NIST published the final version of Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards (NIST IR 8547) on 27 October 2026. The official publication record marks the November 2024 initial public draft as the preceding version; the transition framework should no longer be described as draft guidance.
The final report supports Executive Order 14412 and OMB M-26-15. Federal high-value assets, high-impact systems and other prioritised sensitive systems must adopt post-quantum key establishment by 31 December 2030 and digital signatures by 31 December 2031. The overall federal migration target remains 2035. The report also cites a 2 January 2030 deadline for federal TLS 1.3 support; supporting TLS 1.3 is not itself evidence that PQC has been deployed.
NIST will deprecate quantum-vulnerable public-key cryptography after 2030 and disallow its use for the stated purposes under NIST standards and guidelines after 2035. These dates cover RSA, elliptic-curve and finite-field schemes identified in the report. This transition window does not extend earlier federal deadlines and does not establish an identical blanket legal deadline for every private organisation.
The report prioritises long-lived confidential data because of harvest-now-decrypt-later risk. It recommends ML-KEM-768 as the default KEM parameter set, identifies post-quantum signature alternatives including ML-DSA and SLH-DSA, and addresses PKI and cryptographic supply-chain dependencies. Hybrid approaches are accommodated rather than required, with implementation, security-review, performance and complexity trade-offs.