Regulation (European Union)
EU legal acts that apply directly in each Member State
A regulation is a legal act of the European Union which becomes immediately enforceable as law in all member states simultaneously. Regulations can be distinguished from directives which, at least in principle, need to be transposed into national law. Regulations can be adopted by means of a variety of legislative procedures depending on their subject matter. Despite their name, Regulations are primary legislation rather than regulatory delegated legislation; hence, the EU increasingly uses the term "Act" in the short titles of many of its Regulations (e.g. the Digital Services Act).
Description
The description of regulations can be found in Article 288 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (formerly Article 249 TEC).
Article 288
To exercise the Union's competences, the institutions shall adopt regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions.
A regulation shall have general application. It shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.
A directive shall be binding, as to the result to be achieved, upon each Member State to which it is addressed, but shall leave to the national authorities the choice of form and methods.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Regulation (European Union)” is eU legal acts that apply directly in each Member State. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Regulation, European and Union, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q240141. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Regulation (European Union)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.