The Chemicals Exemption Map
Twenty-seven national gateways, one Union market, and the €35.8 million a year the Commission says they cost
On 12 June 2026 the General Secretariat of the Council circulated to Permanent Representatives the final compromise text on defence readiness, closing the negotiation that broadens the national defence exemptions embedded in Union chemicals law. The Commission staff working document accompanying the package prices the change: compliance savings across the entire European Defence Technological and Industrial Base of EUR 35.8 million a year, a net present value of EUR 263 million over 2026 to 2036. That is 0.5% of the EUR 42.5 billion to EUR 51.3 billion the same document assigns to the Omnibus as a whole, and roughly one twenty-second of the EUR 804 million a year it assigns to fast-track permitting alone. The chemicals leg is the smallest quantified item in the package, smaller than the European Defence Fund administrative savings at 1.4% and smaller than the intra-EU transfer savings at 1.8%. The structural constraint is that Union law confers the derogation power while twenty-seven separate national administrations decide whether, how, for how long and on what evidence it operates. The 2016 study commissioned by the European Defence Agency counted only six of the twenty-seven participating Member States, plus Norway, as ever having granted a defence exemption, across a range running from zero to more than sixty. What the arrangement costs to file is now quantified. What it does to the location of a coating line, an energetic formulation or a connector treatment inside the internal market has not been.
This report proceeds in four parts. The first works from the Joint White Paper JOIN(2025) 120 final, the Defence Readiness Omnibus communication COM(2025) 820, the staff working document C(2025) 7190 final, EDA Steering Board Decision No. 2010/05 of 19 March 2010 and the two EDA Codes of Conduct, on REACH and on CLP. The second works from the consolidated REACH, CLP and Biocidal Products texts, the legislative file 2025/0176(COD) including the committee report A10-0273/2025 and the agreed text PE790.782, the Council progress report ST 9834/1/26 REV 1 and the final compromise text ST 10454/26, read against the country fiches of the EDA REACH Portal with their update dates — Ireland’s of 19 October 2018, France’s of 23 November 2021, Belgium’s, Germany’s and Portugal’s of 14 November 2023 — and against Belgium’s own page of 30 March 2026, on which the two published filing fees diverge. The third works from the 2016 REACHLaw study for the Agency, covering lead chromate, chromium trioxide, connector passivation and aerospace overhaul. The fourth sets out implications for ministries, industry, cross-border programmes and company screening. The proposition that broadening the derogation resolves cross-border fragmentation is tested here. The report does not rank Member States by attractiveness, does not identify current exemption holders, and does not cover the Seveso permitting strand.