Most certifications renew on a fixed cycle you can put on the calendar the day you earn them. Nadcap doesn't work that way — your next audit date is something you earn, over and over, with your audit performance. Nadcap accredits the aerospace "special processes" — heat treating, chemical processing and plating, nondestructive testing, welding, composites, electronics and soldering — where you can't verify quality by inspecting the finished part, so the industry relies on audited process control instead.
The primes trust it enough that roughly eighty of them subscribe and accept a Nadcap audit in place of running their own, and they check your status in the Performance Review Institute's eAuditNet database before they place an order. That's why losing accreditation isn't a quality footnote. It's a market-access problem.
Here's the part that makes it hard to track: after your initial accreditation and a first reaudit at twelve months, the interval for each subsequent reaudit is awarded on merit, based on how you performed. Do consistently well and it stretches to eighteen or twenty-four months; pick up findings and it tightens back to twelve, with corrective actions to close on PRI's clock. So the date you need to hit next isn't a fixed anniversary — it's a moving target that reflects your last audit, and it can be different for every special process you hold. Here's how Nadcap accreditation works to track, and how to never let a re-audit — or a market — slip.
General information, not accreditation or quality advice — see Sources & References.
1. What is Nadcap accreditation?
Nadcap — the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program, administered by the Performance Review Institute and founded by SAE International together with the aerospace primes — is an industry-managed accreditation of aerospace and defense special processes. A special process is one whose result can't be fully verified by inspecting the part afterwards. You can't look at a heat-treated component and see whether the furnace held its profile; you can't measure a weld and recover what the operator did. Because the outcome is invisible after the fact, the industry audits the process instead of the product.
Three properties follow from that, and together they're what make Nadcap a tracking problem rather than a filing one. It's a shared supplier-approval system: prime-contractor subscribers accept the audit in lieu of their own and verify supplier status in PRI's eAuditNet database before placing work. It's granted per special process, so one supplier can hold several accreditations, each with its own audit history. And it's time-limited, never permanent — equipment ages, staff turn over, and processes drift, so the accreditation has to be re-earned rather than renewed on paper.
Remindax helps you track the accreditation, re-audit, and finding-closure dates and reminds you before each one. It does not audit, accredit, prepare you for an audit, or provide quality or accreditation advice, and it's not an eAuditNet tool or a quality management system. That work belongs to you, your quality team, and PRI's auditors.
1.1 How the cycle works
- →Initial accreditation — granted after the initial audit, for a named special process at a named site.
- →First reaudit — generally within 12 months of that initial audit, regardless of how well it went.
- →Merit-based reaudits — from then on, the interval is awarded on performance, commonly 12, 18, or 24 months.
- →Findings and corrective actions — nonconformances raised at audit have to be answered and closed within PRI's timeframe.
Every specific above varies by commodity and task group, so treat it as the shape of the obligation rather than as your own schedule — the sources at the end of this page are where your actual dates come from.
2. How often is a Nadcap re-audit?
Generally within 12 months of the initial audit, for every newly accredited supplier.
Subsequent reaudits are commonly awarded at 12, 18, or 24 months depending on audit performance.
The interval is earned. It isn't a property of the program; it's a property of your last audit.
Accreditation is per process, each separately dated and separately verifiable in eAuditNet.
The variable interval is the crux of the whole problem. Your next re-audit date reflects your last audit's result, so it isn't an anniversary you can calculate — and it differs across the special processes you hold. Two accreditations earned in the same month, at the same site, by the same quality team, can be sitting on completely different dates a year later because one audit went cleanly and the other didn't.
This is the line that separates Nadcap from the certification most of its suppliers also hold. An ISO 9001 quality management certificate runs a three-year cycle with surveillance audits at known points inside it — you can draw the whole thing on a calendar the day it's issued, and it will look the same next year. Nadcap gives you one date at a time, and only after an audit has decided what that date should be. You can't plan the second date from the first. The difference is small on paper and large in practice: a supplier who treats a merit interval like a renewal cycle is planning around a number that may already have changed.
3. Why tracking Nadcap dates matters
Four properties combine to make an accreditation expiration unusually easy to be wrong about:
The interval is earned, not fixed
Merit-based scheduling means your next re-audit date depends on your performance — strong results stretch it, findings tighten it. There's no cycle to memorise.
It's market access, not just quality
Primes verify your status in eAuditNet before placing orders, so a lapse can stop purchase orders — not merely fail an audit or dent a quality report.
Each special process has its own clock
Accreditation is per process — heat treat, NDT, welding, chemical processing — so a supplier carries several re-audit dates that were never going to line up.
Findings carry closure deadlines
Nonconformances must be corrected within PRI's timeframe — deadlines of their own, and the same findings can pull your next interval in.
Individually, none of these is difficult. Together they produce a specific failure that's easy to recognise once you've seen it: a supplier that is confident about its audit schedule and confidently wrong. The confidence comes from the last interval it was awarded — a comfortable twenty-four months on the process it's proudest of — and it quietly gets applied to everything else. Meanwhile a round of findings on a second process has already shortened that one to twelve, and nobody rewrote the calendar, because nobody was keeping a calendar per process in the first place.
4. Who needs to track these dates
These dates tend to sit with whoever ran the last audit, which isn't the same as sitting somewhere they can be seen:
Special-process suppliers
Shops running heat treating, chemical processing, nondestructive testing, welding, or composites — each accredited process on its own merit-based re-audit clock.
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Electronics & PCB suppliers
Soldering, conformal coating, and assembly accreditations held for defense programs — specialist scopes that are rarely the first thing anyone thinks to check.
Sub-tier & contract suppliers
Accreditation is what keeps them inside a prime's supply chain — and the check that decides it happens in a database they don't control.
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Quality managers
The people holding the merit-based re-audit calendar across processes, alongside the corrective actions that will decide what the next interval looks like.
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Primes' supplier-quality teams
Looking the other way down the chain — watching when each accredited supplier is next due, so a source doesn't drop out mid-programme.
Multi-site suppliers
Accreditation attaches to a process at a site. Two plants running the same process are two accreditations, two audit histories, and two intervals.
The recurring pattern is that the person who knows the date and the person who needs it are different people. The audit is run by quality. The order it protects is taken by sales, planned by operations, and verified by a prime's supplier-quality group without anyone on your side being asked. Nothing joins those up unless the dates live somewhere all of them can look.
5. What happens when Nadcap accreditation lapses
A lapsed accreditation is a market-access failure first and a quality-paperwork problem second — and that ordering is what hurts. Because prime contractors subscribe to Nadcap specifically so they don't have to run their own special-process audits, they verify a supplier's status in PRI's database before and during a relationship, and place or continue purchase orders on the strength of it. When accreditation lapses, that verification comes back negative, and the primes' systems can stop allowing orders for the affected special process. The supplier can lose the work it was accredited to do until it's back in good standing.
Regaining that standing isn't instant. It means scheduling and passing a reaudit — on an auditor's calendar, not yours — and if the lapse followed findings, closing those corrective actions on PRI's timeline first. Nothing about that compresses to fit an order you've just been told you can't take.
The merit dimension is what makes the timing so easy to mismanage. Suppliers naturally anchor on the interval they last had, but the interval is awarded per audit and per process. A supplier that earned a comfortable twenty-four months on one process can be on a much tighter clock for another, and a round of findings can pull an interval in without the supplier ever updating its mental calendar. Layer on that each accredited special process is time-limited and independently scheduled, and a multi-process supplier is juggling several moving dates with no single anniversary between them.
So the lapse, when it comes, is almost never a forgotten renewal. It's a re-audit date that shifted — shortened by a finding, or simply different across processes — and slipped. Tracking each process's current re-audit date, and any finding-closure deadlines behind it, is what keeps a supplier accredited and its orders flowing.
This is the specific trap. A merit-based interval feels like a status you hold — "we're on twenty-four months" — when it's really a result you were given, once, for one process. It can be revised by the next audit, and it was never the same across your other accreditations. Any tracker that stores one interval for the company has already lost the information that matters.
6. How Remindax keeps every accreditation current
Your quality team runs the process and PRI's auditors decide the outcome. What's left over is a coordination problem — knowing which process is due next, on the interval it was actually awarded, early enough that an audit can still be booked. That's the part Remindax does:
Every process's clock in one dashboard
Each special process's current accreditation expiration and merit-based re-audit date, plus any finding-closure deadlines — status at a glance, per process and per site.
Long-lead reminders
Staged alerts by Email, SMS, and WhatsApp, set well before each re-audit — scheduling and preparation both take lead time — and routed to the quality owner rather than a shared inbox.
Adjustable per audit
When a merit change or a finding moves your next re-audit date, update that one process's interval — without disturbing any of the others.
Records kept in order
Accreditation and re-audit dates organised per process, so a prime's eAuditNet check never finds a gap you didn't know was opening.
Remindax tracks the dates and reminds the right people. It doesn't audit, accredit, prepare you for an audit, or give quality or accreditation advice, and it's neither an eAuditNet tool nor a quality management system — that work stays with you and PRI. And because intervals and requirements vary by task group, confirm your own schedule with PRI rather than with a page on the internet. For teams carrying this beside every other dated obligation, see compliance tracking software — tracking and reminders, not governance — and certification tracking software.
7. Why spreadsheets fail for Nadcap tracking
This is the rare accreditation with no fixed renewal date, and a spreadsheet is built on the assumption that there is one. The column headed "expires" wants a single value it can sort by. What Nadcap gives you instead is a per-process interval that was set by the last audit and may be reset by the next one.
So it won't reflect an interval that shortened after a finding — the cell says what it said last year. It won't distinguish the process you earned twenty-four months on from the one still sitting at twelve, because both are just rows with dates in them and nothing records why they differ. And it has nowhere at all to put a corrective-action closure deadline, which isn't an expiry, isn't a renewal, and yet is the thing standing between a finding and your standing.
Then there's the silence. A spreadsheet holds a date perfectly and never mentions that it passed. For an obligation where a prime verifies your status in eAuditNet before placing an order — and where the first sign of trouble is an order that doesn't arrive rather than a letter that does — a silent tracker isn't half a solution. It's the same failure in a second place.
- ✗Keyed to one anniversary — but a merit interval isn't an anniversary
- ✗Won't reflect an interval that shortened after a round of findings
- ✗Can't tell a 24-month process apart from a 12-month one, or say why
- ✗No place for the corrective-action closure deadlines that gate your standing
- ✗Silent — it will never volunteer that a reaudit needed booking last quarter
- ✓Each process's current re-audit date held separately, per site
- ✓Adjustable the moment merit or a finding moves the next date
- ✓Finding-closure deadlines carried as first-class entries of their own
- ✓Staged alerts far enough ahead that an audit can still be scheduled
- ✓Reminders reach quality by Email, SMS, and WhatsApp — not a shared inbox
8. Key takeaways
- ✓Nadcap, administered by PRI, accredits aerospace and defense special processes — and prime contractors verify supplier status in eAuditNet, which makes it a market-access requirement, not just a quality badge.
- ✓After the initial audit and a first reaudit at around 12 months, subsequent re-audit intervals are merit-based — commonly 12, 18, or 24 months, by audit performance.
- ✓Strong audit performance lengthens the interval and findings shorten it, so the next date is earned rather than fixed — and it can change without your calendar changing.
- ✓Accreditation is granted per special process, each on its own clock and time-limited, with findings requiring corrective actions closed on PRI's timeline.
- ✓Tracking each process's current re-audit date and its finding-closure deadlines is what keeps a supplier accredited and its orders flowing. Remindax tracks those dates; it doesn't audit, accredit, or advise.
Never let a moving re-audit date slip
Track every accreditation and re-audit across your special processes — automatically. Hold each process's current date and its finding-closure deadlines in one place, and Remindax reminds quality early enough to book the audit.
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Intervals and requirements vary by task group — confirm your own schedule with PRI.
9. Frequently Asked Questions
The first reaudit is generally within 12 months of the initial audit. After that, intervals are merit-based - commonly 12, 18, or 24 months depending on your audit performance - so the date is not fixed. Requirements also vary by commodity and task group, so confirm your own schedule with PRI.
It is the Nadcap approach that rewards strong audit performance with an extended reaudit interval, while suppliers picking up findings face more frequent oversight. In practice it means consistent, clean audits lengthen the gap between audits and findings shorten it. Confirm the current criteria with PRI, as they vary by task group.
No. Nadcap accredits specific special processes such as heat treating, chemical processing, nondestructive testing, welding, and composites. AS9100 and ISO 9001 certify a quality management system. They are separate programs on separate clocks, and many aerospace suppliers hold both.
Prime contractor subscribers verify supplier status in PRI's eAuditNet database, so a lapse can stop purchase orders for the affected special process until you reaudit and regain standing. It is a market-access problem before it is a paperwork one.
Yes. Accreditation is granted per special process, each one time-limited and on its own merit-based reaudit clock, so a supplier accredited for several processes carries several different dates - and they will not line up.
Findings are nonconformances raised during an audit. They require corrective actions that have to be submitted and closed within PRI's timeframe, so they add deadlines of their own - and they can also shorten the interval before your next reaudit.
No. Remindax tracks the accreditation, reaudit, and finding-closure dates and reminds you before each. Auditing and accreditation are handled by PRI and its auditors, and audit preparation stays with you and your quality team. Remindax is not a consultant, an auditor, or a quality management system.
Yes. Each special process at each site gets its own current reaudit date and finding-closure deadlines in one place, each with its own reminders, so one accredited process is never mistaken for all of them.
Yes - a forever-free plan, no credit card required.
11. Sources & References
This page summarizes how the program works; it isn't accreditation or quality advice. Intervals and requirements vary by commodity and task group — confirm your own schedule with PRI and the sources below.
- • PRI (Performance Review Institute) — Nadcap — the administering body: how the program works, the special-process task groups, and the Supplier Merit approach to reaudit intervals.
- • PRI — eAuditNet (accreditation database) — where audit criteria are published and where subscribers verify a supplier's current accreditation status.
- • SAE International — Nadcap's founding standards body, and the source of the aerospace standards these special processes are audited against.