Digital euro timeline — pilot 2027, launch ~2029

The digital euro has a date problem: it is simultaneously years away and already late to start preparing for. This page lays out what is actually scheduled, what is conditional, and what it means for planning.

The timeline#

1. July 2026

   Scheme rulebook v0.91 published

   The current published draft. It incorporates feedback from the market consultation that ran June–October 2025. Explicitly a draft — not a stable specification.

2. 14 July 2026

   36 PSPs selected for the pilot

   Selected from 57 applications, spanning 19 countries including Croatia. Banks and non-bank providers, chosen for broad representation of business models, size and geography.

3. Q3 2026

   Development starts

   Build work begins on the pilot.

4. H2 2027

   Live pilot begins — runs ~12 months

   A beta digital euro. The users are ECB and national central bank staff, not the general public.

5. ~2029

   Targeted launch

   Conditional on the digital euro Regulation completing the EU legislative process.

What each milestone actually means#

The rulebook is a draft, and says so#

Version 0.91 landed in July 2026. It is the most complete public picture of how the scheme will work — and it is explicitly marked as a draft, not for implementation reliance.

Sections remain unfinished. The functioning and enforcement of the holding limit, for instance, is openly flagged as something to be detailed in further iterations. That is not a small gap; the holding limit is the most consequential number in the design.

The practical instruction: read it, plan against its shape, do not build against its details.

The pilot is not a public launch#

This is the most commonly misread milestone, so it is worth stating flatly.

The live pilot starting in H2 2027 runs for roughly 12 months with a beta digital euro, and its users are ECB and national central bank staff. It is not a public beta. Nobody's customers are getting a digital euro in 2027.

The 36 PSPs selected on 14 July 2026 — from 57 applications, across 19 countries including Croatia — are building and testing against real infrastructure. That is the point of the exercise: prove the technology and the operations before anything touches the public.

Launch is targeted, not scheduled#

~2029 is a target, and it is dependent on legislation. The regulation is still in the EU legislative process, and the decision on whether to issue the digital euro will only be considered once that process is complete.

What this means if you are a PSP#

The temptation is to read "~2029" and conclude there is time. That reading misjudges where the work sits.

2026 — decide, don't build. The specification is a moving draft. Writing code against v0.91 is writing code you will rewrite. What you can do now costs little and has a long lead time: work out whether you will build in-house or use a TSP, and understand which of the two roles — distributing PSP, acquiring PSP — you actually need.

2027 — learn from the pilot. The pilot's technical documentation is public, including back-end API specifications in YAML. You do not have to be one of the 36 to read the contract you will eventually implement. If you are one of the 36, this is when your build gets tested against reality.

2028 — build against something stable. By this point the rulebook should have moved past draft and the pilot should have surfaced what the specification got wrong. This is when serious implementation is defensible rather than premature.

2029 — launch, if the legislation lands. For credit institutions, the obligation to offer basic digital euro services on request arrives with the launch, not after a grace period you can plan around.

We work through this in detail in Digital euro timeline for banks: what to do in 2026, 2027, 2028.

The one date that should worry you#

None of the ones above. It is the gap between "the rulebook stabilises" and "you must be live" — because that window is when every credit institution in the euro area needs an integration at the same time, drawing on the same small pool of people who have done this work before.

The institutions that decide how they are solving this in 2026 will be buying in a normal market. The ones that start in 2028 will be buying in a scramble.