Verify a document certificate
Every document we process gets a certificate recording what veraPDF measured against PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1), on a named date, for one exact file. You don't need an account — and you don't need to take our word for it.
The file is fingerprinted in your browser and never uploaded — only the SHA-256 digest is sent. That also proves the file you're holding is the one we verified, rather than an edited copy.
What a certificate says, and what it doesn't. It records the result of an automated conformance test against a published ISO standard, for one file identified by its SHA-256 fingerprint, on a stated date. It is not a legal opinion and not a warranty of fitness for any purpose.
Certificates are issued for documents that fail as readily as ones that pass — a record showing exactly which clauses did not pass is more use to an agency than one that only ever says yes. When a document is processed again, its old certificate is superseded and will say so, pointing to its replacement, rather than quietly going out of date.
Who checks the checker. Every verdict here comes from veraPDF, the PDF Association's reference validator. One validator checking its own work is not evidence, so each quarter — and after any veraPDF upgrade — we take a random sample of certified documents, including failing ones, run them through PAC, an independently built PDF/UA checker, and publish how often the two agree. Disagreements are investigated and reported upstream against whichever tool is wrong; where we cannot tell, we publish that it is unresolved rather than take the favourable answer. The first published rate will appear here with its date, sample size and both tool versions.