NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards: 2026 Status and Timeline

Time-sensitive — current as of July 2026. This page tracks where NIST’s post-quantum standards stand right now and the migration dates that matter. For the plain-terms explanation of what each standard does (which doesn’t change year to year), see the evergreen NIST post-quantum cryptography standards.

Where the standards stand in 2026

The three core standards have been final since August 2024 and remain the stable targets to plan around:

FIPS 203 — ML-KEM (key establishment). Final. This is the one already deployed in the wild via hybrid TLS key exchange.
FIPS 204 — ML-DSA (primary signatures). Final.
FIPS 205 — SLH-DSA (hash-based signatures). Final.

Still forthcoming:

FIPS 206 — FN-DSA (FALCON, compact lattice signatures). Selected but not yet published as a final standard; as of September 2026, NIST’s standardization page still lists it as in development.
Additional signature schemes. NIST’s “on-ramp” process to diversify signature options beyond lattices is ongoing: nine candidates advanced to a third round in May 2026, a phase NIST expects to last about two years. One of them, HAWK, has since been withdrawn by its submission team.
HQC was selected in 2025 as a backup key-establishment mechanism based on different (code-based) math than ML-KEM, to hedge against a lattice weakness; its standard is in development. At selection, NIST said it planned a draft standard for public comment in about a year and a finalized standard in 2027.

The headline for planning: the algorithms you migrate to today (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) are settled. The forthcoming items are additions and hedges, not replacements — they’re no reason to wait.

The timeline that drives your deadline

The migration schedule, not the algorithm list, is what sets your urgency:

2030 — deprecation of RSA and elliptic-curve algorithms at the 112-bit security level (such as RSA-2048), per NIST’s draft transition guidance (IR 8547, initial public draft, November 2024; not yet final).
2035 — disallowance of all quantum-vulnerable RSA, elliptic-curve, and Diffie-Hellman algorithms under the same draft.
2029 — Google’s migration timeline. In March 2026, Google announced it is “setting a timeline for post-quantum cryptography migration to 2029.” Because so much traffic flows through Google’s ecosystem, this date functions as a de-facto readiness anchor for the wider web.
CNSA 2.0 milestones for U.S. national-security systems run on their own, earlier schedule (NSA CNSA 2.0 advisory): new acquisitions must be compliant from January 1, 2027; software/firmware signing and networking equipment must use CNSA 2.0 exclusively by 2030; web browsers/servers, cloud services, and operating systems by 2033.

For a mid-market organization, the operative deadline usually isn’t any of these directly — it’s your customer’s next audit or RFP, which inherits them. Those PQC line items are landing in security questionnaires now, well ahead of 2030.

What’s actually deployed in 2026

Beyond the paperwork, post-quantum key exchange is live in production today: major browsers negotiate the X25519MLKEM768 hybrid by default, and major CDNs offer it at the edge (see TLS 1.3 post-quantum). If your public endpoints still negotiate classical-only key exchange in 2026, you’re already behind the deployed baseline — and exposed to harvest now, decrypt later.

What to do with this in 2026

The 2026 status doesn’t change the playbook, it sharpens the urgency: the standards are final, the tooling is shipping, and the clock to 2030 is running. Inventory first, migrate key establishment first via hybrids, then signatures — the sequence in the NIST migration guidance.

Run a free scan to see where your public TLS and certificates stand against the 2026 baseline — each finding mapped to the NIST standard that addresses it. It’s the fastest way to know whether you’re keeping pace or falling behind the deployed state of the art.

Last updated: 2026-09-22. Dates and standardization statuses checked against primary NIST, NSA, and Google sources on that date.