What Is the Validity Period of an ISO Certificate?

ISO is the abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. The organization was founded in 1947 and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. An ISO certificate is a document that proves businesses operating in different service sectors deliver their services in line with a defined standard, and confirms that they have the competence required in their field. Every certification process carried out under standards drafted by the ISO is referred to as ISO certification. The validity period of the ISO certificate refers to the time from the date the certificate is issued through to its expiry date.

The certificate referred to as the ISO certificate validity period, with its real name being the ISO 9001 validity period, is 3 years. Within these three years, an ISO 9001 surveillance audit is carried out at least once per year. So, that covers the validity period of the ISO 9001 certificate. Some firms that promise quick results on ISO 9001 do not properly inform companies about the certificate validity period and the surveillance audits. As a result, one year after receiving the ISO 9001 certificate, those companies face a surveillance audit they were not prepared for, and risk having their ISO 9001 cancelled. Companies that have been certified under ISO 9001 should also have completed the ISO 9001:2015 system revision and switched from ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015. The deadline for this transition phase was October 2018.

To keep the ISO certificate valid, certified businesses pay the annual visa fee at the initial certification and at every surveillance audit in the years that follow.

The ISO certificate is not issued to a product. It is issued to the business itself.

Under our ISO certification work, Sistem Kalite, our certification and testing consultancy firm, has been informing and certifying businesses since 1999.

One year after you receive the certificate, in the same month, you arrange a follow-up meeting with our Sistem Kalite certification and testing consultancy firm. If you wish to continue, you sign a 3-year certification contract with us.

One thing worth highlighting: if you only buy ISO certificate consultancy once and go through the audit each year, the quality of the firm you bought it from really matters. The consultancy firm should walk you through how the system is built, how it is put into operation, and what to do in the steps that follow. Doing all of that within a 3-month or 5-month window is rarely realistic in practice. For that reason, we recommend running consultancy with our Sistem Kalite certification and testing consultancy firm continuously for at least one year.

As you can see, the ISO certificate is, the deeper you go, a layered system. In our country, an ISO certificate can be read as the sign of a business that respects scientific methods, or it can be treated as a piece of paper or even seen as a meaningless administrative requirement. The choice is yours.