What changed on July 8, 2026
CPSC certificate eFiling became mandatory for covered imports on July 8, 2026, under the Commission's eFiling rule (with a later applicability date of January 8, 2027, for goods entering from foreign trade zones). The obligation sits with the certifying importer; the entry filing itself is transmitted by your customs broker.
Source: Federal Register, Certificates of Compliance (correction), federalregister.gov 2025-18521 (carried from our research snapshot dated 2026-07-15).
The mechanics: Registry rows, then an ACE reference
CPSC's Product Registry is the free system where certificate data lives. It supports individual entry, CSV upload, and an API. At entry time your broker files the ACE PGA Reference message pointing at the Certifier, Product, and Version IDs of the registry record — the certificate data itself has to already be there, and already correct.
- Individual entry works at very small catalog sizes, then stops scaling.
- CSV upload is the workhorse: an 83-column official template (V3) covering identifiers, trade parties, manufacture dates, testing labs, and citations.
- API suits importers with engineering teams and stable product data pipelines.
Source: cpsc.gov/efiling/importers and cpsc.gov/efiling/brokers (checked 2026-07-16); program hub structure re-checked 2026-07-17 at cpsc.gov/eFiling.
The part nobody automates for you: making the data true
The Registry validates structure at upload. It does not know whether the lab report you cited is the current one, whether the manufacture date matches the shipment actually crossing, or whether the factory address on the certificate survived your last sourcing change. Those failures surface later — at inspection, in a records request, or in a recall file.
That is the layer we work on: versioned certificate data with field-level provenance (every value traceable to a document), a contradiction queue when two sources disagree, and a change-control chain when the product changes. Our five-year records guide covers what you may be asked to produce afterward; the Certificate Data Health Check scores a certificate's data in your browser — nothing uploads.