Guide · accreditation audits · checked against the NHVR's documents on 12 October 2026

What the auditor asks to see, under NHVAS and the HVA scheme

Almost everything written about the new accreditation scheme is about the decision: which pathway, what changed, do not leave it late. Very little is about the day somebody turns up and asks for your records. This is that day, in the regulator's own words, and the thing most of it misses: there are three audits, not one, and the bar goes up between the first and the second.

The short version

If you are applying for accreditation under the Heavy Vehicle Accreditation scheme, you will be audited three separate ways over your first couple of years, and the second one is the one to plan for. An entry audit looks at your system on paper. An initial compliance audit six to seven months later asks whether it is actually running. A compliance audit before each expiry keeps it alive.

If you are accredited under NHVAS today, you are still on NHVAS and your auditor still works through the eight numbered Maintenance Management standards. The records are the same records either way, which is the useful part: there is nothing to wait for.

There are three audits, and the bar rises

An entry audit is the first assessment of your SMS, including any applicable ACA requirements.
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

SMS is the safety management system. ACA is Alternative Compliance Accreditation, which covers fatigue and mass and has nothing to do with maintenance: maintenance is the Maintenance Assurance Program, held as an add on to General Safety Accreditation. The guideline sets out the method used at every audit as Present, Suitable, Operating and Effective. Four questions about one system: is it there, does it suit a business this size, is it running, and is it working.

Here is the sentence that changes how you prepare, and it is about the first audit rather than the last:

Desktop audits can only assess an SMS as Present and Suitable.
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

Read that next to the purpose of the second audit, which is to confirm the system is Operating and Effective, and the shape of the risk is obvious. You can pass the first audit on documents and fail the second one on an empty file. A business that writes its procedures in the week before entry, gets accredited, and then runs the next six months the way it always has, has nothing to show at the audit that counts.

At application · assessed to Present and Suitable

The entry audit

The first assessment of your safety management system. It forms part of applying and is only required when you are establishing accreditation for the first time. A desktop audit at this stage can find a system Present and Suitable and no further, so documents can carry you through it.

Six to seven months later · assessed to Operating and Effective

The initial compliance audit

Where the bar rises. Its purpose is to confirm the system is Operating and Effective, which is a question about what happened rather than what was written down. Where an accreditation was added early it falls at ten to eleven months instead, and the guideline says that one cannot be waived.

Before each expiry · assessed to Operating and Effective

The compliance audit

The one that keeps the accreditation. Accreditation periods are typically granted for two years, and this audit happens in a window before the period runs out, so it is a diary item rather than a surprise.

The window on the recurring one is written down, so it can go in the diary:

This audit is conducted between 9 months and one month before the expiry date of your accreditation period.
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

The timings around the other two reproduced only once each on probing, so they are in our words rather than in quotation marks: the initial compliance audit at six to seven months after accreditation is first granted, ten to eleven months where an accreditation was added early and not waivable in that case, periods typically granted for two years, and an audit application to be submitted at least 28 days before the audit. Treat those as the shape of the schedule and confirm the dates with your auditor.

What the auditor asks to see

The evidence requirements sit in an appendix to the guideline, under the heading for the accreditation type itself. Each line below is the guideline's sentence, with what it means in a yard underneath it.

Have a process for recording, reporting and escalating faults found in the daily check.

Three verbs, and escalating is the one that catches people. A fault written on a sheet that stays in the truck has been recorded and not reported. The auditor is looking for the path a fault takes to somebody who can spend money on it.

Ensure decisions to delay repair are controlled, recorded and signed off by an identified decision maker.

The strongest line in the document, and the one almost no system answers. Deferring a repair is allowed. Deferring it anonymously is not. If an open fault has been open for five weeks, the auditor will want the name of the person who decided that and the day they decided it.

Keep records of completed repairs and where appropriate, that the vehicle has been tested before it goes back on the road.

Closing a fault is two facts, not one: the repair, and where it applies, the check that the repair worked before the machine went back out. A jobcard that ends at the invoice has answered half of this.

Keep records for all vehicles that operate under the accreditation, including subcontractor vehicles.

Subcontractors are named explicitly, and this is where an otherwise tidy business comes unstuck. If somebody else's trailer runs under your accreditation, its daily checks and its repairs are your evidence to produce.

Four more requirements belong in that list and are not quoted, because their wording reproduced in the opening clause only. In substance: keep records showing that daily checks, fault reporting and maintenance work are being carried out as part of ordinary operations. Keep them in a systematic way that lets the maintenance history be tracked for audits and reviews. Keep them up to date, accurate and easy for the responsible staff to find. And scale the paperwork to the size and risk of the business, using records you already have, invoices among them, where they already show what is needed. That last one is worth saying plainly to a small operator: the guideline is not asking for a bigger filing system than the risk justifies.

A daily check with a name and a date on it, a fault that goes somewhere, a repair closed out on a jobcard: that is the evidence, and it is what AssetPass keeps. Start free and put one asset in.

Start free, no card Or send your asset list

The fault nobody has fixed yet, and the name against it

Of everything in the appendix, one line is worth reading twice, because it is the requirement most maintenance systems cannot answer and the one an auditor can test in about a minute.

Ensure decisions to delay repair are controlled, recorded and signed off by an identified decision maker.
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

Deferring a repair is normal and the guideline does not forbid it. What it asks is that the deferral is a decision somebody made, not a thing that happened. Three words carry it: controlled, so there is a rule about what may be deferred and what may not; recorded, so the deferral is written down at the time; and signed off by an identified decision maker, so there is a person's name on it.

A fault list with items open for weeks and nobody's name against any of them is the plainest possible evidence of a system that is Present and not Operating. It is also, for what it is worth, the thing most likely to matter after an incident, because the question then is not whether you knew about the fault but who decided to live with it.

How long to keep it

Operators ask this first, and the honest answer depends on which scheme you are under. Under NHVAS there is a number, three years, and it comes from the Maintenance Management Accreditation Guide under the heading Documents you must keep, not from Maintenance Management Standard 5, which is where most pages put it. The 2026 guideline sets no period in years at all. What it asks for instead is a judgement:

Keep records in a format and for a length of time that allow for audit and review, without creating more administrative tasks than needed for the risk profile of the business.
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

The seven year figure appears in none of the NHVR documents these guides are built on, and a planted sentence claiming a seven year minimum was correctly rejected on probing. Three years remains a sensible floor under either scheme, and our NHVAS and HVA records guide sets the citation out in full and explains why the usual one is wrong.

Who may audit you, and who may not audit you twice

You can use the same auditor for up to 2 consecutive accreditation periods
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme Operator Guideline 2026, NHVR

So a long relationship with one auditor has a limit, and at some point you will be introducing somebody new to your system. That is worth knowing when you build it: a system only its author can explain is a system that gets marked down the first time a stranger reads it.

The auditor is a HVA scheme approved auditor, registered on the NHVR register of approved auditors, which is public. The practical sequence, from a single reading of the guideline rather than a quotation, is that you contact an approved auditor and schedule a date, the NHVR confirms whether that auditor is accepted, and where one is not accepted the regulator offers an alternative selection to choose from. The document does not say who pays for the audit, so we are not telling you.

If you are accredited under NHVAS today

Then nothing above is your audit yet. The Heavy Vehicle Accreditation scheme began replacing NHVAS on 1 August 2026, and the NHVR's implementation FAQs say the existing scheme continues to operate during a transition period and that operators currently accredited will have up to three years to transition. Three years from what is not spelled out and no published calendar end date could be found, so we are not quoting a deadline at you. Your own accreditation expiry, which is on your certificate, is the date that governs you.

Until then your auditor works through the eight numbered Maintenance Management standards, and NHVAS has one thing the new scheme does not: the quarterly compliance statement, accepted and signed by the responsible person. We went looking for a quarterly compliance statement in the 2026 guideline and could not find one. The items that statement lists are set out in our records guide, from the Accreditation Guide itself.

The thing worth doing now does not depend on any date. The records both schemes want are the same records. A daily check with a name and a date, a fault with a path and an owner, a repair closed out with evidence it was checked: that satisfies a NHVAS auditor today and it is what a HVA scheme approved auditor will ask for when you move.

Three things this page will not tell you, because the document does not

Each of these is a detail an operator would act on, which is exactly why we are not guessing at it.

Whether the initial compliance audit can be waived, and on what condition

The guideline does say a waiver exists and ties it to evidence that the system has been Present, Suitable, Operating and Effective for a period before the application. Two readings of the document gave materially different wording for the condition, so there is no sentence here we are willing to put in quotation marks. Ask your auditor.

The standard your system must meet at the entry audit

Two figures in the same document appear to disagree: one gives Present and Suitable as the minimum at entry, the other reads as though the full four are needed for General Safety Accreditation. We could not reconcile them. Prepare for the higher bar and you are safe either way, which is the practical answer regardless.

What an applicant with no operating history does

The obvious case for a new business, and the document does not address it. If you have no maintenance history to show, nothing we read tells you how the Operating and Effective questions are answered at six months. That is a question for an approved auditor before you apply, not after.

What this looks like in AssetPass

Said plainly, and claiming nothing the product does not do today. A daily check is a prestart, filed by whoever did it, with the date and the name on it, and a fault found on it goes onto the fault list rather than into somebody's memory. A fault is recorded as it was found, with who raised it, and it closes out on a jobcard carrying the lines, the rates and the GST. A service schedule carries its interval and shows what is due and what is overdue. Certificates and test results are kept against the asset, so one machine's history reads in one place rather than a folder per year. That is the systematic part of the guideline's sentence.

Two honest limits. The app does not today produce a single screen titled for an audit, so preparing for one means knowing which records to show. And it will not estimate what it does not know: where an asset's history is not recorded it says not tracked instead of printing a guess. For the fourth PSOE question that is the right way round, because a count the business cannot stand behind is worse than no count.

Questions people ask

How many audits are there, and when?

Three kinds. An entry audit, which is part of applying and is only needed when you are setting up accreditation for the first time. An initial compliance audit six to seven months after accreditation is first granted, or at ten to eleven months where an accreditation was added early. Then a compliance audit before each expiry, which the guideline says is conducted between 9 months and one month before the expiry date of your accreditation period. Accreditation periods are typically granted for two years.

What is the difference between the first audit and the second one?

The bar. The entry audit looks at a system on paper, and the guideline says a desktop audit can only assess a system as Present and Suitable. The initial compliance audit is where it has to be Operating and Effective, which is measured against records of things that actually happened. So a business can pass entry with good documents and fail six months later with nothing filed. That is the single most useful thing to know about this scheme and almost nobody publishing on it says it.

What does the auditor actually ask to see?

Records, and specifically records of ordinary days rather than a policy folder. A daily check you can show was carried out for each vehicle in use. A process for recording, reporting and escalating faults found in the daily check. Completed repairs, with evidence the vehicle was tested before going back on the road where that applies. Faults and regulatory notices closed out, with work orders or invoices as the example the guideline gives. And records for every vehicle running under the accreditation, subcontractor vehicles included.

What happens if a fault is found and not fixed straight away?

This is the requirement most systems fail and it is worth quoting. The guideline says to ensure decisions to delay repair are controlled, recorded and signed off by an identified decision maker. So a deferred repair is allowed, but somebody has to own it by name and the decision has to be on the record. A fault list with old open items and nobody's name against them is the clearest evidence an auditor can find that a system is present and not operating.

Who can audit me, and can I keep the same auditor?

A HVA scheme approved auditor, registered on the NHVR register of approved auditors. The guideline says you can use the same auditor for up to 2 consecutive accreditation periods, which means at some point you have to change. You contact an auditor and schedule a date yourself, and the NHVR confirms whether that auditor is accepted.

How long do I have to keep the records for an audit?

Under NHVAS the number is three years, and it comes from the Maintenance Management Accreditation Guide under the heading Documents you must keep, not from Maintenance Management Standard 5 where most pages put it. The 2026 guideline sets no period in years at all: it asks for records kept in a format and for a length of time that allow for audit and review. The seven year figure appears in none of the NHVR documents these guides are built on. Three years remains a sensible floor under either scheme.

I am accredited under NHVAS today. Which rules does my auditor use?

NHVAS, until you move. The eight numbered Maintenance Management standards and the quarterly compliance statement are still what your auditor works through, and the date that governs you is your own accreditation expiry, which is on your certificate. The records are the same records either way, so a maintenance system that satisfies your NHVAS auditor is the one that satisfies a HVA scheme approved auditor.

The rest of the guides

NHVAS and HVA maintenance records: what to keep The Maintenance Assurance Program, and what it asks you to keep The prestart checklist guide The heavy vehicle inspection checklist guide

Sources

Every sentence above in quotation marks was read off the first document on 12 October 2026 and reproduced identically from two independently worded probes, with an invented sentence planted in each probe to check that the reader rejects what is not in the document. It rejected both. Requirements and timings that reproduced only once are in our own prose and flagged as such where they appear. The register is listed for you rather than as a citation. If the NHVR changes any of this, the page is wrong until it is checked again, and the date at the top is how you catch that.

The second audit asks what actually happened. Send your asset list and we will set it up and hand it back loaded, so the record starts building from day one.

Start free, no card Or send your asset list

This is a guide, not legal advice. If your operation is accredited or applying, your auditor and the NHVR's own guidance material are the final word.