Real numbers from this tool, line by line.
A 14-year-old fills in your club's join form on a Sunday evening. Ticks "yes" to the member directory, "yes" to photos. Whether that tick counts depends on the country, not on your form.
GDPR Article 8 says that when an online service relies on consent from a child, the child must have reached a minimum age, or the consent must come from the holder of parental responsibility. The regulation sets 16 as the default and lets each country go as low as 13. They did not agree. Across the 27 EU states plus Iceland, Norway and the UK, 11 countries chose 13, 6 chose 14, 4 chose 15 and 9 stayed at 16.
Here is one real calculation, run in our free web check. A member born 15 March 2012 signs up on 24 September 2026 and is 14. In Germany, where the age is 16, a parent must give consent until 15 March 2028, which is 538 days after the sign-up. In Spain (14) or the UK (13), the same child can consent alone. In France (15) the parent is needed until 15 March 2027. The child could consent alone in 17 of the 30 countries and needs a parent in the other 13.
Why does a club care? Article 83(4) puts breaches of Article 8 in the tier of fines up to €10,000,000 or 2% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. A volunteer-run club will rarely see that ceiling. The more likely loss is a complaint from a parent who never agreed to a photo, and a register that cannot show who consented.
A free form builder does not know any of this. It gives you a date field and a checkbox. It has no idea that the answer for a 14-year-old flips at the border.
So we built a WordPress registration form around the rule. The form has 9 fields: the member's full name, date of birth, the country where the member lives, who gives consent, the parent or guardian's name, the email for the confirmation, the parent's phone, and two choices: member directory yes or no, photos yes or no. The country dropdown carries the Article 8 age next to each of the 30 countries, so the family sees "Germany — consent age 16" while filling it in. On the Settings page you enter your club name and the consent age where the club is based, and both are printed above the form.
Every sign-up lands in an admin register, 50 per page. The form uses a nonce, a honeypot and escaped output on every field. That free plugin is complete: the sign-up job is done.
The paid version is for the week after, when the sign-ups have piled up and the committee asks for the list. It adds four things. A confirmation email to the address on the form, which in the under-age case is the parent. That gives the parent a copy of what was agreed and gives you a record that you contacted them. A CSV export of the whole register, with submission date and time. A new-member alert to the club secretary. And search by member name.
One honest limit: the consent age table reflects each country's national choice as we recorded it. If your regulator tells you otherwise, the free web check lets you type a different age and see the answer change. The plugin's Settings page lets you set the local age printed above your form.
Try it now with one of your own members: enter the date of birth, the country and the sign-up date. The answer, the date the member can consent alone and the full 30-country table appear at once, in your browser, with nothing to install.
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