Model (ELM), the Commission's vocabulary for describing degrees, diplomas, Diploma Supplements, certifications, examination results and other learning achievements. The Commission provides issuing, viewing and verification tools, free of charge or as open source, and a Europass account includes a built-in credential wallet that credentials can be deposited into.

What is different about the EUDI Wallet. The Europass wallet is a web account that holds only your education credentials. The EUDI Wallet is a certified mobile app that holds everything: your education certificates, ID card, driver's license, and any other credential issued under eIDAS2. That's the real difference: instead of a single-purpose account, you get one wallet that works with every verifier across the eIDAS2 ecosystem, not just the ones set up for Europass.

How they relate. These are complementary layers rather than competing systems. ELM describes what a qualification is — the vocabulary, the structure, the meaning. The wallet is how a credential is carried and presented, and eIDAS 2 sets the formats for that carriage. Institutions issuing EDCs today are not doing work that gets thrown away: the underlying credential data is the same, and describing the qualification properly is the part that is hardest to get right.

What is honestly still open. The formats mandated by eIDAS 2 and the format EDCs use today are not the same. Exactly how an ELM-described qualification is expressed as a wallet credential — reissued in a mandated format, wrapped, or referenced — is still being worked out at EU level.

The practical consequence. The safest position for an institution is to keep the qualification description and the credential format separable, so the same underlying data can be issued in whichever format is required.

Student status and the European Student Card

Proving you are a student is a surprisingly frequent transaction: enrolment, library and building access, exam entry, public transport, software licences, commercial discounts, and every mobility exchange.

The European Student Card Initiative has been working on this for years, and in 2025/2026 the Commission ran a pilot issuing a digital European Student Card as a verifiable credential. Thirteen card issuers took part, testing two routes: issuing centrally through the ESC Router, and issuing directly from their own card management systems. The approach was designed to be compatible with the EUDI Wallet, so student status can sit alongside a student's other credentials.

One thing makes this the easiest place for most institutions to start. The credential is simple — you are enrolled, here, now — with none of the complexity of describing a qualification.

Micro-credentials and lifelong learning

Degrees are not the only thing worth issuing. Short courses, professional development, summer schools, language certificates and vocational modules all suffer the same problem as diplomas — hard to prove, easy to fake, tedious to verify — and matter more, because they are more numerous and more often used to justify a hire or a promotion.

For continuing education and professional training providers this is often a stronger commercial case than degree issuance: the volume is higher, the learners are working adults who need to prove things frequently.

Accepting the wallet: admissions, enrolment and login

This is the EUDI wallet acceptance requirement with the deadline, and it involves four things:

• Register as a relying party with the national registrar, and declare which data each will be requested. Wallets check requests against this registration.
• Support the standard protocols and formats. Credentials are presented over OID4VP, in the mandated formats.
• Validation. Check the signature, check the credential is still valid, and check it belongs to the person presenting it.
• Keep the alternatives. Students who do not use a wallet must still be able to apply, enrol and log in.

Admissions is where this pays off soonest, especially for international applicants. Verifying a foreign qualification today can take weeks to months. An applicant presenting an identity credential and a prior qualification from a wallet can be verified during the application itself.

The credentials worth issuing first

Nobody issues a diploma for its own sake. The value of a credential in a wallet depends entirely on whether the person who receives it — usually an employer — can actually check it.

The good news is that this does not require employers to do anything unusual. Verification is a standard operation: check the signature, check the trust list, check revocation. Any HR or applicant tracking system can add it, and recruitment platforms have a strong incentive to, because credential fraud is a direct cost to them.

The relevance for an institution is about sequencing. Issuing credentials that nobody verifies produces nothing. Issuing student status and micro-credentials, where the verifying party is a campus service or a training body the institution already deals with, produces value immediately.

What the wallet does not replace

Three things stay the institution's responsibility:

• Recognition decisions. This is the important one. The wallet proves that a named institution issued a named qualification to a named person, and that nothing has been altered since. It does not establish that the qualification is equivalent to a national one. That is an academic recognition decision, made under the existing recognition framework and national law, and eIDAS 2 does not change it.
• Awarding standards and quality assurance. A verifiable credential is only as meaningful as the institution behind it. Accreditation, quality assurance and academic standards are untouched by any of this.
• Your student record system. The wallet is how credentials are carried and presented. The authoritative record stays with the institution.

Build vs buy: how to build a compliant solution

Whether acting as issuer, verifier, or both, an education institution faces the same decision as every other organisation in the ecosystem: how much of the solution to build, and how much to buy. The student-facing applications — the portal, the application process, the student app — are where an institution differentiates and will always be built in-house or with existing partners. The identity layer underneath — credential formats, exchange protocols, trust checks, key management, revocation — is standardised by definition and changes every time the EU specifications evolve. For that layer, there are three possible implementation paths:

• Build apps, buy infrastructure (recommended) — build only the student-facing applications and use a proven, standards-compliant provider for the identity layer. Fastest time to market, lowest regulatory and technical risk.
• Build apps, own infrastructure — use open-source identity infrastructure to retain full control of the stack, while still avoiding implementing the credential formats, protocols, and trust validation from scratch.
• Build everything in-house — implement and maintain the full stack internally, and keep it current as the specifications evolve. Viable only for institutions with a dedicated identity engineering team.

The walt.id solution

walt.id covers both of the first two paths. The walt.id Community Stack provides open-source issuer, verifier, and wallet infrastructure for institutions that want to own their stack; the walt.id Enterprise Stack is the managed offering on top of it — built on open-source technology used by more than +55.000 developers, governments, and businesses. For education specifically:

• Issuer — issue diplomas, transcripts, student status and micro-credentials in all mandated formats (SD-JWT VC, ISO/IEC 18013-5, W3C VC) from the same underlying credential data, with schema validation and revocation built into the issuance workflow.
• Verifier — accept the EUDI Wallet for admissions, enrolment, exam identification and login, with trust, revocation, and wallet-authenticity checks handled automatically, and results passed to existing student information systems.
• Wallet — where an institution or ministry does want to offer a wallet or embed wallet capabilities into a student app, with flexible key management and everything needed for the certified wallet-provider path.

A role-by-role compliance breakdown is available in the eIDAS 2 Implementers Guide or reach out to our team to learn more.

Frequently asked questions

When do education institutions have to accept the EUDI Wallet?

It depends on whether the institution is public or private. Education is named in eIDAS 2 (Regulation (EU) 2024/1183) as a sector whose private relying parties must accept the EUDI Wallet by the end of 2027. Public universities, schools and training institutions are also public sector bodies, and the public sector obligation applies as soon as wallets are available — the end of 2026. Since most European education is public, the earlier date applies to most institutions.

We already issue European Digital Credentials. Do we have to change anything?

Not immediately, and the work already done is not wasted. European Digital Credentials are built on the European Learning Model, which describes what a qualification is. The EUDI Wallet is how a credential is carried and presented, and eIDAS 2 sets the formats for that. The two are complementary layers, and alignment between them is still being worked out at EU level. The practical advice is to keep the qualification description separate from the credential format, so the same data can be issued in whichever format is needed.

Does the EUDI Wallet replace Europass?

No. Europass is a platform and a credential framework (EDC, built on the European Learning Model) for describing and issuing qualifications. The EUDI Wallet is a new way to hold and present credentials with your phone. Today these run as separate wallets — Europass credentials are designed to be stored in a Europass wallet "or other compliant wallets," and EU-funded pilots (like DC4EU) are actively working to make education credentials presentable through the EUDI Wallet as well. So the two are converging rather than staying permanently apart, but full interoperability isn't in place yet.

Do we have to issue diplomas into wallets?

No. eIDAS 2 requires institutions to accept wallets, not to issue credentials into them. Institutions issue because it removes the cost of producing, posting and re-certifying documents and of answering verification requests, not because the regulation says so.

Does a verifiable diploma mean it is automatically recognised in another country?

No, and this distinction matters. Verification proves that a named institution issued a named qualification to a named person and that nothing has been altered. Recognition is the separate academic decision about whether that qualification is equivalent to a national one, and it continues to be made under the existing recognition framework and national law.

Can employers actually verify credentials we issue?

Yes. Verification is a standard operation — check the signature, check the issuer against the trust list, check that the credential has not been revoked — and can be added to any HR or applicant tracking system. Recruitment platforms have a strong incentive to support it, since credential fraud is a direct cost to them.

What is happening with the European Student Card?

In early 2026 the Commission ran a pilot issuing a digital European Student Card as a verifiable credential, compatible with the EUDI Wallet. Thirteen card issuers took part, testing both centralised issuance through the ESC Router and decentralised issuance from their own card management systems. Student status is often the easiest credential for an institution to start with.

Can we issue micro-credentials this way?

Yes. The European Learning Model covers short-form learning as well as degrees, so the same infrastructure handles course completions, professional development and vocational modules alongside qualifications.