It has become necessary to harmonize road construction requirements within the European Union, in order to guarantee a fair competition among all the European road contractors. In consequence, national specifications are being replaced by new European Standards which are intended to certificate road material products, their production and testing. The CE marking for bituminous mixtures emerged in this context as a quality mark which will certify the accomplishment of the EN requirements and will be a mandatory reference in Portugal after 2008. The work herewith presented aimed to study the differences between the present Portuguese specifications and the EN Standard requirements for affixing the CE marking to bituminous mixtures. The main consequences of this new process of certification for asphalt products up to the present day have also been studied. In order to achieve these objectives, the conformity of three different asphalt mixtures for surface layers was experimentally evaluated by using the present specifications and the new CE marking requirements. One of the main conclusions drawn from this work is that the new CE marking certification is more demanding with respect to complexity, time and costs of laboratory testing, and less strict in relation to the bituminous mixtures composition than the present specifications. Actually, CE marking offers different options for the use of new materials in asphalt mixtures, including reclaimed materials for recycling, since the evaluation of mixture quality resides in performance based indicators. For the covering abstract see ITRD E144473.