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On September 17, 2026, the European Commission published Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/2102 in the Official Journal. The act removes raw hides, tanned hides and finished bovine leather from the scope of the EU Deforestation Regulation, and it entered into force the following day.

China has fixed April 1, 2027 as the start date of a new mandatory national standard for leather and fur products. GB 20400-2026, Safety technical specification for leather and fur products, was issued on March 31, 2026, according to the record held by China's national standards platform.

Since August 6, 2026, a leather jacket placed on the European Union market must not release more than 0.080 mg/m3 of formaldehyde under the chamber test conditions set out in Appendix 14 of REACH Annex XVII. For a buyer building a leather jacket range for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, the change lands in the test file rather than in the sample room.

US Customs and Border Protection will deploy Phase 3 of its IEEPA refund system on October 6, 2026, the agency told the Court of International Trade on September 15, 2026. The phase reaches finally liquidated entries, and it matters to leather jacket buyers whose 2025 entries carried an IEEPA duty line.

From August 12, 2026, every carton, polybag and mailer that carries a leather jacket into the European Union sits inside a new regime. Regulation (EU) 2025/40, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, replaced the 1994 Packaging Directive on that date, and the Commission confirms that the recyclability duty starts then, not later.

California's next textile rulemaking step is set for September 29, 2026, when CalRecycle holds an informal public workshop in Sacramento on the regulation concepts behind the Responsible Textile Recovery Act. For any brand that sells a leather jacket into California, the agenda reaches the question that decides who carries the duty: producer identification and exemptions.

From December 9, 2026, the European Union replaces the product liability rules it has applied since 1985. Member States must have transposed Directive (EU) 2024/2853 by that date, and every leather jacket placed on the EU market afterwards falls under the new regime instead.

On July 31, 2026, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security added 43 companies to the UFLPA Entity List, the largest single expansion of that list to date. The additions took effect on August 3, 2026, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection began applying a rebuttable presumption of forced labor to their goods.

From September 27, 2026, anyone selling a leather jacket to consumers in the European Union must be able to prove the environmental claims on the label, the hangtag or the product page.

Importers bringing leather jacket shipments into the United States must now file compliance certificate data electronically with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, under a Consumer Product Safety Commission rule that took effect on July 8, 2026.

The European Commission's guidelines for the EU's forced labour ban were published in the Official Journal on September 3, 2026, setting out how authorities will police imports of leather jacket supplies once enforcement begins on December 14, 2027.

On May 12, 2026, Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas introduced H.R.8744, the TREE Act, which would make it unlawful to import goods linked to deforestation into the United States from January 1, 2029.

On July 19, 2026, the European Union's ban on destroying unsold consumer products entered into application, and leather apparel is on the list it covers.

Leather jacket suppliers selling into California have a fixed date to plan against. From January 1, 2027, the limit for regulated PFAS in textile articles falls from 100 parts per million to 50 parts per million, measured as total organic fluorine.