GPSR and Small Businesses: Is There an Exemption, and What Do You Actually Have to Do?

"I'm far too small, this can't apply to us" — that is the sentence we hear most often in GPSR advisory work. The expectation is understandable, because in many areas of EU law there genuinely are reliefs for small and medium-sized enterprises. With the General Product Safety Regulation the position is different, and it is worth saying so plainly from the outset.

Does the GPSR provide an exemption for small businesses?

No. Regulation (EU) 2023/988 does not differentiate obligations by company size, turnover, headcount or units produced. What determines the scope is whether a product is made available to consumers in the EU. A one-person workshop selling from home carries the same core obligations as a factory producing millions of units: the product must be safe, a risk assessment must exist, the technical documentation must be kept available, and traceability details and any required warnings must appear on the product.

That is a deliberate legislative choice. The risk a consumer encounters does not change according to who made the product; a choking hazard in a baby item does not shrink because the manufacturer's turnover is small. The search for a "micro-enterprise exemption" therefore comes up empty — no such exemption exists in the text.

So does nothing change for a small business?

It does — just not where people expect. What scales is not the obligation itself but the extent of the documentation needed to satisfy it. Article 9 provides that the further content of the technical documentation is included where appropriate with regard to the possible risks related to the product. In practice, that proportionality makes a real difference for small businesses.

Concretely: for a decorative wooden board with no safety risk, the risk assessment and technical documentation can be completed in a few pages. For a children's toy with a rechargeable battery, the same file calls for references to applicable harmonised standards, test reports and a detailed risk analysis. What creates the difference is not the size of the business but the risk profile of the product. If a small business sells low-risk products, the burden is correspondingly light.

What a small business actually has to put in place

Regardless of size, this is the minimum list that must exist for every product in scope:

• Risk assessment. The written analysis of what hazards the product presents in foreseeable use. It does not have to be long; it does have to be done and retained.
• Technical documentation. Description of the product, materials used, any test reports, standards applied and the risk assessment. Retention period: ten years.
• Traceability detail. Model, batch or serial number, on the product or its packaging.
• Manufacturer details. Name and contact address, on the product, the packaging or an accompanying document.
• Warnings and use information. Product-specific, in the language of the country of sale.

These five items apply to a candle workshop just as they do to a furniture manufacturer. What differs is only how deeply each one has to be filled in.

Small businesses outside the EU: the Responsible Person requirement

Here the dividing line is not company size but geography. If you are not established in the EU and make your products available to consumers in the EU, Article 16 requires an economic operator established in the EU to perform the Responsible Person function for that product. This applies to a single-person Etsy shop as well.

Following from that, Article 19 requires distance-selling offers to show the manufacturer's name, postal address and electronic address clearly; where the manufacturer is outside the EU, the same details for the Responsible Person appear in the offer as well. That is why marketplaces ask you to fill in compliance fields, and why a listing can be taken down when those fields are left empty.

How do you keep the cost reasonable?

For a small business the real question is usually not "must I" but "how do I do this within my budget". In practice this order works:

1. Group products into families. Products made of the same material with the same use can sit under one risk assessment; you do not need a separate file per SKU.
2. Start with the highest risk. Children's products, electricals, anything in contact with skin and anything involving a flame come first; decorative items can wait.
3. Collect the documents you already have. Your supplier may already hold test reports or material certificates; ask before commissioning new testing.
4. Set the label up correctly once. Once the label template is settled it applies across the whole product family; you do not start again with each new item.

A small business working through this order turns compliance from a single large outlay into a distributed, predictable task.

Three common mistakes

First, continuing to look for an exemption and doing nothing in the meantime. Second, treating conformity as a labelling question — the label is the visible part and is not sufficient on its own without a risk assessment and technical documentation behind it. Third, mistaking the completion of a marketplace compliance field for compliance itself; that field only displays the information, it does not create its basis.

If you are unsure which categories your range falls into, our categories page helps; for the scope of the documentation, see the documentation page.