ESMA Culls Outdated Q&As Under Simplification Drive

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU's markets regulator and supervisor, has withdrawn or amended dozens of Questions and Answers (Q&As) across three core rulebooks — MiFID II market structure, the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) and the Short Selling Regulation (SSR) — in an update published on 22 October 2026.

The exercise forms part of ESMA's Simplification and Burden Reduction (SBR) initiative, a programme aimed at trimming regulatory complexity for market participants. The Q&A lists touched by the update span 16 serials under MiFID II secondary markets guidance (1494, 1597, 1599, 1619, 1625, 1626, 1627, 1628, 1630, 1631, 1636, 1637, 1640, 1661, 1665 and 1666), 15 under MAR (1147, 1148, 1150, 1720 through 1730, 1732, 1749 and 1750), and six under the SSR (1899, 1901, 1904, 1905, 1906 and 1930).

What did ESMA actually remove?

The cull targeted three categories of guidance, according to the regulator's own description of the exercise:

• Q&As that are no longer relevant because legislative amendments have since been absorbed into established market practice;
• Q&As that duplicate guidance already set out in other ESMA publications, such as supervisory briefings and opinions;
• Q&As rendered obsolete by changes to the underlying legislative framework.

In each of these cases the guidance was either withdrawn outright or amended so that the remaining text stays consistent with the current state of the law.

That distinction matters for compliance desks. A withdrawn Q&A means interpretive staff can no longer point to it as evidence of supervisory expectation. An amended Q&A remains live, but its scope has shifted. Firms that maintain internal rulebooks keyed to ESMA's serial numbering will need to reconcile their mappings against the updated lists on ESMA's Q&A search page, which links directly to the affected items across the three regimes.

What is the stated objective?

ESMA framed the goal of the initiative plainly: to reduce unnecessary complexity, remove obsolete guidance and ensure that its Q&As remain relevant, proportionate and consistent with the current legislative framework. The regulator said nothing in the update changes the underlying rules themselves. What changes is the interpretive layer that sits on top of MiFID II, MAR and the SSR.

The Q&A instrument occupies a specific place in that architecture. Q&As are not law, and they are not binding technical standards. They are ESMA's tool for promoting common supervisory approaches, clarifying how the regulator reads a provision when national competent authorities or market participants raise questions. Trimming them reduces the volume of interpretive material that compliance functions must monitor, but it also removes signposts that firms may have relied on when building surveillance, transaction-reporting and short-selling-disclosure workflows.

What should market participants do now?

ESMA's instruction to stakeholders is direct. It encourages them to refer to the updated set of Q&As together with any other ESMA guidance — supervisory briefings and opinions included — for the most comprehensive interpretation of the applicable rules.

In practical terms, that shifts interpretive burden back toward primary legislation and consolidated ESMA publications. Where a withdrawn Q&A once answered a specific operational question on, say, market-structure obligations under MiFID II or disclosure duties under the SSR, firms must now assemble the answer from the rule text and whatever remaining guidance covers the same ground.

The update touches regimes that sit squarely in the daily workflow of European trading desks. MiFID II governs how instruments trade and report; MAR defines insider-dealing and market-manipulation obligations that surveillance systems enforce; the SSR sets the disclosure thresholds that short sellers track. None of those obligations changed on 22 October. Only the guidance around them did.

ESMA has signalled that the SBR initiative is broader than this single exercise, which suggests further streamlining of the regulator's interpretive publications — and further reconciliation work for compliance teams — as the programme continues.