eIDAS defines three assurance levels for electronic identification: low, substantial and high. They describe how much confidence a relying party can place in a claimed identity. The EU Digital Identity Wallet operates at high.
The level reflects the whole chain. How rigorously identity was proofed at enrolment, how the credential is protected, how authentication works, how the scheme is managed. High wants in-person proofing or a method judged equivalent, and a credential protected against duplication and tampering. Wallet onboarding has a second route: a substantial-level eID means combined with additional remote onboarding procedures, where the combination has to reach high.
One limit is easy to miss. The level attaches to the wallet as an electronic identification means and to the PID inside it, not to every attestation the wallet happens to hold. Other attestations carry assurance through different mechanisms, mainly the controls their issuer had to meet. So reading a PID gets you the top tier without assessing each national scheme. Reading a diploma attestation is relying on something else.
Plenty of regulated obligations are written in terms of assurance level rather than specific technology, which makes the level the relevant compliance fact rather than the protocol detail.
Defined in
Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 Art. 8; Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 Art. 5a(11) and 5a(24); Commission Implementing Regulations (EU) 2015/1502 and (EU) 2026/798
If your obligation names an assurance level, wallet authentication meets the highest one. That is usually a shorter argument than justifying a bespoke document-check pipeline.
Authbound handles the protocols, formats, trust lists and revocation checks behind these terms. See what people build with them.
