Key takeaways
- Maximum validity is 200 days now, 100 days from 15 March 2027 and 47 days from 15 March 2029.
- An expired certificate blocks visitors, forms and payments with a full-page warning.
- Automate with ACME, monitor expiry from outside and keep a person in the loop.
The new timeline
Browsers and certificate authorities agreed, in CA/Browser Forum ballot SC-081v3, to shorten the maximum life of public TLS certificates:
- from 15 March 2026: 200 days;
- from 15 March 2027: 100 days;
- from 15 March 2029: 47 days.
The time a certificate authority may reuse your domain validation shrinks as well — to just 10 days by 2029. In practice, certificates will be renewed about once a month, and domain control re-checked almost every time.
Why it matters
An expired certificate takes your site away from visitors: browsers show a full-page warning, forms stop working and online payments fail. With yearly renewals a forgotten reminder was a yearly risk; with 47-day certificates it becomes a monthly one.
How to get ready
- List every certificate you have: websites, mail servers, APIs, admin panels and load balancers.
- Automate issuing and renewal with the ACME protocol, supported by most hosting panels, web servers and CDNs.
- Use DNS validation for wildcard certificates and for servers that are not reachable from the internet.
- Monitor expiry dates from outside and alert a person well before the end — automation can fail silently.
- Retire manual steps: certificates copied by hand to several servers are the first to break.
OV and EV certificates
Organisation-validated certificates follow the same lifetimes. Your company details may be reused for longer, but the certificate itself still has to be replaced on time, so plan automation with your certificate authority's ACME service or API.
We can take it off your plate
We issue, install and renew certificates on our hosting or yours, check the chain and watch expiry dates for you.
Sources and further reading
The service behind this article
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