Feb, 2026 : 47-Day SSL/TLS Certificate Validity by 2029

What's Changing

March 2026: Max SSL/TLS certificate validity drops to 200 days (roughly a 6-month renewal rhythm).

March 2027: Max validity drops again to 100 days (roughly quarterly renewals).

March 2029: Max validity reaches 47 days (effectively a monthly renewal cadence).

Validation Reuse is Shrinking Too

The allowed reuse window for domain/identity validation evidence will compress over time, moving from today's longer window (commonly 398 days) down through 200 days, then 100 days, and ultimately to as little as 10 days by 2029, meaning organizations will need to revalidate more often, not just reissue certificates.

How We got Here?

The vote follows a broader industry push toward shorter lifetimes, including earlier proposals such as Google advocating 90-day certificates and Apple proposing 45-day periods. The new plan lands even stricter than those earlier targets by 2029.

Provider cutover dates are already being communicated:

Some CAs have published ordering/issuance transition cutoffs ahead of the 2026 change, including DigiCert (February 24, 2026) and Sectigo (March 12, 2026), to ensure new issuance aligns with the updated limits.

What this Means for Website Owners:

Manual renewals (calendar reminders, shared inboxes, one-off scripts) will become increasingly fragile as renewals accelerate from yearly to monthly.

Organizations should prioritize automation-first certificate operations, typically using ACME where supported, plus centralized inventory, monitoring, and alerting to prevent surprise expirations.

Teams should also plan for increased renewal-related activity across infrastructure (load balancers, proxies, firewalls) and ensure OCSP/CRL handling remains efficient as certificate churn rises.