"All-day battery life" has always been an unregulated marketing phrase — measured however a manufacturer chose, under lab conditions no real person replicates. As of June 20, 2025, that changed for any smartphone or tablet sold in the European Union. A real, legally binding test now exists, and it produces a number you can actually compare between devices.
This didn't happen in isolation. It's one part of a broader EU energy label that now covers three separate durability dimensions on a single mandatory sticker: battery endurance (the cycle-count rule below), an IP-class ingress-protection rating for dust and water resistance, and a repairability score — the first time any of these has been a standardized, government-mandated figure rather than a manufacturer's own marketing claim, for any consumer electronics category.
The rule, in plain terms
Under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/1669, every new smartphone and tablet placed on the EU market must be tested through repeated full charge cycles until its capacity drops to 80% of its original rating — and that cycle count now has to be printed on the device's mandatory energy label. According to Fraunhofer IZM's breakdown of the standard, the bar manufacturers must clear is at least 800 charge cycles while still retaining 80% of original capacity — more than double the roughly 300-cycle threshold that was the de facto industry testing norm before the rule existed.
The same label also has to disclose an IP-rating-based durability score and a repairability rating, and the underlying ecodesign regulation requires manufacturers to keep critical spare parts — including batteries — available for at least seven years after a model is discontinued.
Why 800 cycles is the number that matters
One charge cycle is one full 0-to-100% charge, whether it happens in a single sitting or accumulated across several top-ups in a day. Someone who charges nightly puts their phone through roughly 365 cycles a year. At the old 300-cycle bar, a battery could legitimately be certified as acceptable while degrading noticeably in under a year of daily use. At 800 cycles, a phone should hold onto at least 80% of its original capacity for something closer to two years of daily charging — and Fraunhofer's own projection is that the combined battery and repairability rules could push a typical mid-range phone's usable lifespan from about 3.0 years to 4.1 years.
How to actually use this when buying
The rest of what's on the label
The same regulation requires manufacturers to keep the software and firmware needed to actually carry out a battery replacement accessible to independent repairers and consumers, not just the physical part — closing a gap that's historically let a manufacturer technically sell a replacement battery while still making the repair practically impossible without proprietary calibration tools. Combined with the seven-year minimum spare-parts window under the related ecodesign rule, the intent is that a battery meeting the 800-cycle bar today should still be realistically replaceable, by a third party, years after the phone itself is discontinued.
What it doesn't cover
The regulation tests capacity retention under controlled lab charge/discharge cycling — it doesn't account for real-world factors like heat exposure, fast-charging habits, or letting a phone sit at 0% for long periods, all of which degrade batteries faster than the lab test implies. Treat the label's number as a floor a manufacturer is legally required to clear, not a guarantee of exactly how your specific phone will perform. And because the rule only applies to devices placed on the EU market from June 20, 2025 onward, a phone that launched even a few months earlier — however similar the hardware — may simply never carry this label at all.