The month in one line

ISO 14001:2015 is already gone, and most calendars have not caught up

Not “being replaced.” Withdrawn. ISO moved the 2015 edition to stage 95.99 on 15 April 2026, which is the code for withdrawal of an International Standard, and ISO 14001:2026 stands in its place. Every internal audit checklist, procedure and clause cross-reference written against the 2015 text now points at a document that no longer exists.

Meanwhile ISO 9001 is due this month, and a good deal of what is being published about both is guesswork presented as fact. What follows is only what the issuing bodies themselves have put in writing, with the stage codes so you can check it.

Item one

Where the four standards actually stand

A note on the sector schemes

Two of these are not standalone standards at all. RC14001 folds Responsible Care into the ISO 14001 structure, and IATF 16949 is applied together with ISO 9001 rather than instead of it. In both cases an ISO standard is the foundation and the sector scheme is built on top of it.

That relationship is structural, and it carries a consequence worth planning around: a scheme cannot keep pointing at a superseded edition of the standard underneath it. When the base moves, the scheme follows. RC14001 has already made that move. IATF 16949 has not yet, and the reason is visible in the row above — ISO 9001 has not published.

So the relationship is certain and the calendar is open. If you hold IATF 16949, the ISO 9001 edition landing this month is your event too, one step removed.

Item three

The transition work nobody budgets for

Reading a revised standard takes an afternoon. Aligning a mature management system to it does not, and that is where transition programs run late.

A system that has been certified for a decade carries procedures, forms, registers, competence matrices and audit checklists all written against the previous edition and cross-referenced to its clause numbers. None of that is difficult. All of it is finite. It is almost always discovered later than it should have been — most often in the week the certification body confirms the transition audit date.

The second thing that costs money is subtler: reading a revised requirement as equivalent to the old one when the emphasis has moved, or as a much larger change than it is and building work nobody needed. Both are cheap to correct in a review and expensive to correct in a finding.

Next issue

October

What ISO 9001:2026 actually changed, once the published text can be read rather than guessed at — and whether the Global ACI mark authorization decision landed on schedule.