Insights · 6 min read

The next ISO 9001 revision: what is known so far

Every few months a new confident claim circulates about when the next edition of ISO 9001 arrives and what it will require. Most of it traces back to…

Published by CAS — Conformity Assessment Services · 4 September 2026

Every few months a new confident claim circulates about when the next edition of ISO 9001 arrives and what it will require. Most of it traces back to somebody's summary of somebody else's summary.

There is a public page that settles it, and a four-digit code on that page that tells you exactly where the revision stands. Almost nobody in the certified world can read the code. This article is the legend.

Why a revision exists at all

Every published ISO standard is reviewed at intervals not exceeding five years. The review has three possible outcomes: confirm the standard as it stands, revise or amend it, or withdraw it.

A revision project exists because a review reached the second outcome. That decision opens a project. It settles nothing about the content, nothing about the scale of the change, and nothing about the date.

That last sentence is the one most commentary skips.

The stage code

Every ISO project carries a stage code in the form NN.nn, published in an annex to the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. The same code set is used by ISO and IEC, and it appears on the public catalogue entry for the project.

The first pair is the stage:

The second pair is what is happening inside that stage. The annex names these in general terms — registration, the start of the main action, its completion, a decision, a repeat, an abandonment, a proceed — and in a ballot stage they read like this:

.00 registered, the stage has started · .20 the action is under way, a ballot or study is open · .60 close of voting or of the comment period · .92 referred back to an earlier phase · .93 repeat the current phase · .98 the project is abandoned · .99 approved to proceed.

That seventh code is worth holding onto. A project can be dropped, and .98 is how the page says so.

Put the two together and the page tells you something precise. 40.20 means the enquiry ballot is open. 40.60 means voting has closed — not that it passed. 40.92 means the draft went back to the committee. 40.99 means it was approved to move on.

The approval stage reads the same way: 50.20 ballot open, 50.60 voting closed, 50.92 referred back, 50.99 approved for publication.

The two codes that cause most of the confusion

60.60 means published. It marks a text that exists, not one that is coming. A standard carries 60.60 until it enters review, at which point its entry moves into the 90 codes — so a 90-series code on a current standard is routine, not news. Anyone citing 60.60 as evidence that something is about to happen has misread the page.

90.92 means "to be revised". It is the decision that opens a project, and nothing more. It is not a schedule, and it does not describe a draft.

A third worth knowing: .60 is a closing date, not a result. Voting closed and voting passed are different facts, and the code distinguishes them.

Where the page is

ISO publishes a catalogue entry for every standard and every project at iso.org, and the entry shows the current stage code. Search the standard number.

One trap decides whether you find the right page. A standard under development has its own catalogue entry, separate from the entry for the published edition it would replace. The ISO 9001:2015 entry describes the published edition. It is not where a revision's progress appears, and reading it for that purpose is a category error that produces confident wrong answers.

The responsible committee also publishes a work programme listing its active projects, which is the reliable way to find the project entry rather than guess at it.

What is actually settled

Three things, and they are all structural.

ISO 9001:2015 is the current edition, published 15 September 2015. It was amended in February 2024 by ISO 9001:2015/Amd 1:2024, which added a requirement to 4.1 and a note to 4.2 concerning climate change. That amendment is already in force and carried no transition period — conformity is verified at the next scheduled audit, per the ISO and IAF joint communiqué of February 2024.

The revision is being carried out by ISO/TC 176/SC 2, the subcommittee responsible for ISO 9001 under ISO/TC 176.

A draft is not the standard. Text can change at any point up to publication. A draft at the enquiry stage can be referred back to the committee, sent to a second ballot, or approved. The approval stage can be skipped entirely where a draft is approved with no technical changes required, so treating it as a certain step builds a timeline that breaks the moment the committee decides otherwise.

What is not settled, and cannot be

No publication date. The project page shows a target, which is a planning figure that moves as the project moves. We do not publish a predicted date, because we would be guessing in public and you would be planning against our guess.

No transition arrangement. For accredited certificates, transition arrangements are set by IAF resolution — not by ISO, and not by a certification body. Arrangements are decided case by case, and a period once set has been changed afterwards. Until a resolution exists, there is no deadline, and any countdown you are shown was assembled from somewhere other than the public record.

No content. We will not tell you what the next edition requires, and neither can anyone else honestly. Drafts are ISO copyright and circulated under restricted terms, and their text is not final. A summary of a draft is a summary of something that may not survive.

Both lists above — what is settled and what is not — were checked against ISO's and IAF's published pages in the week of publication. Those pages are the authority. This article is not.

Who owns which decision

Five parties, and confusing them is the source of most bad information.

The committee develops the text. National member bodies vote, which is also the only route by which an organization's view reaches the drafting table. ISO publishes. IAF resolves the transition arrangements for accredited certification, applied through accreditation bodies. The certification body audits against a published standard within its granted accreditation scope.

ISO does not certify anyone and does not accredit certification bodies. A certification body cannot shorten a transition, extend one, or preview a requirement.

What this means for the certificate you hold

Your certificate names an edition. That edition governs until an arrangement says otherwise, and no arrangement exists yet.

Accredited certification runs only against a published normative document inside the certification body's granted scope. A committee draft, an enquiry draft or an approval draft is none of those things. No organization can be certified, audited or assessed against a document that has not been published, whoever offers to do it. Certification to a new edition begins only once the accreditation body has extended the certification body's scope to cover it, in writing.

That is the check worth running on anything you are sent about the revision: not whether the claim sounds plausible, but whether the page it came from is ISO's or IAF's.

CAS reads the same public page you do, on the same day. What we can hand over is the legend.

This is generic information about the standards development process, not advice on any particular management system.