A French e-commerce brand manager running €4,000,000 of turnover with 9 eco badges still live on the product pages is carrying a €400,000 statutory maximum on 27 September 2026 - €44,444 for every badge nobody has sourced yet.
That date is not a consultation. Directive (EU) 2024/825, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition, had to be transposed by 27 March 2026 and applies from 27 September 2026. From that day a generic environmental claim with nothing behind it - eco-friendly, green, kind to nature - is an unfair commercial practice, and so are climate-neutral claims resting on offsetting and sustainability labels with no certification scheme.
Everybody in marketing now knows the date. Almost nobody knows their number, and the reason is that there is no single number to know.
Ask a chatbot what a green claim costs and you will get one EU-wide figure. That figure comes from Directive (EU) 2019/2161, the Omnibus directive, which sets the maximum fine for widespread infringements at at least 4% of annual turnover. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Under French law a misleading commercial practice can be raised to 10% of average annual turnover, or to 50% of the expenditure incurred on the campaign that carried the claim.
Those are two different routes, and enforcement takes the one that hurts. For the shop above, the turnover route is 10% of €4,000,000, which is €400,000. The campaign-spend route is 50% of a €250,000 campaign, which is €125,000. The answer is the larger one: €400,000. Move the same shop to the EU baseline and it reads €160,000 instead - 4% of €4,000,000. Same claims, same pages, an amount that differs by €240,000 depending on which route you are standing in.
The spend route is the one that surprises people. Raise that campaign to €9,000,000, which is not unusual for a seasonal push across several markets, and 50% of spend comes to €4,500,000. It has just overtaken the turnover route by more than an order of magnitude, and the per-claim figure goes from €44,444 to €500,000. A tool that only knows the 4% number cannot see that at all.
The second thing nobody computes is the runway. 27 September 2026 is 10 days from 17 September 2026. Rewriting product copy, hang tags and packaging artwork for 9 claims is not a 10-day job in any organisation that has a legal review step - 4 weeks is an honest estimate, and 4 weeks from today lands 18 days after the ban. The tool says it in one line: late by 18 days. That line, not the fine, is what makes somebody start today.
Green Claims Fine Check 2026 does this arithmetic in a browser popup, and the same code runs as one free web page. You pick the enforcement route and type your turnover, your campaign spend, how many generic claims and uncertified labels are live, whether any climate-neutral claim rests on offsetting, and the date you are reading it. It returns 9 figures and one verdict line.
All 5 rules are free. There is no key, no limit, no watermark and no account: the free layer finishes the job, which is knowing your number. The $60 key adds a different axis - ownership and repeat. It exports all 9 figures as .csv, the file you actually hand to a lawyer, an auditor or the agency that wrote the copy, and it sets a monthly alarm that re-runs the clock as each member state transposes the directive, because the national numbers are still moving.
For comparison, Greenwashing Checker's Pro plan is €29 per month for full-site scanning, checked on 17 September 2026. This is $60 once, with a 7-day full refund.
Free in your browser (the same rules): https://getreadystack.com/tools/green-claims-fine-check-2026
Licence ($60, once, 7-day refund): https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_tIo4sp0J7wRoQQc8Z9INI4pMAPLbkpgKjXwW10ACfeT
Top comments (0)