Before any question about plots or filings, EUDR asks who you are. The regulation assigns obligations by role, and the 2025 amendment redrew the map in a way much online guidance has not caught up with: the DDS duty now sits exclusively with the first placer, and everyone further down keeps records instead of filing. Getting your role right is the difference between building a due diligence operation and maintaining a reference-number ledger.
The role definitions
- Operator: whoever, in the course of commercial activity, places an in-scope product on the EU market for the first time, or exports it. Importing from outside the EU makes you an operator; so does an EU farmer or forest owner putting domestic production on the market. For goods entering from outside, the non-EU producer is never the operator; the EU importer is.
- Downstream operator: a company further down the chain that transforms or incorporates products already placed on the market (a chocolate maker using imported cocoa butter, a furniture factory using imported panels).
- Trader: anyone in the chain, other than the operator, who makes products available on the market without transformation: distributors, wholesalers, retailers.
- SME or not: sized per the EU Accounting Directive on balance-sheet, turnover and headcount ceilings. Size never removes duties entirely, but it decides registration obligations and the applicable start date.
Who does what, after the 2025 amendment
| Role | Due diligence + DDS | Record duties |
|---|---|---|
| Operator (first placer) | Full: Article 9 data, risk assessment, mitigation, DDS in TRACES | Five-year evidence file |
| Downstream operator | None: no DDS, ever | Collect and keep DDS reference and verification numbers, supplier and customer identity, 5 years; non-SMEs also register in the information system |
| Trader | None | Same collect-and-keep duties; non-SMEs register |
The earlier version of the regulation made large downstream companies re-submit statements referencing upstream ones; the amendment removed that. What large downstream companies retain is accountability for what they rely on: building on an upstream statement that obviously could not be true is not a defence. Verification of a reference-and-verification-number pair is available to anyone holding the numbers, and doing it at goods receipt is cheap diligence.
The classifications people get wrong
- "We only buy from EU suppliers, so we are exempt." You are likely a downstream operator or trader with real record duties, and your suppliers' failures become your supply disruptions. Verify their readiness now.
- "We are a retailer, this is a manufacturer problem." Retailers are traders; own-brand importing makes you the operator for those flows.
- "Compliance handles our imports." Most companies are several roles at once: downstream for the main supply, operator for the side imports nobody told compliance about. The palm oil guide shows how derivative imports create exactly this split. Inventory the side purchases first.
- "Our agent files, so it is their responsibility." An authorised representative can file the DDS on an operator's behalf, but responsibility for compliance stays with the operator, and non-EU companies using representatives remain outside the market unless an EU-established actor answers for the goods.
Map your flows, not your job titles
The working method: list every in-scope product flow (Annex I HS code in, product out), and per flow ask one question: were these goods already placed on the EU market by someone else, with a statement whose numbers you hold? If yes, you keep records per the retention guide. If no, you are the operator for that flow, and the whole due diligence apparatus (geolocation, screening, negligible-risk conclusion, filing) is yours. Most companies discover they are both, and the split is stable enough to build procedures around.