Resources · Quality management

The ISO 9001:2026 transition: what happens, in what order, and when

The sixth edition of ISO 9001 was published on 16 September 2026. Certified organisations do not lose their certificates that day. They move across during a transition period set by accreditation rules, not by ISO, and not yet formally published.

Status as at 16 September 2026. Confirmed: ISO 9001:2026 is published. ISO’s catalogue records the sixth edition at stage 60.60, International Standard published, dated September 2026, running to 36 pages, with ISO/TC 176/SC 2 as the responsible committee. The same entry now shows ISO 9001:2015, and the 2024 amendment to it, as withdrawn. Not confirmed: the transition end date, which no accreditation communique has yet fixed.

This page is about the mechanics of moving between editions, not a summary of what changed in the requirements. The certification bodies published those the moment the standard landed and will be the ones auditing against it: read DNV, NQA, DQS or LRQA.

What almost nobody has written down is the sequence. A transition is a records problem before it is a training problem. An organisation moving between editions has to be able to demonstrate, for any date inside a three year window, which edition it was working to, what it changed, when, and on whose authority. Most transition advice describes the destination. Very little describes how you evidence the journey, which is the part an auditor asks about.

What has actually happened, and what has not?

Four things have happened. ISO/DIS 9001 was approved with a 97% approval rate after the public comment stage closed on 19 November 2025. The FDIS was released to SC 2 members for ballot on 27 May 2026, closing on 9 July 2026. The FDIS was approved on 7 August 2026. The sixth edition was published on 16 September 2026.

Publication is not the same thing as certifiability. The standard now exists, and nobody is yet accredited to audit you against it.

The deadline exists, and it was set before the standard was published. Global ACI issued mandatory transition requirements for ISO 9001:2026 on 4 September 2026, twelve days ahead of publication, binding on every accreditation body and accredited certification body in its arrangement. The transition period is three years: certification bodies must move all certified clients across by 30 September 2029, and no new ISO 9001:2015 certificates may be issued after 31 March 2028. What has not happened is accreditation: no certification body yet holds accreditation to audit against the sixth edition, because that cannot be granted until after publication.

One consequence of publication is being very little discussed. ISO now records ISO 9001:2015, and the 2024 climate change amendment to it, as withdrawn. Withdrawal is a catalogue status rather than an instruction to your certification body, and it does not cancel a certificate you already hold. What it does mean is that the edition most certified organisations are working to is no longer a current ISO standard, and the point after which new certificates can no longer be issued against it is published: Global ACI sets it at 31 March 2028, eighteen months from the last day of the publication month. UKAS states 16 March 2028 for UK certification bodies, fifteen days earlier, apparently counting from the publication date itself rather than the month end. If the difference matters to your planning, ask your certification body which it is working to.

The sources agree, and ISO has not contradicted them, that the revision keeps the harmonised structure used across ISO management system standards, commonly called Annex SL, and retains the same ten clauses. That sets the scale of the exercise, because a renumbering would have forced every cross-reference in your system to be rewritten.

ISO’s own description of the edition is the closest thing to a primary source that anyone can read for free, so we quote it rather than paraphrase it. On the standard’s page, ISO writes: “Published on 16 September, the 2026 edition focuses on improving clarity to help organizations of all sizes, maturity and purpose to better understand the requirements. It emphasizes the importance of quality culture and leadership and separates risk and opportunities to ensure organizations proactively take actions to pursue beneficial results. And with improved alignment to other ISO management system standards, it’s easier than ever to integrate ISO 9001 into an organization’s existing management systems, no matter their size or sector.”

That is ISO itself on quality culture and leadership, on the separation of risk and opportunity, and on alignment with the other management system standards. DNV’s summary reaches the same points in more specific terms, at clause level: quality culture and ethical behaviour appearing under clause 5.1 on leadership and commitment, the climate change amendments made to clauses 4.1 and 4.2 in 2024 now integrated into the standard itself, and a clearer separation between risk and opportunity in clause 6.1. That is a certification body’s account, valuable because it is specific, and secondary to ISO’s own wording.

We have not read the standard, so we will not paraphrase requirements we have not seen. If you want to look at it yourself, ISO publishes a free official preview, labelled “Read sample”, on the standard’s page. The full document runs to 36 pages, ISO lists it at CHF 196, and UK buyers are directed to BSI.

Who sets the transition deadline now that the IAF no longer exists?

Search for the ISO 9001:2026 deadline and you will be told, repeatedly and confidently, that the transition period will be confirmed by the International Accreditation Forum, and that nothing is final until the IAF issues its mandatory document. Some of those pages were written this month.

The IAF does not exist. Its own website now states that “IAF ceased operations on 01 January 2026” and that the site is maintained for archival reference only. The IAF and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation merged into a single body, Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated, which commenced full operations on 1 January 2026, including the launch of its own multilateral recognition arrangement. It is abbreviated both as Global ACI and as GLOBAC, and ILAC and regional bodies including APAC record the same replacement.

The substance is unaffected: former IAF mandatory documents carried over under their existing numbering, and accredited certificates remain recognised without interruption. But the body that will set the ISO 9001 transition period is Global ACI, and any page still telling you to wait for an IAF announcement is pointing you at an organisation that closed nine months ago.

A deadline whose issuing body is named wrongly is a deadline nobody is actually tracking.

The honest position on the end date is this. A three year transition ending around September 2029 is expected and repeated everywhere. It is not confirmed. No accreditation communique fixing it has been published, so until Global ACI issues one, September 2029 is a forecast rather than a date you can put in a board paper as fixed.

The precedent carries the same caveat. ISO 14001:2026 was published on 15 April 2026, and certification bodies report a transition deadline of 30 April 2029, with no new certificates issued against the 2015 edition after about 30 October 2027. That is three years to the deadline and eighteen months to the point where the old edition stops being available for new work. If ISO 9001 follows the same shape, the eighteen month marker matters more, because it arrives while you are still deciding.

When will you actually be audited against the new edition?

Later than you think, and this is the most useful planning fact on this page.

A newly published standard is not immediately certifiable. Your certification body cannot audit you against the sixth edition until it has trained its auditors and been accredited against that edition by its national accreditation body, such as UKAS or ANAB. That process is widely reported to take nine to twelve months, which is why first accredited audits against the new edition are generally expected from the middle of 2027 onwards.

You cannot be certified to a standard before anyone is accredited to certify you to it.

So there is a gap of roughly nine months before the first real transition audits, then a second gap before your own falls due, because transitions are normally folded into a scheduled surveillance or recertification visit. Work backwards from your certification cycle, not from the publication date.

That gap is not dead time. It is the only period in which you can change your management system without an auditor watching, and it is when the records that will be examined at that audit are created.

What does a certified organisation do, and in what order?

The order matters more than the speed, because doing it out of order produces changes you cannot later explain.

NQA’s published transition steps run in a familiar sequence: obtain the standard and perform a gap assessment, build a phased transition plan aligned to your certification timeline, train staff on the revised clauses, update documentation, then prepare for the transition audit using the mandatory transition documents your certification body issues after publication.

Each of those steps produces a record, and the audit tests the records rather than the intentions.

A gap assessment is only useful later if it is dated and its conclusions are attributable. A transition plan is only evidence if the approved version is still retrievable after it has been superseded twice. Training is only demonstrable if the register records who attended, when, and against which edition the material was written. A procedure change is only defensible if you can show the previous text, the change, the reason and the approver.

Add one step to the front of that sequence, which most guides leave out. Before you change anything, fix the date at which your management system was compliant with the 2015 edition, and make sure document control can produce that state on demand. Without the baseline, your transition is a set of changes with nothing to be a change from.

Which documented information has to change, and how do you evidence it?

We will not tell you what the new edition requires you to document, because we have not read it. What we can say is which artefacts a transition always disturbs, and what evidence each needs to carry.

The usual set: quality manual or scope document, process maps and procedures, internal audit programme and checklists, management review inputs, competence and training records, and the risk and opportunity register. Each needs a version referencing the new edition, and each has a date on which it stopped referencing the old one.

An auditor examining a transition asks one question in several forms: on this date, what were you working to, and who said so?

Four fields answer it, whichever clause is in play. What the item says now. What it said before. When it changed. Who authorised the change. A document control system that keeps only the current version answers the first and none of the rest, which is why so many transitions produce a fully compliant management system and a thin evidence trail.

Two traps. Your internal audit programme has to cover the new edition before your certification body arrives, so your internal quality audits need to record which edition each was performed against. And any non-conformance raised during the transition window, with any corrective action arising from it, should record the edition in force when it was raised. A corrective action opened against the 2015 edition and closed against the 2026 edition is perfectly legitimate, and completely indefensible if the record does not say so.

Running two editions in parallel

For most of the transition window you will be operating one management system that answers to two editions, and the ability to say which one applied to a given activity on a given day is the whole of the exercise.

This is normal, not a failure of planning. Multi site organisations transition site by site, and integrated systems face two revisions at once, since ISO 14001:2026 is already in its own transition. Your certification body holds you to the 2015 edition until your transition audit, while your improvement work is already pointed at the 2026 edition.

Three things make the parallel period survivable. Label the edition on every controlled document rather than leaving it to be inferred. Keep one register of the transition decisions, recording what you changed, when, why and who approved it, because that is the document an auditor asks for first and the one almost nobody has. And do not retire old versions: supersede them with the dates intact, so the state of the system on any past date can be reconstructed.

If two organisations make identical changes and only one can show when each change took effect, only one of them has evidence.

What to do now, and what to wait for

Do now: confirm your certification cycle dates and identify which visit will be your transition audit, because that is your real deadline. Establish the dated baseline of your current 2015 compliant system. Ask your certification body in writing when it expects accreditation for the sixth edition and which visit it proposes to use, and keep the reply. Check whether document control can reproduce the state of a procedure on an arbitrary past date, because that is far easier to build before the changes start.

Wait for: the transition communique from Global ACI, which will fix the end date and the point after which certificates against the 2015 edition stop being issued; your certification body’s mandatory transition documents; and your own reading of the published standard rather than anyone’s summary of it, before you rewrite a procedure.

The one thing not worth waiting for is the deadline. The transition work that takes longest is being able to prove what you were doing and when.

For background on the standard itself, see ISO 9001 explained.

Frequently asked questions

What has actually happened, and what has not?

ISO 9001:2026 was published on 16 September 2026 as the sixth edition, and ISO 9001:2015 is now recorded as withdrawn. The deadline exists. Global ACI set it on 4 September 2026, before the standard was published: three years, with all certified clients moved across by 30 September 2029 and no new ISO 9001:2015 certificates after 31 March 2028. UKAS restated it for the UK on 16 September. What has not happened is accreditation: no certification body is yet accredited to audit against the new edition.

Who sets the transition deadline now that the IAF no longer exists?

When will you actually be audited against the new edition?

Later than you think, and this is the most useful planning fact on this page. A newly published standard is not immediately certifiable.

What does a certified organisation do, and in what order?

The order matters more than the speed, because doing it out of order produces changes you cannot later explain.

Which documented information has to change, and how do you evidence it?

Sources

Related terms

Last reviewed: 16 September 2026

About Logincident. Logincident is a data and software company whose configurable platform captures structured evidence at the point of work and presents it in dashboards and reports, including the dated, attributable records a management system transition has to produce. We are not a law firm or a claims handler, and nothing on this page is legal advice.