Your B Corp assessment, prepared and evidenced on the new standards

The ask

B Corp certification is the ask you make of yourself, which is exactly why it is easy to underestimate. B Lab, the nonprofit behind the certification, published new standards on 8 April 2025 and closed the old route where a cumulative 80 points across the B Impact Assessment was enough. Every submission now runs on the new standards: Foundation Requirements first, then performance requirements across seven Impact Topics, from Purpose and Stakeholder Governance to Climate Action, Human Rights, Fair Work, Environmental Stewardship and Circularity, Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and Government Affairs and Collective Action. Depending on your size, sector and risk profile, roughly 20 to 124 sub-requirements apply, and B Lab verifies them in an audit-style review.

For existing B Corps the ask has a date on it: recertification lands on your due date, on a stricter bar than the one you originally certified on, and B Lab granted the companies due in 2026 a 12-month extension precisely because the transition is heavy. For first-timers in Europe, submissions on the new standards opened on 11 March 2026. Either way, under the new standards certification is valid for five years with follow-up audits along the way, so the evidence you assemble now keeps working.

Who this applies to

For-profit companies at least twelve months in operation, which is B Lab’s own eligibility floor. In practice two groups sit in front of this deliverable: companies that have decided to certify and are discovering that the assessment means digging policies, contracts, workforce data and emissions numbers out of every corner of the organisation, and existing B Corps facing recertification on standards that are tougher than the ones they passed.

This deliverable fits you if the decision is made, or nearly made, and what stands between you and submission is weeks of internal excavation nobody has time for. If you are still deciding, the gap list alone answers the real question: how far is our company from the bar, concretely, requirement by requirement.

What you need to have ready

This list doubles as our intake. You will not have everything, and that is fine: what is missing becomes the gap list, with a template attached wherever a standard document can close it.

• Your articles of association or statutes, since B Corp requires stakeholder governance anchored in your legal form
• HR basics: contracts or contract templates, handbook, pay structure, benefits overview
• Policies you have: code of conduct, environmental policy, health and safety, anti-corruption
• Workforce data: headcount, contract types, training, pay ratios if you track them
• Energy and emissions data, or the invoices and meter readings we can build them from
• Supplier information: your largest suppliers and any supplier code or screening you apply
• Certificates and prior assessments: ISO certificates, EcoVadis scorecards, a prior B Impact Assessment if you have one
• Ownership and governance structure: who owns what, how decisions are made

What Humboldt delivers

The prepared B Impact Assessment for your scope on the new standards: every applicable requirement answered from your own documents and data, every answer backed by a source in your evidence pack, organised so B Lab’s verification finds what it needs where it expects it. Where your practice meets the bar, we evidence it. Where it does not, we say so.

That honesty is the gap list: the requirements you do not meet yet, ranked by the work it takes to close each one. For every standard document on it, a supplier code, an environmental policy, a whistleblowing procedure, we include a ready-to-adapt template written for a company like yours, so closing the gap is tailoring and adopting, not drafting from zero. One caution we will always repeat: B Lab’s review tests what you actually do, so adopt the practices genuinely or they will not survive verification, and we will tell you which ones those are.

A senior specialist reviews the whole pack before it reaches you. Then you, as the applicant, review, submit and go through B Lab’s verification, with your evidence already in order.