Foreign investment screening is about to become a compulsory, harmonised task for every EU capital, and the clock is already running. The new Regulation on screening of foreign investments entered into force on 16 July 2026, twenty days after it appeared in the Official Journal on 26 June, and it replaces the 2019 framework that only asked governments to coordinate on a voluntary basis.
The road to the final text was long. The Commission proposed it on 24 January 2024, Parliament and Council negotiators reached a political agreement on 11 December 2025, Parliament approved the deal on 19 May 2026, and ministers signed it off on 8 June. Full application follows eighteen months after entry into force, which points to January 2028. Some pieces start sooner: the obligation to notify national measures and the secure system for cooperation apply from entry into force, and the Commission has twelve months to build that system.
The most consequential change is that no member state may opt out. Every government must run a national screening mechanism, and the old exceptions are closing. Cyprus, which had no mechanism when trilogues began, passed its law in 2025 and saw it enter into force on 2 April 2026. Croatia and Bulgaria were also under pressure to complete their systems. For investors, that removes the weakest links in the EU map of foreign investment screening.
The regulation also sets a common minimum scope that requires prior authorisation. Dual-use items, military equipment, critical raw materials, and so-called hyper-critical technologies such as semiconductors, quantum technologies and certain general-purpose AI research all fall inside it. Critical entities, parts of the financial system, electoral infrastructure and transport infrastructure identified through national risk assessments join the list. Greenfield investments stay outside the mandatory core, although capitals may still choose to review them. The definition of foreign investment now also reaches deals made through an EU subsidiary of a non-EU investor.
Timing rules matter as much as scope in foreign investment screening. The harmonised initial review lasts 45 calendar days, and cooperation notices between capitals and the Commission run on deadlines of 15 and 45 days. Authorities can open an own-initiative review for up to five years after a deal closes. Media services and farmland are not in the mandatory list, yet they appear as risk factors, with food security flagged when a target controls more than 10,000 hectares of farmland. A single EU portal exists only if nine or more member states ask for it.
For dealmakers, the practical lesson is to map foreign investment screening filings early. A transaction touching a chip designer in one country and a mining asset in another could trigger parallel reviews with different clocks, and the cooperation mechanism lets other capitals and the Commission comment on each case. Compliance teams should start preparing now for January 2028 rather than waiting for national implementing laws.
The regulation shows how the EU treats economic security as ordinary single-market law rather than a crisis tool. Whether foreign investment screening ends up predictable for investors or merely adds a new layer of paperwork will depend on how consistently 27 administrations apply the same text over the next two years.
