EPREL Adds a Built-In Tool to Compare Appliances by Energy Label

The European Commission’s EPREL database, the public register that underpins every A-to-G energy label sold in the EU, added a built-in comparison feature on 20 July 2026. According to DG Energy’s own announcement, the tool lets anyone search EPREL’s more than 2 million registered products and compare several similar models side by side, rather than opening one product record at a time.

EPREL is not a new system. Every washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerator, oven, air conditioner, TV and other energy-labelled product sold in the EU has had to be registered there since the database went live in 2019, and its contents are the legal source of truth behind the sticker on the box. What changed this month is how a shopper can use that data once they are on the site.

What the tool actually adds

Before this update, EPREL’s public interface was built around looking up one model at a time. The new feature, per the Commission’s announcement, adds three concrete abilities:

Feature	What it lets you do
Filtering	Narrow a product list by energy class, capacity, noise level and other registered specs
Multi-criteria sort	Sort results by up to three criteria at once, not just one column
Export	Download the filtered comparison as a file for closer analysis

The Commission frames this as a tool for consumers, businesses doing sustainable procurement, and national market-surveillance authorities checking compliance, all pulling from the same underlying registry. Confirmed directly on the live site, the standard search still starts from a single category, such as dishwashers, with a model-identifier or brand search and a filter panel down the side, exactly the structure the announcement describes.

Why it matters for buying decisions

EPREL’s registered figures are the ones a manufacturer is legally required to declare, which makes the database a harder-to-dispute reference point than marketing copy on a product page. A comparison view built directly on that data means a shopper can check whether two models’ energy classes, water use per cycle, or noise levels are really as close as a store display suggests, using the same numbers a market inspector would use.

It is worth being precise about what EPREL is not. It does not carry price, and it does not rank products by overall value. That is the gap a shopping-focused comparison fills: when you compare two machines on our dishwashers or washing machines pages, we set the manufacturer’s registered energy figures alongside price and the features that actually change day-to-day use, and we link out to a model’s own EPREL entry wherever we have it, so the registered numbers are always one click away.

The practical takeaway

If you are close to a purchase, EPREL’s own comparison view is now a genuinely useful second check before you buy, particularly if a retailer’s spec sheet looks incomplete or you want to confirm an energy class independently. Search by the exact model identifier printed on the label or the box, since a bare product name can match several regional variants with different registered figures. For the fuller shopping picture, price included, our own comparison pages draw on the same registered data.