ISO 9001:2026 is the next revision of the world's most widely used quality management standard. It has reached Draft International Standard (ISO/DIS 9001:2025) and is expected to publish around September 2026, followed by a three-year transition period to 2029. It is an evolutionary update — the 2015 framework stays intact — so the real task is making sure your people understand what changed.
The transition timeline
Once ISO 9001:2026 is published, organizations certified to ISO 9001:2015 will have three years to transition. After that deadline, 2015 certificates are no longer valid. Because the structural changes are modest, the effort for an already-certified organization is mostly about awareness and understanding — not re-documenting your whole system.
What changed
| Area | ISO 9001:2015 | ISO 9001:2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Quality culture & ethics | Not addressed explicitly | New requirement for top management to promote a quality culture and ethical behavior (5.1), plus employee awareness of it (7.3) |
| Climate change | Added via Amd 1:2024 | Formally integrated into organizational context (4.1, 4.2) |
| Risk & opportunity | Combined in 6.1 | Split into sub-clauses so risks and opportunities are handled distinctly |
| Guidance | External references needed | New Annex A (~15 pages) clarifying structure, terminology and clauses |
| Terminology | Cross-referenced to ISO 9000 | More QMS-specific terms built into the standard itself |
What it means for your team
The paperwork changes are small. The risk is that your auditors, consultants and process owners think they understand the new requirements — especially the new quality-culture and ethics expectations — when they don't. That gap is exactly what an ISTO Test of Understanding measures, scoring real comprehension across the eight A·C·C·U·R·A·T·E domains so you can transition with evidence, not assumptions.