EPO electronic filing: the 2026 rules

Filing rules are the part of patent practice that nobody reads until something bounces. A new decision of the President of the EPO on the electronic filing of documents, dated 25 March 2026 and published as OJ EPO 2026, A19, entered into force on 1 April 2026. It replaces the arrangements that many filing SOPs were written against, and it attaches consequences — including non-receipt — to using the wrong tool for the wrong thing. This is a housekeeping exercise with a short deadline: the next filing your team makes is already governed by it.

What has actually changed, and from when?

The President’s decision of 25 March 2026 concerning the electronic filing of documents, published at OJ EPO 2026, A19, entered into force on 1 April 2026, and Article 14 provides that two earlier instruments cease to have effect at that moment: the decision of the President of 8 July 2025 concerning the electronic filing of documents (OJ EPO 2025, A52) and the decision of the Vice-President DG5 of 21 April 2020 on the Online Filing 2.0 pilot project (OJ EPO 2020, A44).

The second of those repeals is the one with the longest tail inside firms and departments. Online Filing 2.0 was introduced as a pilot, and a good deal of internal documentation still treats it that way — as an optional, parallel, “try it if you like” route sitting alongside older habits. The pilot decision is gone. Any SOP, checklist or training note that describes Online Filing 2.0 as a pilot, or that cross-refers to the 2020 or 2025 decisions as the governing authority, is now citing instruments that no longer have effect. That is not merely a citation error: the operative rules on tools, formats and signatures are those in the 2026 decision, and a workflow built on a superseded text may quietly diverge from them.

Which filing channels may be used?

The decision permits documents to be filed electronically using Online Filing 2.0, MyEPO or the EPO Contingency Upload Service.

That is a three-item list, and it is worth reading it as a list rather than as a description of the status quo. Departments that maintain a fallback plan for outages should confirm that the fallback named in that plan is the EPO Contingency Upload Service and not something improvised. Departments that still hold institutional memory of Online Filing 1.0-era practice — installed client software, locally held certificates, particular file-preparation steps — should treat that memory as a source of risk rather than of expertise. The permitted channels are the ones named above; anything else your workflow assumes is an assumption you now have to justify against the text.

What happens if you use MyEPO for something it does not support?

Under Article 3, a submission made in MyEPO outside the published list of supported responses, requests or notifications will be deemed not to have been received.

This is the single provision that most deserves to be printed and pinned above the filing desk. “Deemed not to have been received” is not a warning message, a rejection notice or an invitation to re-file with an explanation. It is a legal characterisation of the submission as a non-event. Where the submission was a response to a communication, the consequences of that non-event fall wherever the underlying time limit falls — and they fall without anyone at the EPO necessarily having told you first that you picked the wrong channel.

The operational point is that MyEPO’s scope is defined by a published list, and the list is external to the decision. A filing SOP therefore cannot simply say “file responses in MyEPO”. It has to say: check the published list of supported responses, requests and notifications before using MyEPO for anything that is not routine for your team, and record who checked and when. For submission types that are not on the list, the workflow must route to one of the other permitted channels rather than defaulting to the tool the paralegal has open.

Build the check in at the point of choosing a tool, not at the point of review. A review step that catches a channel error after the deadline has passed catches nothing worth catching.

Which formats may be used with which tool?

Article 8 makes format permissibility depend on both the document and the tool: DOCX may not be used for filing international (PCT) applications and other documents filed in the international phase, and TIFF format is permitted only when using MyEPO.

Two distinct corrections follow. The first concerns DOCX in the PCT international phase. Many departments have, sensibly enough, standardised on DOCX for drafting and filing because it travels well through internal document management. Article 8 blocks that route for international applications and for other documents filed in the international phase. If your drafting template outputs DOCX and your filing instruction says “file the DOCX”, the instruction has to be split by procedural track: what is acceptable for a European filing is not automatically acceptable in the international phase, and the SOP must say so at the point where the attorney chooses the track.

The second concerns TIFF, which is permitted only in MyEPO. TIFF tends to survive in workflows involving scanned material — assignments, certified copies, older prior-art documents. If your scanning station produces TIFF by default, that output is usable through one tool only. Either change the default output for material destined for other channels, or make the tool choice conditional on the format, and make the condition explicit rather than tribal knowledge.

How must submissions be signed?

Under Article 11, a signature in MyEPO may only take the form of a text-string signature.

Signature form is where legacy practice is most persistent, because it was historically tied to hardware, smart cards and locally installed software. Article 11 removes the choice within MyEPO: the text-string form is the only permitted one there. Internal guidance that offers signatories a menu of signature types, or that tells them to use whatever their certificate supports, should be rewritten to state the single permitted form for MyEPO submissions. This matters most for occasional signatories — inventors, in-house signatories, colleagues covering an absence — who follow the written instruction literally because they have no habit to fall back on.

What are the rules on priority documents and unreadable files?

Under Article 4, priority documents may be filed electronically only if they are digitally signed by the issuing authority and the signature is accepted by the EPO; under Article 13, a filed document infected with a computer virus is deemed to be illegible.

The priority-document rule imposes a two-part test, and the second part is not within your control: the issuing authority’s digital signature must exist, and it must be one the EPO accepts. That makes it a matter to resolve when the certified copy is ordered from the first-filing office, not when the European filing is being assembled under time pressure. Where a copy arrives without an accepted digital signature, the electronic route under Article 4 is simply not open, and the docketing entry should reflect that as a known constraint rather than a surprise.

Article 13’s treatment of infected documents is short and severe: the document is deemed illegible. Anything your organisation does that touches outbound filing packages — macro-enabled templates, third-party PDF tooling, files received from co-applicants or foreign associates and forwarded without inspection — is a place where that risk enters. Scanning inbound files from associates before they join a filing package is cheap; discovering that a filed document is deemed illegible is not.

What does this decision not settle?

The decision governs the channel and the form of electronic filing, and no more than that.

It does not alter the substantive requirements for obtaining a filing date; a submission that satisfies Articles 3, 8 and 11 is compliant as to channel and form, and nothing follows from that about its substantive sufficiency. It does not deal with notification of documents by the EPO, which is the subject of separate arrangements — so the rules described here should not be read across to the incoming direction of correspondence. And the published list that defines MyEPO’s scope for Article 3 purposes sits outside the decision, which means compliance with Article 3 depends on a document that can be updated independently of the decision itself.

What should you do before the next filing?

Put the SOP next to the decision and reconcile them provision by provision, this week rather than after the next deadline.

Four checks, in order of exposure. Article 3: does the workflow require a check against the published MyEPO scope list before that tool is used, and is the consequence of getting it wrong — deemed non-receipt — written into the instruction in those words? Article 8: is DOCX excluded for international applications and other international-phase documents, and is TIFF routed to MyEPO only? Article 11: does the guidance state the text-string signature as the sole permitted form in MyEPO? Article 4: does the priority-document procedure ask about the issuing authority’s digital signature at the point of ordering the certified copy?

Then strip the citations. Any internal reference to OJ EPO 2025, A52 or to the Online Filing 2.0 pilot decision at OJ EPO 2020, A44 should be replaced with OJ EPO 2026, A19, and any language describing Online Filing 2.0 as a pilot should go. Finally, confirm that your outage fallback names the EPO Contingency Upload Service, and that whoever would have to use it under pressure has done so at least once when nothing was at stake.