How much does a PCN cost? The full price breakdown

The direct answer: ECHA charges nothing for a poison centre notification — not for the first submission, not for updates, not for any of the three submission routes. Three member states add national fees of their own; everywhere else, the official cost is zero. The real money in PCN compliance sits elsewhere: in the hours a first dossier consumes, in what you pay a service to do the work, and in the hidden costs that only show up after the first rejection or reformulation. This page prices all four layers.

What ECHA charges: nothing

All three official submission routes are free of charge: preparing the dossier online in IUCLID Cloud, building an .i6z file in IUCLID 6 and uploading it to the submission portal, or submitting system-to-system with ECHA-issued keys. There is no account fee, no per-dossier charge, and updates to an existing notification are free too. Anyone quoting you an “ECHA fee” for a PCN is describing their own service fee, not an official charge.

Part of the confusion comes from neighbouring regimes: REACH registration does carry ECHA fees, and a cottage industry of third-party websites sells “UFI registration” as if an official charge existed. It does not. The UFI itself is free too — ECHA’s generator costs nothing, and generating a code creates no obligation by itself.

National fees: three countries

Under Annex VIII the submission is harmonised, but member states may still charge for receiving notifications. Per the Member State Decisions overview (v14, May 2026), exactly three do:

Fee-free does not mean condition-free: six countries — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain — require confirmation of receipt before the product is placed on their market. Per-country specifics, including language requirements, are in our country guides.

The time cost of doing it yourself

For DIY, the dominant cost is the first dossier. It carries everything that later dossiers reuse: creating and configuring the ECHA account, learning the dossier structure, picking the correct category from the roughly 250 in the EuPCS, entering the full composition with compliant concentration ranges, and clearing the validation layer — more than 130 business rules that block a submission until fixed.

As a planning assumption — adjust to your own team — budget on the order of two working days (around 16 hours) of accumulated effort for the first dossier, and a couple of hours for each subsequent dossier of a similar mixture once the pattern is learned. The gap between first and later dossiers is the single most underestimated number in PCN budgeting: the learning curve is a one-off cost, but only if the person who climbed it stays. Where portfolios deviate from these assumptions, the drivers are component count and data availability — a three-component cleaner with cooperative suppliers sits at the bottom of the range; a 25-component formulation with two mixture-in-mixture entries does not.

What services cost

• Regulatory consultant: €300–1,000 per mixture, with 2–6 weeks turnaround. The right buy when the problem is expertise — contested classification, missing toxicological data — rather than throughput. See do I need a consultant for PCN.
• Enterprise EHS suite: roughly €5,000–60,000 per year (Sphera, Lisam, EcoOnline class), plus implementation. PCN is one module; the price buys SDS authoring, label management and ERP integration. Rational when you need the platform, hard to justify for PCN alone.
• Focused submission tool: around €20 per mixture. Ufi Number, for example, sells prepaid credits at €20 single, €180 for 10, €800 for 50 and €1,500 for 100; credits never expire, and a failed first submission refunds the credit. You enter the composition; the tool generates the UFI, builds the dossier and submits it.

Two worked examples

Assumptions, stated so you can swap in your own: 16 hours for a first DIY dossier, 2 hours per subsequent dossier, and €50 per hour as a loaded staff cost. National fees excluded — they apply equally to every option.

The pattern is stable across portfolio sizes: consultants price expertise, suites price platforms, tools price throughput, and DIY converts cash cost into calendar time. Which trade fits which portfolio — and when to combine them — is worked through in PCN submission options compared.

The hidden costs

• Rejected dossiers. Blocking validation failures send you into a fix-and-resubmit loop; each round costs hours and, in confirmation-of-receipt countries, delays market placement. The common failure modes are catalogued in PCN validation errors.
• Reformulation updates. A composition change beyond the permitted ranges means a new UFI and an updated notification before the reformulated product ships — recurring work that per-mixture budgets routinely omit. See how to update a PCN.
• Staff turnover.ECHA account credentials, S2S keys, the formulation-numbering scheme and the hard-won knowledge of why each dossier looks the way it does can all leave with one person. The first dossier’s 16 hours get paid again.
• Non-compliance discovered late. In the 2025 enforcement pilot, 19% of inspected mixtures requiring notification had none — and remediation under enforcement pressure costs more than notification ever did. The findings are summarised in PCN enforcement.

Budget rule of thumb: price the notification, then price the maintenance. A PCN is cheap to submit and never quite finished — the option that handles updates and format changes without re-learning is usually the one that costs least over three years.