What is a poison centre notification (PCN)?

If your company places a mixture classified for a health or physical hazard on the EU market, a PCN dossier is one of two obligations that come with it, alongside the UFI printed on the label. Neither one is optional, neither one is a formality, and neither one can be prepared without the other: the dossier is what a poison centre actually reads, and the UFI is what points them to it.

The legal basis

The requirement comes from Annex VIII to the CLP Regulation (Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008 on classification, labelling and packaging of substances and mixtures). Annex VIII was added to CLP by Regulation (EU) 2017/542 and later amended by Regulation (EU) 2020/1677, which set the final transitional deadlines for mixtures already on the market.

Before Annex VIII existed, each EU member state ran its own notification scheme, with its own format, its own required data and, in many cases, its own language rules — so a company selling one mixture in ten countries could face ten different submissions. Annex VIII replaced that patchwork with a single harmonised format: the same data set, structured the same way, submitted once through the ECHA Submission Portal and routed to every member state the notifier selects.

The obligation sits with the company that places the mixture on the market — most often an importer or a downstream user formulating the product — rather than with a distributor further down the chain who is only reselling it unchanged. Where exactly that duty lands in a given supply chain is its own question, covered on our page on who must notify.

What a notification contains

A PCN dossier is built around eight information sections, covering everything a poison centre needs to identify the product and respond to an exposure. Each one is covered in full on our dossier breakdown.

Who receives it

A PCN is not filed with ECHA to sit on record. It is submitted through the ECHA Submission Portal, which routes the dossier to the body each member state has appointed to receive it — and from there to the poison centres operating in that country. Which body that is, and what else it expects alongside the harmonised data, differs from one member state to the next; we cover those differences separately, on our member state page. What matters here is that the dossier has to reach every member state where the mixture is placed on the market, not only the one where your company happens to be established.

The dossier is not published, and it is not searchable by the public. Access is limited to the appointed bodies and the poison centres they work with, who use it only when they need to — most often because someone has called about an actual or suspected exposure and given the UFI or the product name from the label. See how poison centres use the data once a notification arrives.

When it must be submitted

A PCN dossier has to be submitted before the mixture is placed on the market — not alongside the first shipment, and not once a customer or an authority asks for it. Placing on the market means the first time the mixture is supplied or made available, whether that is a sale, a transfer within a corporate group, or an import into the EU. A dossier submitted after that point does not retroactively cover the product; the product was on the market without one, for however long the gap lasted.

PCN and the UFI

The UFI is the code that ties the two ends of this system together: it is generated before the dossier is submitted, it is printed on the label of the physical product, and it is entered into the dossier itself, so that anyone who reads the UFI off a label or a safety data sheet can be matched, in an emergency, to the exact composition on file. A PCN dossier without the correct UFI, or a label carrying a UFI that matches no submitted dossier, both defeat the purpose the system was built for — the two have to be prepared and checked against each other, not treated as separate paperwork handled by different people at different times. Read more about what a UFI is and how it works.

What changed in 2021, 2024 and 2025

Annex VIII did not apply to every mixture on the same day. Consumer and professional use mixtures came into scope from 1 January 2021, industrial use mixtures followed from 1 January 2024, and a transitional period that allowed mixtures already notified under the old national systems to keep operating without a new PCN closed on 1 January 2025. There is no transitional cover left: every classified mixture on the EU market today needs a valid UFI sitting behind a submitted dossier. See the full deadline picture and where your product sits in it.