Digital Passports for Every Home: Russia Moves Its Housing Sector to the Cloud
Starting March 1, 2026, Russia’s housing and utilities sector will undergo a historic transformation: every residential building—both private and multi-unit—will be assigned a digital passport. This electronic document, consolidating key data about each property, will become the cornerstone of the industry’s large-scale digitalization.
How Will the Digital Passport Work?
The initiative, signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, aims to establish a unified, transparent system for managing the country’s housing stock—a move that will fundamentally change how maintenance and resource allocation are planned. Unlike a simple digital copy of a paper document, the digital passport is a dynamic data system that aggregates information from the Unified State Register of Real Estate (EGRN), technical inventory records, and building maintenance logs. Property management companies and homeowners’ associations will be responsible for keeping the data up to date.
Each passport will consolidate critical information about a building—its construction year, structural materials, wear levels, engineering systems, and maintenance history.
All this data will be accessible through Russia’s State Information System for Housing and Utilities (GIS HCS), providing transparency for homeowners, housing inspectors, and regional maintenance operators alike.
From Reactive to Predictive Maintenance
The key goal of the reform is to shift from reactive to predictive management. Currently, many major renovation programs are drafted without an accurate understanding of the real condition of residential buildings—leading to inefficient spending. Experts note that funds are sometimes allocated to repair a roof, while the building’s foundation is in far worse shape.
With digital passports, authorities will be able to accurately prioritize renovation needs and channel funding toward critical repairs. In the future, the system will support advanced analytics by linking passport data to urban planning systems, cadastral information, and smart home technologies. Machine learning algorithms will be able to predict when specific engineering systems or structural elements are likely to fail. For homeowners, this means direct, transparent access to objective information about their property’s condition.
The Road to Digital Transformation
The initiative is the result of years of groundwork. As early as 2013, Russia moved away from the Soviet-era Bureau of Technical Inventory (BTI) system, retaining only a basic passport for multi-apartment buildings. With the launch of GIS HCS in 2016, data integration between different government bodies began to take shape.
A major milestone came in June 2025, when Russia’s State Duma passed the law introducing digital building passports, providing the necessary legal framework for the new system. Following the law’s signing by President Putin, the Ministry of Construction began developing the technical format and data standards. Moscow served as a practical prototype for the nationwide system—having already implemented more than 46,000 digital passports for capital construction projects. The capital’s success demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach and laid the foundation for replication across the country.
Smart Housing, Smarter Cities
The introduction of digital housing passports marks an essential step in the digital evolution of Russia’s utilities and housing sector. Over the next two to three years, authorities will focus on refining data collection, verification processes, and system integration.
By 2026, as the system reaches full operation, housing maintenance will begin transitioning toward proactive models.
Within several years, the digital passport is expected to become a nationwide standard. Its analytical capabilities will feed into urban planning strategies and smart city platforms, effectively creating a digital twin of Russia’s residential infrastructure. The reform promises not only greater operational efficiency but also a foundation for more sustainable and citizen-focused urban management.
