Every dated deadline that is going to land on your desk, and what each one actually asks you to produce. Most of them ask for the same thing first: an inventory of the cryptography you are running. Almost nobody has one.
The quantum computer is not the deadline. The regulator is.
NIST · FIPS 203 / 204 / 205
The final post-quantum standards: ML-KEM (key encapsulation), ML-DSA and SLH-DSA (signatures).
Why it matters: The 'we're waiting for the standards' excuse expired here. Every deadline after this one assumes these algorithms are available, and they are.
Applies to: Everyone; the basis of every migration below
PCI SSC · PCI DSS v4.0.1
Maintain a documented inventory of the cipher suites and protocols in use, reviewed at least every 12 months, including a plan to respond to changes in cryptographic vulnerabilities.
Why it matters: This is not a quantum requirement and it is not in the future — it is a live, assessable control. A QSA can ask for the inventory today, and 'we don't have one' is a finding.
Applies to: Any entity storing, processing or transmitting cardholder data
European Commission · EU PQC coordinated implementation roadmap
Begin the transition to post-quantum cryptography, with high-risk use cases targeted for completion by end-2030.
Why it matters: The nearest cliff on this map. 'Started' means a plan and an inventory — which is exactly the artifact nobody has.
Applies to: EU Member States and, in practice, their critical-infrastructure supply chains
UK NCSC · NCSC PQC migration timeline
By 2028: define migration goals, carry out a full discovery exercise, and build an initial migration plan.
Why it matters: NCSC put discovery first and gave it its own deadline — an admission that nobody knows what crypto they are running.
Applies to: UK organisations, explicitly including critical national infrastructure
NSA · CNSA 2.0
CNSA 2.0 requires PQC signatures (ML-DSA / LMS / XMSS) for software and firmware signing, the earliest of its category deadlines.
Why it matters: Signing keys are the first thing anyone has to migrate, and the hardest — you cannot re-sign the past, and firmware in the field outlives the key that signed it.
Applies to: National Security Systems and their vendors — in practice, anyone selling software to US defence
NIST · NIST IR 8547
112-bit classical security (RSA-2048, P-256 and friends) becomes deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035.
Why it matters: This is the date your current TLS certificates, SSH keys and JWT signing keys stop being acceptable. Almost all of them are on this list.
Applies to: US federal systems, and every standard that follows NIST
European Commission · EU PQC coordinated implementation roadmap
Complete PQC migration for high-risk use cases.
Why it matters: Four years to migrate the systems that are hardest to change. That is not a long time in an environment with hardware in it.
Applies to: EU Member States; critical infrastructure first
NSA · CNSA 2.0
Networking and cloud categories complete their transition to CNSA 2.0 algorithms.
Why it matters: Your TLS termination, your CDN and your managed KMS all land here.
Applies to: National Security Systems and their vendors
NIST / NSM-10 · NIST IR 8547; US National Security Memorandum 10
RSA/ECC disallowed. NSM-10 sets 2035 as the target for mitigating quantum risk across US systems.
Why it matters: This is the end of the runway, and it is the number every other regulator anchored to. Data you encrypt today that must stay secret past 2035 is already exposed — harvest now, decrypt later.
Applies to: US federal systems; the de-facto global backstop date
PQLens builds the inventory these deadlines ask for: across your code, dependencies, configs, certificates, keystores, TLS and SSH endpoints, JWKS, and cloud KMS. Free to run, 100% local — nothing about your code leaves the machine.
Regulatory dates move, and the wording matters more than the date. Every entry above links to its primary source — read it before you put a number in a board pack. Last verified 2026-07-13. We never claim any algorithm is “quantum-proof”; the honest words are quantum-vulnerable, quantum-weakened, PQC-ready, and hybrid.