ISO Accreditation vs Certification: What’s the Difference?

If you have searched for “ISO accreditation”, you are in good company. It is one of the most common phrases in the ISO world, and most of the time the person using it actually means ISO certification. The two words get mixed up constantly, and it isn’t only clients who do it; people inside the industry mix them up too. They describe different things, they sit at different levels, and in Australia a couple of local quirks (NATA and the OFSC scheme) muddy the water further. Here’s a plain-English untangling.

Is it “ISO accreditation” or “ISO certification”?

Short answer: if you run a business and you want to prove your quality, safety, environmental or information security system meets an ISO standard, the word you want is certification, not accreditation. You get certified to ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 45001 and the rest. “ISO accreditation” is the phrase almost everyone reaches for, and while it is the wrong term for what a business gets, it is so common that we will use both here so nobody gets lost. The distinction stops being a technicality the moment you are checking whether a certificate is real, which we come to below.

Certification: attesting that you meet a standard

Certification is a third-party attestation that a product, process, system or person meets a defined standard. When your organisation is certified to ISO 9001 or ISO 27001, an independent certification body (sometimes called a conformity assessment body, or CAB) has audited your management system and attested that it conforms to the standard. The organisation being audited is the one that gets “certified”.

Accreditation: checking the body that does the certifying

Accreditation operates one level up. It is the independent evaluation of a conformity assessment body (a certification body, inspection body or laboratory) to confirm it is competent and impartial to do its job. Accreditation bodies themselves work to ISO/IEC 17011, and they assess management-system certification bodies against ISO/IEC 17021-1. Put simply: your certifier is accredited; you are certified.

The chain of trust

Think of it as a chain that makes a certificate actually mean something:

• An accreditation body, in Australia and New Zealand JAS-ANZ (the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand),
• accredits a certification body against ISO/IEC 17021-1, confirming it is competent and impartial,
• and that certification body then certifies your organisation against ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and so on.

That is why a certificate issued by a JAS-ANZ-accredited body carries weight, and why an unaccredited “certificate” often doesn’t. If you’re ever handed one, our guide on how to tell if an ISO certificate is real or fake shows you exactly how to check.

Where it gets confusing in Australia

NATA accredits laboratories to ISO/IEC 17025

Testing and calibration laboratories aren’t “certified” to ISO/IEC 17025. They’re accredited, and in Australia that accreditation is granted by NATA (the National Association of Testing Authorities). Here’s the twist that trips people up: a NATA-accredited lab then issues calibration certificates. So the lab is accredited to a standard, and the document it produces is a certificate: two words that sound like they should line up, but describe different things.

The OFSC “accredits” companies directly

The Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner (OFSC) runs the Australian Government’s Work Health and Safety Accreditation Scheme. Builders must be accredited by the Federal Safety Commissioner to take on head contracts for construction that is directly or indirectly funded by the Commonwealth. Here “accreditation” is granted to the company directly by a government scheme, not the usual pattern where accreditation is reserved for the bodies that certify others. Same word, a third meaning.

Quick reference

Why the distinction matters

When a supplier tells you “we’re accredited to ISO 9001”, they almost always mean certified. It’s a harmless slip in conversation, but when you’re verifying a supplier, the distinction is exactly what protects you: look for certification issued by a JAS-ANZ-accredited body, and confirm it. Our guide to choosing an ISO certification body in Australia walks through what to check and why accreditation is the part that gives a certificate its value.

Speak with an experienced ISO auditor

If you’d like help getting certified, or making sense of what a certificate or accreditation actually proves, you’ll work directly with an experienced ISO auditor, and our systems are built to certify first time. Email hello@streamline.business, call Brisbane 07 3667 8280, Sydney 02 8315 7780 or Melbourne 03 9034 3990, or get in touch here.