How to Get Cyber Essentials Certified
From readiness to certificate - and how Cyber Essentials Plus technical testing fits in.
- Prepare: Define scope, inventory assets, and close obvious gaps with the readiness checker.
- Choose a route: Self-service, guided or managed - depending on how much support you need.
- Complete the self-assessment: Answer the questionnaire and submit a senior-executive declaration.
- Certification Body review: An assessor marks your submission. Your assessment account remains active for six months. Once your answers have been submitted and assessed, an unsuccessful result normally includes a two-working-day opportunity to correct simple issues and resubmit.
- Certificate: On pass, you receive a certificate typically valid for 12 months.
- Optional CE+: The CE+ journey includes the verified Cyber Essentials self-assessment stage followed by technical testing. Where the underlying Cyber Essentials certificate is sufficiently recent, that stage does not normally need to be repeated.