When will the February 10, 2027 classic profile change (64-day certificates) reach the staging environment?

Issuance Policy
1

Hi,

We operate a large ACME integration that renews many Let's Encrypt certificates on the default classic profile, and we are preparing for the February 10, 2027 change (64-day certificates, 10-day authorization reuse) announced in Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days.

The blog post says "Changes will be deployed to our staging environment approximately one month before the production dates below." For the first milestone (tlsserver to 45 days on May 13, 2026), staging was still issuing 90-day tlsserver certificates on May 5 and was switched on May 7, about one week before production (Will tlsserver profile switch to 45 days next week?, Upcoming Let's Encrypt Profile Changes On May 13, 20th, and 27th).

We have change freezes in late December and a weekly release cadence in January, so the staging lead time decides when we can run our end-to-end verification. It would help us to know:

  1. Staging date. Is there a planned date or window for switching the classic profile in staging to 64-day certificates? Should we plan for about one month before (around January 10, 2027) or about one week before (around February 3, 2027), as with the May change?
  2. Announcement. Will the staging switch be announced in API Announcements and on the technical updates mailing list when it happens, as on May 6?
  3. Scope in staging. Will the staging switch apply to all accounts at once (no allowlist or gradual percentage), and will the validity period and the authorization reuse period change together? We want to be sure that a test from any staging account is representative of production behavior after February 10.
  4. Earlier testing. Is there a way to obtain 64-day classic-shaped certificates from staging before the switch (for example a staging-only profile name or an allowlist), so that integrators can validate renewal pipelines earlier? If not, we will continue to validate with the tlsserver profile and our own tests.
  5. 2028. Should we expect the same lead time for the February 16, 2028 change (classic to 45 days, 7-hour authorization reuse)?

Thank you for the transparent timeline and for all the work on this transition.

2

We are planning to switch staging to 64-day certificates next week. It will be the same as the production change we're making on Feb. 10: Switching all new certificates from the classic profile to 64-days.

We are making a staging announcement this week (probably tomorrow; just putting the finishing touches on it).

3

64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027