Service Standard updated to version 3.0

Version 3.0 of the Commonwealth Service Standard is published today and applies to every assessment booked from 1 September 2026. It replaces version 2.2, which had been in place since 2023.

The standard grows from eleven points to fourteen. The three new points cover providing a route through for people who cannot use a service online, collecting only the data a service actually needs, and planning how a service will eventually be retired and who inherits its records.

None of these are new expectations in practice. Panels have been asking about all three for years, and teams have reasonably pointed out that they were being assessed against something that was not written down. Version 3.0 writes them down.

Services assessed before 14 July 2026 were assessed against version 2.2 and stay valid until their next scheduled reassessment. No team needs to reassess early, and no live service is affected today.

We consulted on the changes between February and April 2026. Of 218 responses, the most contested change was the retirement planning point, which several departments argued belonged in service management rather than the standard. We kept it: services that are never planned for retirement are the ones that become impossible to replace.