On Wednesday, August 20, 2025, we will be switching issuance to use our intermediate certificates: E7, E8, R12, and R13. The Let’s Encrypt staging environment will make an equivalent change on August 11. As planned when these intermediates were generated in 2024, this change is part of our efforts to regularly rotate issuance of intermediates in order to encourage automation and efficiency.
Most Let’s Encrypt Subscribers will not need to take any action in response to this change because ACME clients, like certbot, will automatically configure the new intermediates when certificates are renewed. You will only be affected if your ACME client or server software pins or hard-codes intermediates; you will likely know if you fall into this category as you will have experienced similar difficulties when we rotated intermediates in June 2024.
If you have any questions, please open a help thread.