Cofrac: What French Accreditation Actually Guarantees, and How to Check Your Certification Body

A certification quote lands with a logo, a number and the words “accredited by Cofrac” somewhere near the bottom. Reassuring. Except the statement, on its own, says nothing about what matters: accredited for what? A body can be perfectly accredited for ISO 9001 and have no right whatsoever to issue you a Qualiopi certificate. The document is genuine, the wording is accurate — and beside the point.

Accreditation is the common foundation of almost every French scheme: vocational training, ISO management systems, health data hosting, organic farming, construction, property surveying. Understanding it once saves you from getting it wrong everywhere else.

Three jobs everyone confuses

The initial misunderstanding comes down to three words used interchangeably.

	Standardisation	Certification	Accreditation
Who	ISO, CEN, AFNOR as the French member body	Private certification bodies	Cofrac, the single national body
Does what	Writes and publishes the standards	Audits an organisation, a person or a product and issues the certificate	Assesses the certification body itself
Against what	Consensus among stakeholders	The applicable standard (ISO 9001, the French national quality framework, a private specification…)	ISO/IEC 17020, 17021-1, 17024, 17025, 17065
What you get	Nothing directly	Your certificate	Nothing directly — it is the control over the controller

Researchers Allison Loconto and Lawrence Busch gave this stack a name in the Review of International Political Economy in 2010: the tripartite standards regime, the standardisation–certification–accreditation tripod that now structures almost every market governed by proof (see the study). The practical consequence is worth keeping: each tier is only as good as the one above it. A certificate without accreditation is a tripod missing a leg.

On the neighbouring distinction between certification, qualification and label, our article on what separates certification, qualification and label fills in the picture.

Cofrac: a single body, designated by the State

The Comité français d’accréditation is a non-profit association created in 1994 and entrusted with a public-service mission. Decree no. 2008-1401 of 19 December 2008, adopted under article 137 of the French Economic Modernisation Act of 4 August 2008, is unambiguous: the national accreditation body referred to in article 137 “is the Comité français d’accréditation (COFRAC)”, and Cofrac “alone is authorised to issue accreditation certificates to conformity assessment bodies, whether that accreditation is compulsory or not”.

This monopoly is not a French quirk: Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 requires every member state to designate a single national accreditation body operating on a non-competitive basis. That is precisely what makes accreditation comparable from one country to another.

Cofrac is organised into four divisions — Laboratories, Inspection, Certification, Healthcare — and its mission comes down to two goals: ensuring the competence and impartiality of conformity assessment bodies, and securing the widest possible acceptance of their attestations across Europe and internationally.

One point Cofrac itself insists on, and that gets forgotten fast: accreditation provides no guarantee as to the outcome of an assessment. It guarantees a process, not a conclusion. Nobody is “Cofrac-guaranteed”.

Scope of accreditation: the only thing that really counts

This is where it is won or lost. Accreditation is never general. It is granted for specific activities, standards and schemes, set out in a technical document.

Certificate plus technical appendix: inseparable

Every Cofrac accreditation certificate carries two warnings in plain text:

“This certificate is only valid if associated with the technical appendix.”

“The accreditation can be suspended, modified or withdrawn at any time. For a proper use, the scope of accreditation and its validity should be checked on the Cofrac website.”

In other words: the accreditation PDF a salesperson forwards you is the cover of the book. The technical appendix is the book. It lists, line by line, the schemes covered, the sites concerned and sometimes the countries excluded.

Reading an accreditation number

A number takes the form X-YYYY rev. N. The leading digit points to the family of activity (testing, calibration, inspection, management system certification, product/service/person certification, healthcare), the next four identify the body, and the revision number shows the scope has changed. A certificate marked “rev. 86” simply signals a living arrangement, revised as the scope was extended or reduced.

Two real, public examples verifiable on cofrac.fr: accreditation no. 4-0001 covers AFNOR Certification’s management system certification activities under NF EN ISO/IEC 17021-1:2015, with explicit validity dates; accreditation no. 5-0594 covers CTC’s product certification activities under NF EN ISO/IEC 17065, for occupational health and safety only. Two accredited bodies, two scopes that do not overlap.

Which accreditation standard for which scheme

Accreditation standard	What it governs	Example schemes
ISO/IEC 17021-1	Audit and certification of management systems	ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 22000
ISO/IEC 17065	Certification of products, processes and services	Qualiopi, organic farming certification, HDS health data hosting
ISO/IEC 17024	Certification of persons	Property surveyor certification, CACES® testing body
ISO/IEC 17020	Inspection bodies	Regulatory inspections, legal metrology
ISO/IEC 17025	Testing and calibration laboratories	Analyses, measurements, tests

For Qualiopi, the French Ministry of Labour tasked Cofrac with accrediting certification bodies under NF EN ISO/IEC 17065, in addition to compliance with the scheme’s own regulatory texts. A body accredited to 17021-1 for management systems is therefore not, by that fact alone, entitled to issue Qualiopi certificates.

What a foreign certificate is worth: EA, and a rebuilt global arrangement

Every Cofrac certificate carries a recognition statement: “Cofrac is signatory of the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA) Multilateral Agreement for accreditation for the activities covered by this certificate.” European co-operation for Accreditation (EA) organises mutual recognition among European accreditation bodies: an accreditation granted by a signatory peer is worth, within the scopes covered, what a French accreditation is worth.

Globally, the landscape has changed. The International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) have been brought together into a single organisation, Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated (Global ACI), fully operational since 1 January 2026, with a single mutual recognition arrangement covering the scopes previously recognised under the IAF MLA and the ILAC MRA. Certificates issued before that date still refer to IAF: that is not a forgery, but your checks should rely on current sources.

Mind the limit: international recognition applies to accreditation, not to national obligations. A body accredited in Europe to ISO/IEC 17065 is not thereby entitled to issue Qualiopi, a scheme under French law. For HDS health data hosting certification, by contrast, the text expressly accepts an equivalent European accreditation body.

When a certification is not accredited

Nothing stops a body from issuing a certificate without accreditation. Three situations recur.

• Private or industry-association schemes, run by a profession. MASE, for instance, relies on auditors trained and validated by the association itself, outside the accreditation circuit. That is not a flaw in itself: it is a peer system, and should be assessed as such.
• Certification bodies deemed admissible but not yet accredited. For Qualiopi, the ministry’s list distinguishes accredited bodies from those whose accreditation application has been ruled admissible. The nuance has very concrete consequences, set out in our article on what happens when a certification body loses its authorisation.
• False signals. Certificates with no technical appendix, “Cofrac-approved” claims, accreditation marks applied to services outside the scope. This ground is mapped: see our article on guaranteed certification offers, and our explainer on what the AFAQ mark actually covers.

Gabriele Jahn, Matthias Schramm and Achim Spiller modelled this market back in 2005 in the Journal of Consumer Policy: the reliability of a certification depends less on the standard than on the auditor’s incentive structure — economic dependence on the client, price wars between certification bodies, reputation effects, liability regime (see the study). Accreditation is precisely the institutional counterweight to those incentives. Without it, all that remains is the goodwill of whoever signs.

What if your certification body loses its accreditation?

Accreditation can be suspended, modified or withdrawn at any time, and Cofrac publishes the list of suspensions, terminations and withdrawals. For a certified organisation this is not an immediate disaster but a countdown: certificates already issued remain valid during the transfer procedure, within a strict time limit. We set out the mechanism and the deadlines in our dedicated article on a Qualiopi certification body losing its accreditation.

The four-step method before signing a quote

1. Ask for the accreditation number, not the logo. A logo can be copy-pasted; a number can be verified. If it is not on the quote, request it in writing.
2. Search for it on cofrac.fr. The search engine accepts the name, the accreditation number, the programme number or the SIREN company identifier. While you are there, check that the legal entity matches the one that will invoice you.
3. Open the technical appendix, not just the certificate. Look for the exact scheme you are buying, your sector and, where relevant, your site. This is the step nobody takes, and the one that exposes the gaps.
4. Check the dates and the revision. Granting date, expiry date, revision number. Then look at the list of suspensions and withdrawals. An accreditation that was valid yesterday may not be valid today.

Allow ten minutes. Compare that with the cost of redoing an audit. The same logic applies when you are the one receiving a certificate from a supplier: see our method for checking an ISO certificate and, on the food side, how the annual organic inspection works.

Take action

Pull up the last quote or certificate you received and run the four steps: number, search on cofrac.fr, technical appendix, dates. If you are still choosing, our guide to selecting a Qualiopi certification body and our method for comparing certification quotes take it from there. And to prepare the audit itself, the Complete Kit Certif gathers the templates and evidence expected across the 32 indicators of the Qualiopi national quality framework, usable with any accredited certification body.