Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days

Summary

Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient. We are also reducing the authorization reuse period, which is the length of time after validating domain control that we allow certificates to be issued for that domain. It is currently 30 days, which will be reduced to 7 hours by 2028. Timeline of Changes To minimize disruption, Let’s Encrypt will roll this change out in multiple stages. We will use ACME Profiles to allow you control over when these changes take effect. They are configured in your ACME client. For more information, see our blog post announcing them. Changes will be deployed to our staging environment approximately one month before the production dates below. May 13, 2026: Let’s Encrypt will switch our tlsserver ACME profile to issue 45-day certificates. This profile is opt-in and can be used by early adopters and for testing. February 10, 2027: Let’s Encrypt will switch our default classic ACME profile to issuing 64-day certificates with a 10-day authorization reuse period. This will affect all users who have not opted into the tlsserver or shortlived (6-day) profiles. February 16, 2028: We will further update the classic profile to issue 45-day certificates with a 7 hour authorization reuse period. These dates are when the change takes effect for new certificates, so Let’s Encrypt users will see the reduced certificate validity period at their next renewal after thes...