ISO/IEC 17025 is the international standard that governs the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. It’s not a certificate you print after a self-assessment. It’s a third-party accreditation body — in the U.S., typically A2LA, ANAB, or PJLA — auditing a lab’s technical competence on a recurring cycle: its equipment, its uncertainty calculations, its technician training records, its environmental controls, and its traceability chain back to national standards.

That distinction matters more than most compliance officers realize until an auditor asks for it directly.