ISO TRANSITION

ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 in 2026: What a Certified South African Site Must Actually Do

By Mthokozisi Nkosi, Food Safety Specialist & Lead Auditor, ASC Food Safety · 13 min read

ISO 14001:2026, edition 4, was published on 15 April 2026 and ISO 14001:2015 is now withdrawn at stage 95.99. A sixth edition of ISO 9001 is scheduled for 16 September 2026 and stood at stage 60.00 when ASC checked on 10 September 2026. No global transition deadline has been published for either standard. Your certificate remains valid.

What is the status of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 in September 2026?

Two different situations, often reported as one. ISO 14001:2026, edition 4, was published on 15 April 2026 and ISO 14001:2015 sits at stage 95.99, withdrawn. A sixth edition of ISO 9001 is scheduled for publication on 16 September 2026 and was at stage 60.00, not published, when ASC checked on 10 September 2026.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. One standard exists and can be bought today. The other has a date in the diary. Much of what is circulating online treats both as done, and a louder group treats both as carrying deadlines. Neither claim survives a look at the published record.

The only column that would justify a project with a deadline attached is the transition document column, and at global level it is empty for both standards. Your own accreditation body is the one that can fill it.

What ISO stage 60.00 and stage 95.99 actually mean

ISO tracks every document through numbered stages, and the two numbers in circulation this month are 60.00 and 95.99. Stage 60.00 is the publication stage, where the text is settled and the document is being prepared for release. Stage 95.99 is withdrawal, the record that ISO no longer maintains or sells that edition because a newer one has replaced it.

Put plainly, 60.00 means almost but not yet. The technical content is fixed, the committee work is finished and the document is in production. It is still not a standard you can buy, quote a clause from, or be audited against. When ISO 9001’s sixth edition moves off 60.00 to published, that is the moment the text becomes real for you, and it is why 16 September 2026 is worth a diary note rather than a project charter.

Stage 95.99 is the one people misread. Withdrawal is an ISO housekeeping act about the catalogue. It says ISO has stopped maintaining ISO 14001:2015. It does not say your certificate has expired, that your auditor may no longer audit against it, or that anything happens to you on a particular date. Certificates live under the accreditation system, not under the ISO catalogue, and the accreditation system has not spoken yet.

Why the IAF closing on 1 January 2026 changed who writes the transition rules

Transition deadlines are not set by ISO. They come from the accreditation system, and that system changed at the start of this year. The International Accreditation Forum ceased operations on 1 January 2026 and its work moved to Global Accreditation Cooperation, known as Global ACI. The body that would normally publish the transition rules is new, and it has not published them for either standard.

For twenty years the pattern was predictable. ISO publishes a revision, the IAF issues a mandatory document setting a transition period, accreditation bodies adopt it, certification bodies write to their clients, and everyone works backwards from a date. That machinery is exactly what changed hands in January. Global ACI has been operating, and it has endorsed FSSC 22000 Version 7, so the successor is functioning. It simply has not issued a transition instrument for ISO 9001 or ISO 14001, and some accreditation bodies have moved ahead of it.

This is the single fact that explains why the internet is noisy on this subject. Commentators are pattern matching to previous transitions and filling the empty space with what usually happens. A transition period will very probably be published. What it says, and from when it runs, is not knowable today, and a plan built on a guessed date has to be rebuilt when the real one lands.

A publication date is not a compliance date, and a withdrawn edition is not a cancelled certificate.

Is there an ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 transition deadline? Not a global one

Not a global one. As at 10 September 2026, when ASC last checked, Global ACI had published no transition document for ISO 9001 or ISO 14001, so no global transition deadline exists. Existing certificates stay valid and run to the expiry printed on them. Surveillance audits continue on their existing schedule against the edition named on your certificate.

I want to be precise about what that sentence does and does not promise. It does not promise that no deadline will ever be published, or that when one arrives it will be generous. It says only that on the date this article was written, the document that would set a global deadline did not exist in public.

Individual accreditation bodies have not all waited for Global ACI. UKAS published a technical bulletin on 22 May 2026 requiring certification bodies to transition all certified customers to ISO 14001:2026 by 30 April 2029, with the certification bodies’ own transition completed by 30 April 2027. If your certificate is issued by a certification body accredited by UKAS, those dates already apply to you even though no global instrument exists. So the only question worth asking is which accreditation body your certification body works under, and what that body has published. Ask in writing.

The reasonable planning posture follows from that. Assume a transition period will come, and assume its length will be set by the accreditation system rather than by ISO. Do not sign a fixed price transition project against a date nobody has published, and do not let a deadline you cannot verify push you into re-writing documentation you would otherwise be improving on your own timetable.

• Your certificate is not at risk today. Nothing published between April and September 2026 changes the validity of a certificate in force.
• No global date can be quoted to you. Global ACI has published no transition instrument for either standard, though your own accreditation body may have.
• ISO withdrawal is not accreditation withdrawal. Stage 95.99 is a catalogue status, not a certification consequence.
• Your certification body is the authority on your dates. Not a blog, not a webinar, and not this article.
• Work started now is not wasted. Reading the new ISO 14001 text and tidying shared procedures pays off under any deadline that eventually appears.

What SANAS and your certification body decide, and the letter to send them

ASC has not verified a SANAS position on ISO 9001:2026 or ISO 14001:2026 and will not state one. SANAS is the South African National Accreditation System, and your certification body is accredited by SANAS or by another recognised accreditation body. Those two organisations, not a consultant, are the ones that will settle your transition dates in writing.

That is an unsatisfying answer and it is the correct one. I would rather tell a client that I do not know than tell them a date I cannot support. Get the answer from the party contractually obliged to give you one, and get it on paper, so it sits in your management review pack rather than in somebody’s memory of a phone call.

1. Write to your certification body scheme managerEmail, not a call. Name your certificate numbers, the standards and editions on them, and your next surveillance and recertification dates.
2. Ask four questionsHas your accreditation body issued a transition instruction for ISO 14001:2026 or the forthcoming ISO 9001 edition? If yes, what is the document reference and date? From which date will you audit against the new edition, and from which date will you require it? What notice will you give us?
3. Ask them to cite, not to summariseRequest the document reference behind the answer. A certification body quoting an accreditation instruction is telling you something verifiable. A certification body quoting a general expectation is not.
4. File the reply as a controlled recordAttach it to your management review inputs under external issues and interested party requirements. It is evidence that you monitored the change, which is itself a clause requirement.
5. Diarise a re-askSet a reminder to repeat the question each quarter until you have a document reference. Positions will firm up as Global ACI publishes.

What a certified site should actually do this quarter

Four things, none of which require a deadline to justify. Get your certification body’s position in writing. Buy the ISO 14001:2026 text from the ISO Store, because you cannot gap read a standard you have not read. Do the gap read against your existing documentation. Then budget a range rather than committing to a transition project on a date that has not been published.

Buying the text is where sites stall, and it is a small amount of money for the only authoritative source in the whole exercise. ISO standards are copyrighted and sold, from the ISO Store, with South African adoptions published by the SABS. This is different from Codex texts, which FAO publishes free, and it is different again from the scheme documents in the ASC standards and certification scheme register, which lists 46 scheme documents and 45 SANS standards so you can see at a glance which of your reference documents are current.

The gap read itself is a two column exercise, not a re-write. New or changed requirement in the left column, the document in your system that currently answers it in the right, and a plain note on whether the existing wording still holds. Most of the rows in an environmental gap read come back as no change needed. The rows that do change tend to cluster in the same place, which is the subject of the next two sections.

Why an integrated management system makes a small ISO change a big project

Most South African food manufacturers do not run ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 on their own. They run one or both alongside FSSC 22000 or BRCGS, sharing a single document control system, one internal audit programme, one corrective action procedure and one management review. A change to one standard therefore reaches procedures that three certification audits look at. That shared layer is the real work.

Think about what a genuinely integrated system holds in common: document and record control, internal audit planning and auditor competence, non-conformance and corrective action with root cause analysis behind it, management review inputs and outputs, training, communication, change management, and in some sites supplier approval. None of those is owned by a single standard, and every one of them is quoted in an environmental clause, a quality clause and a food safety clause at the same time.

The failure mode is predictable. A site updates its environmental procedures for the new ISO 14001 text, the shared internal audit procedure gets a new revision number and clause reference table, and nobody tells the food safety team. Three months later the FSSC 22000 auditor finds an internal audit procedure whose clause map no longer matches the scheme. The environmental change caused a food safety finding.

The three clauses an ISO transition usually reopens

Every ISO management system standard on the harmonised structure opens with context of the organisation, interested parties and their requirements, and the risks and opportunities that follow from both. Those three are where revisions concentrate, because they are the clauses that carry new themes such as climate into a standard. They are also the clauses South African sites most often answer with a thin paragraph.

See how to build the ISO 22000 clause 4 context and interested party assessments.

Look at what a decent context analysis has to contain for a food factory with an environmental certificate. External issues include the environmental legislation you operate under, municipal water and effluent conditions, electricity supply, waste contractor availability and customer environmental scorecards. Internal issues include plant age, effluent load, refrigerant inventory, packaging formats and the competence of the people who run the utilities. Interested parties include the local authority, your water services provider, your neighbours, your certification body, your customers and your insurers, and each of them has requirements you have to track.

Those registers are also the ones a transition forces you to revisit first, because a new edition changes what the standard expects you to have considered. If you are rebuilding them anyway, build them as living registers rather than as an annual paragraph. ASC sells the three as standalone packs at R690 each, each with a register, a procedure, a completion guide and a read me in editable Word and Excel: Context of the Organisation, Interested Parties and Strategic Risks and Opportunities.

What ISO 14001:2026 means for a South African food factory’s legal register

An environmental management system stands on a legal register, and for a South African food manufacturer that register is long. It carries the environmental instruments that apply to your site, which sit in the ASC South African legislation register of 413 instruments across 42 parent Acts. A revised ISO 14001 is a reason to check that the register is current, complete and evidenced, not just present.

In my audit experience the environmental legal register is the weakest document in most integrated systems. It gets built once during implementation, usually from a template, and then it sits. Meanwhile Extended Producer Responsibility obligations on packaging move, municipal effluent conditions get re-issued with new limits, an air quality licence gets a variation, and the carbon tax position changes for a site that has installed or removed combustion equipment. A register that lists an instrument without recording how compliance is evidenced and when it was last checked is not a compliance evaluation.

Two practical points for food sites specifically. Packaging is where food manufacturers meet Extended Producer Responsibility most directly, and the same packaging decisions sit inside your food safety system as food contact material approvals, so the two systems must agree on what you actually use. Effluent is where a food factory’s environmental risk concentrates, because wash down loads, clean in place chemistry and organic solids all land in the same trade effluent stream that your municipal conditions govern. Both of those are also food safety controls, which is precisely why environmental and food safety documentation cannot be maintained by two teams who never meet.

The ASC South African legislation register lists 413 instruments across 42 parent Acts and is the place to check whether the instrument you cited in your legal register is still the current one. For the food side of the same question, our South African food legislation guide covers the food specific instruments in the same detail.

Does this change ISO 22000, FSSC 22000 or BRCGS?

No. ISO 22000:2018 remains the current edition, confirmed in 2023, with Amendment 1:2024 on climate action. FSSC 22000 Version 7 was published in May 2026 and Global ACI has endorsed it. BRCGS Global Standard Food Safety Issue 9 remains current and Issue 10 has not been released. None of that moves because ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 changes edition.

One point that catches sites out when a quality manager starts reading ISO standards. ISO 22000 alone is not GFSI recognised. GFSI is hosted by The Consumer Goods Forum, it benchmarks schemes and it does not certify anyone, so there is no such thing as GFSI certification, only certification to a GFSI recognised scheme. FSSC 22000 is ISO 22000:2018 plus a sector prerequisite programme standard from the ISO 22002 series plus the FSSC additional requirements, and that combination is what carries recognition. If a customer has asked for GFSI and you hold ISO 22000 by itself, that gap is a bigger commercial problem than the ISO 9001 edition question.

The genuine food safety deadline this year is the FSSC one, and it is published. Version 6 audits are permitted until 30 April 2027, and the Version 7 upgrade audit window runs from 1 May 2027 to 30 April 2028. Ask your certification body to confirm when it must complete the upgrade administration in the FSSC platform, because the certificate depends on that step clearing behind the audit. Our FSSC 22000 Version 7 guide for South Africa and the Version 6 to Version 7 change guide set that out clause by clause. If you have limited change capacity this year, that is where it should go, not into an ISO transition with no date.

Prerequisite programmes: ISO 22002 moved on its own timetable

The change people most often confuse with the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 news is the ISO 22002 prerequisite programme restructure of July 2025. Most parts moved from Technical Specification to full International Standard, including ISO 22002-100:2025, published on 29 July 2025 as a new common baseline, along with parts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7. ISO/TS 22002-3:2011 for farming is the exception.

Check which ISO 22002 prerequisite standard applies to you now.

That change is dated, published and directly relevant to a food manufacturer, because your prerequisite programme documentation cites these numbers. ISO 22002-1:2025 covers food manufacturing, -2:2025 catering, -4:2025 food packaging manufacturing, -5:2025 transport and storage, -6:2025 feed and animal food and -7:2025 retail and wholesale. If your prerequisite procedures still reference the older technical specification numbering, the citations in your own documents are out of date, and that is a document control observation waiting to be written up.

The confusion happens because both stories are about ISO numbers changing status in the same eighteen month window, and both are being summarised by people who have not read either text. The practical difference is that the ISO 22002 change is published, has a defined content, and touches documents you use every day, while the global ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 transition rules do not exist yet.

How to budget for a transition whose deadline does not exist yet

Budget a range, not a project. Price three things separately: the ISO 14001:2026 text from the ISO Store, the internal hours for a gap read across your shared procedures, and an external allowance for the parts you decide not to do yourself. Approve the first two now and hold the third as a contingency until a transition document is published and your certification body confirms dates.

Splitting it this way protects you from both failure modes. You do not spend a year doing nothing and then meet a deadline that lands in your peak season, and you do not commit a large sum this year against a schedule that turns out to be twice as long as the vendor assumed. The first two line items are useful under every scenario, because a current legal register and an aligned set of shared procedures are worth having on their own merits.

One more thing to put in the plan. Whoever performs your internal audits will need to audit against a text they have read, and internal auditor competence is a clause requirement in every one of these standards. If your internal audit programme is thin, that is a gap the transition will expose regardless of when it starts, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix early. Our guide to building internal and supplier auditors covers what competence evidence an auditor expects to see.

For the broader 2026 picture, the standards and scheme changes discussed here sit alongside the Codex changes adopted this year, which reach South African manufacturers through export customers and certification schemes rather than through our own regulations. Our full list of every Codex change from CAC48 and CAC49 is the companion piece to this one.

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Published by ASC Food Safety, South African food safety and quality consultants. This article is general guidance and not a substitute for certification-specific advice.