The European Payments Council (EPC) has postponed the requirement for structured addresses for SEPA debits and credits until February 2027. The EPC, which writes the rules for euro payments, will decide on the new deadline in early 2027. This delay gives businesses more time to organize their address data into separate fields.

For those who use file products from management software, their anachronisms will be reorganized into separate fields starting from the IBAN of the beneficiary, which can be verified before sending via the IBAN verification service. The Payment Scheme Management Board, the committee of the EPC that manages the SEPA schemes, decided on October 29, 2026, not to fix the date of stop for unstructured addresses and will meet again by February 2027; SEPA rules in effect since September 30, 2026, allow three formats of addresses, including the hybrid format with city and country in separate fields up to two lines of 70 characters, which have no expiration date; for cross-border payment services established within the European Union, Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1113 requires at least the account number of the payer and payee; Swift will inform by December 2026 about the new times for cross-border payments, while the Eurosystem allows for a limited period of unstructured addresses in regulated T2 payments.