B Lab launched a new B Corp standard on April 8, 2025, and the new standard significantly changes the certification. Companies are no longer assessed based on an overall point score, but must meet specific requirements across seven impact topics. In practice, for companies, this means greater requirements for documentation, management support and systematic work on, among other things, climate, human rights, working conditions and environmental impacts.
From points to performance
Until now, companies have had to achieve at least 80 points in an overall assessment to be certified. This meant that strong results in some areas could offset weaknesses in others. The new standard changes that logic. Companies must now meet specific requirements across 7 impact topics. This means that the certification is based to a greater extent on minimum requirements within key themes such as climate, human rights, working conditions, environment, inclusion and the company’s governance.
The 7 areas of the new B Corp standard
The new B Corp standard is built around 7 impact topics. To be certified, companies must meet requirements within all 7, and not just in the areas where they are already strong.
- Purpose & Stakeholder Governance (PSG): The company must have a clear purpose and be able to demonstrate how consideration for relevant stakeholders is included in governance and decision-making processes. This includes mapping relevant stakeholders, ensuring involvement and following up on how the company is working with its purpose in practice. In addition, the senior management or board of directors must continuously – at least annually – relate to the company’s progress in relation to purpose, stakeholder governance and social and environmental performance.
- Fair Work (FW): The company must work with good jobs, fair pay practices, employee involvement and conditions that support a safe and well-functioning working life. This includes systematically collecting employee feedback and assessing workplace culture on an ongoing basis, so that the company can identify challenges, follow developments over time and translate insights into concrete improvements.
- Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI): The company must work systematically to identify and address barriers to equality, inclusion and fair treatment within the company and in relevant relationships with the outside world. This includes, among other things, involving relevant stakeholders, collecting data and input on significant challenges, preparing a JEDI action plan and prioritizing specific actions that can be documented and followed up on.
- Human Rights (HR): The company must assess where its own operations and value chain may have negative impacts on human rights, and work systematically to prevent, limit and mitigate them. In practice, this means that the company must work with human rights due diligence: identify and prioritize the most serious risks, involve affected or relevant stakeholders, translate the assessments into action and follow up on whether the efforts are working.
- Climate Action (CA): The company must prepare a climate action plan that supports limiting global warming to 1.5°C. The plan must be approved by the board of directors or senior management, and progress must be continuously evaluated and communicated. For larger companies, the requirements also include measuring greenhouse gas emissions and validated science-based targets.
- Environmental Stewardship & Circularity (ESC): The company must assess its environmental impacts and take concrete steps to reduce them in its own operations and value chain. This also involves a more systematic environmental due diligence, where the company works to identify, prioritize and manage significant environmental impacts and follows up on whether the chosen measures actually reduce the impact.
- Government Affairs & Collective Action (GACA) The company must work responsibly with political advocacy and collective action. This includes, among other things, a public policy for responsible lobbying, which describes principles, responsibility and oversight of the company’s political engagement – also indirectly through, for example, industry organizations. In addition, the company must actively participate in collective efforts with external actors that have a clear social or environmental purpose, and where the collaboration is aimed at concrete improvements.
In addition to the 7 impact topics, companies must also meet a number of basic requirements, which B Lab calls Foundation Requirements. They are part of the certification basis and have an impact on the requirements the company meets in the process:
- Meet the eligibility requirements: The company must be legally registered, have been in operation for at least 12 months and comply with applicable local and national legislation.
- Meet the legal requirement: The company must implement B Corp’s legal requirements so that consideration for stakeholders is anchored in the company’s legal framework or corporate documents. As part of this, the company must also sign the Declaration of Interdependence.
- Conduct a risk assessment (risk profile): The company must prepare a risk profile through B Lab’s platform B Impact. It is used to assess the company’s risk profile and has an impact on which additional requirements the company meets in the certification process.
Why is the new standard coming now?
B Lab has tightened the standard to make B Corp certification more credible, more concrete and more in line with the challenges and expectations that companies face today. This applies, among other things, to climate, nature and resources, human rights, working conditions and demands for greater transparency. At the same time, the new standard makes it clearer that B Corp is not a certification for companies that simply want to communicate responsibility. It is for companies that are willing to work systematically, documentably and with management anchoring on their social and environmental impacts.
Significance for existing B Corps
If you are already B Corp certified, it is not enough to wait for the next recertification. You should actively engage with the transition to the new standard and clarify what it requires of you in practice. For many companies, it is about mapping which of the new requirements you already meet, where there are shortcomings, and what needs to be strengthened in documentation, processes and management support. For companies that use B Corp in B2C communication in the EU, the EU-directed ECGT plays a special role. The directive tightens the rules for the use of sustainability labels in consumer communication (including the B Corp Certified logo), and B Lab itself describes the new third-party verified model as the model that has been developed to be used in accordance with the new EU requirements. B Lab also writes that companies that neither recertify to V2.1 nor sign the updated agreement from B Lab before September 2026 will lose the right to use the B Corp logo and refer to themselves as Certified B Corporation. This means that the transition for current B Corps is not just about certification. It also deals with how the certification can be used in the market in the future, especially in the EU and in B2C communication.
Do you want to understand what the transition to the new standard means, what it specifically requires to become B Corp certified and what ECGT means for your company in practice? Then I will be happy to help you create an overview of the requirements, clarify the options and next steps.