Standards
Is your old car seat still legal to use?
Yes — and here is where the “old seats are banned” story came from, plus the four real reasons to replace one.
Rules & standards
Is it required, and is it legal?
Two different things decide what you may do: the approval standard the seat was built to, and the traffic law of the country you are driving in. They do not always say the same thing, and the words on the box stopped matching the words parents use. This section separates the two.
The standards themselves
Has my child reached the next stage?
Readiness
Rear-facing vs forward-facing: when to turn the seat around
The single question with the biggest gap between what parents do and what the standard asks for.
Readiness
When can a child use a booster seat?
The five-step readiness test, and why age alone answers nothing.
Readiness
When can a child sit in the front seat?
Airbags, deactivation, and what changes when the back seat is genuinely unavailable.
Readiness
Which stage does my child need now?
Age, weight and height limits read the way the label actually means them.
Rules when you are not in your own car
How we handle rules on this site
Every requirement, age limit, measurement and penalty we publish is traced to a primary source — the European regulation text, national road traffic law, or a national road safety authority — and carries the date we last checked it. Rules change; a page without a source and a date is a page you cannot verify. Where a country’s law and the approval standard disagree, we say so instead of picking the tidier answer.
Country-by-country pages are in progress. If the rule you need is not here yet, the full article list may already cover it, and Setup & fit covers the checks that apply everywhere regardless of local law.