SSL Certificates Now Expire Faster: The 2026 to 2029 Timeline

SSL certificate validity changes from 2026

Buying a one-year SSL certificate and forgetting about it is no longer an option. In April 2025 the CA/Browser Forum approved Ballot SC-081v3, which cuts the maximum life of public SSL/TLS certificates in stages. A missed renewal means browser warnings and a website or portal that customers cannot reach.

The new validity limits

  • From 15 March 2026: 200 days at most
  • From 15 March 2027: 100 days at most
  • From 15 March 2029: 47 days at most

In practice, each certificate needs renewing about twice a year now and about eight times a year by 2029. Certificates you already hold stay valid until they expire, and the limits apply to free certificates too.

Six steps to avoid surprise outages

  1. List every certificate with its domain, location, issuer, expiry date and owner.
  2. Make a team, not one person, responsible for each certificate.
  3. Automate issue and renewal with the ACME protocol.
  4. Plan for older systems that cannot be automated, for example by placing them behind a reverse proxy or load balancer.
  5. Set up independent expiry monitoring with alerts 30, 14 and 7 days ahead.
  6. Write down the renewal process and test it.

Read the full SSL renewal guide here: SSL Certificate Validity 2026: Stop Surprise Outages

Published by Affix Center, a Mumbai-based IT services company. See our IT operations and managed services.

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