Tech··3 min
Electronic signatures and LuxTrust: what legal value for your contracts
Most Luxembourg commercial contracts can be validly signed online without LuxTrust, but some documents require a qualified signature. Here is how a business leader tells the two apart and equips the company accordingly.
Translated from French · Lire l'original en français
You receive a contract to sign online and you are not sure whether a simple click is enough or whether you need LuxTrust. This question concerns every Luxembourg business leader and administrative manager who exchanges contracts, quotes or purchase orders electronically.
What the law says: three levels of electronic signature
The Luxembourg legal framework is based on the amended law of 14 August 2000 on electronic commerce, brought into line with the European eIDAS Regulation (EU No 910/2014) by the law of 17 July 2020. The eIDAS Regulation distinguishes three levels of electronic signature, simple, advanced and qualified, each corresponding to a different degree of technical reliability and therefore of evidential weight before a judge, according to the definitions published by the ILNAS Portail Qualité.
| Level | What it guarantees | Legal value |
|---|---|---|
| Simple (SES) | Basic identification of the signatory (e.g. tick box, scanned signature) | Admissible, but easy to challenge |
| Advanced (AES) | Uniquely linked to the signatory, data under their sole control | Admissible, stronger evidence |
| Qualified (QES) | Qualified certificate + qualified signature creation device (e.g. LuxTrust) | Equivalent to a handwritten signature |
Simple or advanced signature: enough for most of your contracts
For a quote, a purchase order, a standard service contract or a routine commercial agreement, a simple or advanced signature, via a tool such as DocuSign or an embedded scanned signature, is in principle admissible in Luxembourg. These levels do not benefit from the presumption of equivalence with a handwritten signature, but they constitute initial evidence that you can supplement with other elements (email exchanges, timestamps, connection logs). This is the approach most Luxembourg SMEs follow for their day-to-day management, before even considering a solution such as LuxTrust.
When a qualified signature (QES) becomes necessary or mandatory
Only a qualified electronic signature, which relies on a qualified certificate issued by a supervised provider and a qualified signature creation device, has a legal value strictly equivalent to a handwritten signature in Luxembourg, according to the official Guichet.lu glossary and the Portail Qualité. Three situations call for this level of rigour: documents with high financial or legal stakes (transfer agreements, guarantees, digital notarial deeds), situations where a dispute is conceivable and you want to avoid any challenge to the authenticity of the signature, and public procurement by the Luxembourg State. On this last point, bids must be signed electronically before being submitted on the public procurement portal, using authorised devices such as LuxTrust cards and tokens or the Luxembourg electronic identity card, according to the marches.public.lu portal.
Equipping your company: LuxTrust, eID and checking the provider
LuxTrust S.A. appears on the national trusted list of qualified trust service providers managed by ILNAS, alongside other players recently added to this list, IgniSign since May 2024 and InCert since July 2025. In practice, equipping your company for qualified signatures means a LuxTrust card or token for your directors and authorised signatories, or the Luxembourg electronic identity card, which also includes a signature function. Before trusting another provider, particularly a foreign online service claiming to offer qualified signatures, always check that it appears on the trusted list published by the Portail Qualité: this is the only way to make sure the certificate issued will have the expected legal value in Luxembourg. This digital compliance effort is part of a wider movement, such as B2B electronic invoicing, which will become mandatory for Luxembourg companies by 2028-2029.
What this article does not cover
This text provides information on the general framework and cites official sources; it does not constitute legal advice. For a high-stakes contract, a document requiring a specific authentic form, or doubts about the validity of a signature already applied, consult a notary or a lawyer. The full text of the law of 14 August 2000 remains available on Legilux for any in-depth verification.
