Your auditors need transition-ready criteria before they can conduct transition audits.
ISO 9001:2026 was published on 16 September 2026. The Q•UNIQUE Transition Toolkit provides clause-by-clause assessment criteria for the published standard.
Much of the transition material in circulation was written against the draft.
Guidance produced during the DIS stage maps to a clause structure the final standard does not use. Clause 10 in particular was restructured; 10.3 no longer exists, and 10.1 now carries a different meaning.
We have seen widely circulated gap-analysis material that marks every clause as changed while its own descriptions state, against six of them, that nothing changed. Criteria built on that basis will not withstand scrutiny.
What the toolkit contains.
All 57 clausesof ISO 9001:2026, classified against 2015 as new, substantive, editorial or unchanged — so audit effort concentrates where the standard actually moved
Assessment questions per clause, written as auditable criteria rather than restatements of requirement text
The eleven genuinely new obligations, isolated and separately assessable
Maturity criteria for the requirements that cannot be answered yes or no — quality culture, ethical behaviour and awareness — with written descriptors so two auditors reach the same conclusion from the same evidence
Evidence rules setting out what constitutes objective evidence for each of the new requirements
The toolkit is assessment methodology. It does not reproduce ISO's requirement text, which remains ISO's copyright and which your auditors will hold under licence.
Why the culture requirements will cause you difficulty.
Quality culture and ethical behaviour are now within the requirements, not the guidance. They cannot be assessed by document review, and they cannot be answered yes or no.
Without written maturity criteria, two competent auditors will reach different conclusions from the same site — and your consistency across an audit team becomes the thing under scrutiny. The toolkit exists largely to solve that.
On impartiality.
Q•UNIQUE licenses assessment methodology. It does not deliver management system consultancy on your behalf, and licensing does not create a consultancy relationship under ISO/IEC 17021-1.
Where we have separately advised an organisation you certify, we will tell you. We would rather raise it than have you find it.
Request the specification.
The specification sets out clause coverage, question structure, maturity criteria and licensing terms.
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