United States
ANSI National Accreditation Board
ANAB
ANAB is one of 7 ILAC MRA-signatory accreditation bodies listed here for United States, alongside A2LA, AIHA LAP, IAS, NAC, NVLAP, PJLA.
ANAB is not a government-designated sole national body — in the United States, multiple private accreditation bodies operate side by side, accrediting to the same international standards. NIST's own site lists ANAB alongside two competitors as interchangeable options for a federal recognition purpose.
How this body's authority is structured
A private, non-profit-owned accreditation body — not a government agency
ANAB describes itself: 'The ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) provides accreditation and training services to the certification body, validation and verification body, inspection and laboratory related communities. With a headquarters in Washington DC and an additional location in Fort Wayne, Indiana, ANAB is the largest multi-disciplinary accreditation body in the western hemisphere, with more than 3000 organizations accredited in approximately 80 countries.' And on its structure: 'ANAB is a non-governmental organization and a wholly-owned subsidiary of American National Standards Institute, Inc. (ANSI), which is a non-profit organization.' ANAB became ANSI's wholly owned subsidiary in December 2018; before that, from 2005, it was run as a 50/50 partnership between ANSI and the American Society for Quality (ASQ) under the name 'ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, LLC'.
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Not one designated body, but one of several — NVLAP is the closest thing to a federal program, and even it calls itself unbiased, not central
NIST names three accreditation bodies as acceptable for its own MRA-designation purposes: A2LA, ANAB and NVLAP. The one federal program among them, the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP, operated within NIST), does not describe itself as a national authority either — its own founding regulation states its purpose is 'to set out procedures and general requirements under which the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP) operates as an unbiased third party to accredit both testing and calibration laboratories' (15 CFR § 285.1). There is no single body a US organisation must use.
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Verify a certificate: the directory has a dedicated Certificate # field
ANAB's public directory, 'Directory Of Accredited Organizations', needs no login and can be searched by Keyword, Company, Certificate #, Country, State, City or ZIP, filtered by status (Active, Inactive, Suspended, Voluntary Withdrawal, Withdrawn) and by standard or scope (calibration and testing labs, inspection bodies, forensic testing, proficiency testing providers, medical/clinical testing, and more). The dedicated Certificate # field is the direct answer to 'how do I verify an ANAB-accredited certificate' — the exact question behind GSC queries like 'anab certificate verification'.
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International recognition, scope by scope and dated
ANAB states its own recognition plainly: 'ANAB has comprehensive signatory status across the multilateral recognition arrangement of the Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated (formerly IAF and ILAC).' Global ACI's own member registry gives the detail, scope by scope: ISO/IEC 17011 (22 Jan 1998), ISO/IEC 17025 for testing and calibration (14 Sep 2006), ISO/IEC 17021-1 (22 Jan 1998), ISO/IEC 17065 (20 Oct 2008), ISO/IEC 17020 (5 Dec 2012), ISO/IEC 17024 (26 Oct 2018), ISO/IEC 17029 (26 Oct 2018), ISO 15189 (21 May 2019), ISO/IEC 17043 (2 Oct 2019), ISO 17034 (21 Jul 2020). Different accreditation scopes were recognised at different times — a single 'ANAB is MRA-signatory' sentence understates how granular this recognition actually is.
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How to verify a certificate instead
Memberships and mutual recognition
- ILAC MRA signatory
What this body's recognition means
This body is one of Global ACI's ILAC MRA-signatory bodies, a status that carried forward when IAF and ILAC merged on 1 January 2026; IAF MLA and ILAC MRA marks stay valid through the transition period running to December 2028. What that recognition means →
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This page is for information only; it is not legal advice. It records what an accreditation body publishes about itself and does not accredit, certify or endorse any organisation.