B Corp certification — after the rewrite

B Corp Certification is a private, voluntary certification awarded by B Lab, a non-profit network, to companies meeting its standards for social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. No statute creates it and no regulator supervises it.

B Lab rewrote the standards in 2025 as the B Lab Standards (V2). All certification submissions now run on V2, and every existing B Corp moves to it at its next recertification. The rewrite changed the threshold, the structure, who audits you and how long a certificate lasts.

No. That is the pre-2025 model. B Lab describes the new standards as "moving away from individual point scoring to minimum requirements across seven Impact Topics", and there is no longer a target point score.

A company now either meets the minimum requirements in each applicable Impact Topic or it does not. Strength in one topic no longer offsets weakness in another, which is a materially harder test than a cumulative total at the same nominal bar.

Purpose and Stakeholder Governance; Climate Action; Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; Government Affairs and Collective Action; Fair Work; Human Rights; and Environmental Stewardship and Circularity.

Those are Part 2 of the standards. Part 1, the Foundation Requirements, comes first: the company must be legally incorporated, operating for at least 12 months and legally compliant; it must adopt the B Corp Legal Requirement and sign the Declaration of Interdependence; and it must complete a risk assessment using B Lab’s Risk Tool. Which Part 2 requirements a company sees depends on its "track" — its size, sector and industry.

It is the date the EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT) comes into effect. B Lab UK states that "ECGT-impacted B Corps that have neither recertified on V2 nor signed the amendment to the B Corp Agreement by this point will lose the right to use the B Corp logo or describe themselves as a Certified B Corporation."

The trigger is not where the company is based. B Lab asks companies to identify whether they engage in business-to-consumer communications in the EU, which brings them into scope "regardless of your location" — so a UK company selling to EU consumers is caught. An earlier step has already passed: impacted B Corps were expected to submit for audit by 15 July 2026, and those who did not are asked to sign an amendment to the existing B Corp Agreement instead.

Five, under V2 — and B Lab UK’s own website gives both answers, which is why the question keeps being asked. Its certification-process page says a certified company will "receive a certificate valid for 5 years" with "a Year 3 audit, and a recertification audit in Year 5", and its pricing page refers throughout to a "5 year certification cycle".

Its FAQs page and its after-you-certify page still say "recertify every three years". The after-you-certify page carries both statements at once. The three-year statements are residue from the pre-2025 scheme; five years with a Year 3 audit inside it is what V2 implements. Depending on size and sector, companies may also face partial Surveillance Audits annually or every second year.

No. Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 is unamended, and B Lab UK’s page on the legal requirement never mentions the Companies Act at all. What changes is the company’s own constitution: you amend your Articles of Association to include B Lab’s prescribed wording, adopted verbatim and matched to your legal form.

Amending section 172 itself is the objective of the Better Business Act campaign. That is a proposed change to statute which has not happened, and it is a different thing entirely from a certification requirement.

By amending your Articles of Association with the current 2024 wording, which must be adopted verbatim. Mechanically: the board approves the wording and convenes the members; a special resolution passed by at least a 75% majority adopts it; and the amended articles, the resolution and Form CC04 are filed at Companies House within 15 days of the resolution.

The timing depends on size. Companies with 0–49 full-time employees must make the change before certification. Businesses with more than 50 employees get more time — limited companies up to a year after certification, LLPs 90 days. Once filed the articles are public, so anyone can check at Companies House whether the wording is actually there.

An independent third party, not B Lab. B Lab describes certification as starting "with a self-assessment against the B Lab Standards, which is later independently verified and audited by a third party based on ISO 17021-1 requirements" — the same conformity-assessment standard that governs bodies certifying management systems such as ISO 14001.

B Lab assigns an Assurance Provider, and the audit produces a report listing nonconformities. Major nonconformities must be resolved before a company can be certified; minor ones can be addressed before the next audit.

The Risk Tool produces a company’s risk profile, which determines the additional due-diligence sub-requirements it must meet as part of certification. It is completed as part of the Foundation Requirements, before the substantive assessment.

It is self-declared. B Lab states that it will not verify a company’s responses to the Risk Tool. That is disclosed rather than hidden, but it is worth a buyer knowing: the depth of the audit behind a certificate was scoped, in part, by the company’s own answers about its own risk.

B Lab UK estimates two to six months from submission to certification, varying with the complexity of the business and the number of major nonconformities that need to be resolved.

That is the clock after submission. Before it there is registration, the Assessment Setup, a Scope agreed with B Lab UK if the corporate structure is complex, the Foundation Requirements review and the Risk Profile — and, for companies under 50 full-time employees, the constitutional amendment, which has to be filed before certification.

Three charges: a tiered submission fee when the assessment goes in, a verification fee covering the initial Year 0 HQ audit, and an annual fee based on total revenue from the last set of audited accounts. Large or multi-site companies also face a scoping fee and additional site-audit fees.

B Lab UK has frozen its fees through 2026, and for B Corps required to recertify on the new standards in 2026 it is absorbing 100% of the initial Y0 HQ audit cost and up to four required Y0 site audits. Equity pricing gives a 40% reduction in the annual fee to B Corps under £5m revenue that are more than 50% owned by people of colour and underrepresented ethnicities, women, LGBTQ people or disabled people. Beyond 2026 B Lab UK says the fee structure "is still in development".

No. SECR and ESOS are statutory UK obligations with their own scope tests, thresholds and deadlines. B Corp certification is private and voluntary and discharges neither. A company can be a certified B Corp and still be in breach of SECR.

It is also not a management-system certification like ISO 14001, and not a reporting framework like GRI or the ISSB standards. The one genuine overlap is architectural: since V2, B Corp audits run on ISO/IEC 17021-1, the same conformity-assessment standard behind those management-system certifications. That makes the audit comparable, not the subject matter.

B Lab publishes a public directory of every certified company, so the claim itself is checkable in seconds. The UK legal requirement is checkable too — the amended Articles of Association are filed at Companies House and are public.

The more useful questions of a supplier are which version they are certified on, when their next audit falls, and what their certification scope covers — because under V2 the scope and the requirement set both vary with size, sector and the company’s own risk profile.