What the Commission Adopted and When

On 15 September 2026, the European Commission formally adopted the Fair Labour Mobility package, a set of five legislative proposals designed to make it easier for workers to move between EU Member States and have their qualifications recognised, compared and verified across the Single Market. The package directly concerns any profession regulated at national level — a category that includes an increasing number of fitness and wellness roles across EU countries.

The proposals were published through the Commission's employment and social affairs directorate and are now subject to the standard EU legislative process, meaning they are not yet binding law. Their practical effect will depend on the final text agreed by the European Parliament and Council, and on how individual Member States implement the resulting rules.

The Five Proposals and What They Change

The package's most consequential element for training schools and mobile professionals is a revision of the Professional Qualifications Directive, which currently governs how regulated-profession credentials are assessed when a worker moves to another country. The Commission proposes to simplify and digitise those procedures, with a stated target of reducing recognition timelines from as long as three months to five weeks.

A second major proposal, the Skills Portability Act, would establish standardised digital qualification records accessible through the EU Digital Identity Wallet. In practical terms, a professional holding a recognised credential could carry a verified digital record of that qualification rather than managing paper documentation through foreign-language administrative systems.

The package also includes measures covering qualifications held by third-country nationals and a proposed European Social Security Pass — a mechanism for mobile workers to demonstrate their social-security and health-insurance status to employers and authorities in another Member State without lengthy bureaucratic verification.

Who Is and Is Not Covered

The Commission's proposal expands the scope of automatic recognition through common training frameworks, beginning with physiotherapists, whom the Commission identifies as one of the EU's most mobile professions. For employers in wellness and exercise facilities that work alongside regulated rehabilitation services, or that hire dual-qualified staff, this is directly relevant.

However, the package does not automatically extend the same recognition mechanisms to generic personal trainers, fitness instructors or wellness coaches. Those occupations remain governed by a patchwork of national regulations — or, in many countries, by the absence of regulation entirely. Cross-border recognition for those roles will continue to depend on whether the destination country treats the occupation as regulated, and on bilateral or sector-specific frameworks where they exist.

Industry data consistently shows that the fitness sector's workforce mobility is constrained less by qualification quality than by inconsistent regulatory classification across Member States. The Commission's package does not resolve that classification problem directly, though expanding common training frameworks to additional professions in future iterations of the directive remains an explicit part of the agenda.

What Training Schools, Professionals and Employers Should Do Now

Because the package is a proposal rather than enacted law, immediate operational changes are not required. However, the direction of policy is clear, and stakeholders should begin preparing.

• Training schools seeking or holding accreditation should audit whether their qualification certificates carry sufficient structured data — issuing body, competence scope, level against the European Qualifications Framework — to be machine-readable in a future digital wallet environment. Qualifications issued without this metadata will be harder to port automatically under any eventual Skills Portability Act.

• Fitness professionals planning cross-border moves should continue using existing recognition procedures under the current Professional Qualifications Directive while monitoring legislative progress. The proposed five-week target is aspirational at this stage; current timelines remain in force.

• Employers and facility operators hiring internationally — particularly those in markets where physiotherapy or exercise rehabilitation is integrated into service delivery — should track how the automatic-recognition expansion for physiotherapists develops through the legislative process. It is the most immediately actionable element of the package for the sector.

Timeline and Next Steps

The Commission adopted the package on 15 September 2026. It now passes to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU for consideration. No implementation deadline has been set, and the legislative process typically takes between 18 months and three years before Member States are required to transpose new rules into national law. ESWA will publish analysis as the legislative text evolves and as specific common training frameworks are proposed for occupations within the fitness and wellness sector.