BIS QCO Deadlines, 2026–27: How to Segregate and Trace Pre-Deadline Stock in Your Godown

Which QCOs turn mandatory between 30 September and 6 October 2026?

Six product families land in that window, and four more follow between December 2026 and June 2027. The table below comes from the Bureau of Indian Standards page Upcoming QCOs – notified and due for implementation, which read Last Updated on September 22, 2026 when checked. BIS calls it advance information for better awareness, gives no individual notification dates, and lists an Indian Standard against every entry. Note that BIS heads the date column Enforcement date, not implementation date.

Verified against the BIS page on 25 September 2026: every date above matched, and the page still read Last Updated on September 22, 2026. A re-check on 3 October 2026 found the same stamp and the same dates. BIS revises that page, so treat this verification stamp as perishable and re-check the BIS Upcoming QCOs page before acting on any date here. The bare URL without the language parameter redirects to the Hindi version, so use the link above.

Those six families are sixteen individually listed standards on the BIS page. Hand tools alone span nine, and 6 October 2026 carries three separate sack standards, including one for mail-sorting sacks rather than cement. A family name is not a scope test. Find your own IS number on the BIS page instead of matching a product description.

When does the Aluminium QCO become mandatory?

The next dated trigger after October is aluminium. The Aluminium and Aluminium Alloy Products (Quality Control) Order, 2026 is DPIIT's S.O. 1319(E), dated 11 March 2026 and published in the Gazette of India on 13 March 2026, and it supersedes the 2025 order of the same name. It lists 17 Indian Standards in two tiers.

• Seven standards apply with immediate effect, so they have been mandatory since publication: aluminium alloy irrigation tubes, welded and extruded (IS 7092 Parts 1 and 2), EC grade aluminium rod (IS 5484), aluminium and alloy foil for pharmaceutical packaging (IS 16011), aluminium composite panel (IS 17682), corrugated aluminium sheet (IS 1254) and aerospace forging stock (IS 7902).
• Ten wrought-product standards phase in by enterprise size: bars, rods and sections, forging stock, plate, sheet and strip, wire and rivet stock for general engineering, extruded round tube and hollow sections, wire for electrical purposes, alloys for making utensils, and bars to sheets for electrical applications (IS 733, 734, 736, 737, 739, 740, 1285, 2067, 21 and 5082).

The order does not apply to goods made in India for export, or to up to 200 kg a year that aluminium product makers import for research and development.

For a godown, the effect is the October split again, staggered by supplier size: a large or medium mill's wrought stock divides into two states on 1 December 2026, a small or micro supplier's later. If you buy from suppliers of different sizes, your inward stock carries up to three cut-off dates, so record each supplier's enterprise category and the manufacture date at the gate, against the lot. Bars, sheets and wire are bare metal, so the tagging advice for hand tools and utensils below applies: tag the bundle, coil or pallet, not the bare surface.

What does a mandatory implementation date do to your warehouse?

On the day before, you have one SKU. On the day after, the same SKU exists in two states: units made or brought in before the enforcement date, and units covered by the regime that starts on it. Same carton, same part number, same bin, and one stock line in your WMS for both.

"We'll sort it at dispatch" then fails for three ordinary reasons:

• A picker working to a cut-off reads a location, not a production record.
• By dispatch the two states are usually mixed already, because stock rotates and part-picked pallets get topped up.
• Dispatch does nothing at all for a sample drawn from stock in the middle of the godown.

Segregation has to happen at put-away, and it has to be visible without opening a carton.

A sample has been drawn: can you reach its lot?

Design for one narrow, foreseeable scenario: a sample may be drawn, and you should be able to trace it to a lot. That means getting from one unit in someone's hand to three answers:

• which lot or consignment it belongs to;
• when that lot was made or landed;
• where the rest of it sits now.

A record that delivers all three is:

1. attached to the goods rather than held only in a system;
2. readable without unpacking;
3. resolved to a lot identifier that stays unique across years;
4. reverse-searchable from lot back to every location holding it.

Most warehouses have the first three and miss the fourth, which is the one that matters when you are asked where the rest of a lot has gone.

Marking versus identification: is RFID required for QCO compliance?

No. ISI marking and the conditions attached to a BIS licence are the regulatory requirement, and BIS defines them. RFID, lot-coded labels and zone audits are internal controls you choose in order to run your own warehouse. No BIS Quality Control Order requires RFID. Anyone selling hardware on the claim that BIS mandates it is misrepresenting the position.

How do you actually enforce stock segregation on the floor?

• Zone-level reads. Split the rack face physically, into separate aisles or bays rather than a sticker on a shared pallet. Then walk the zone with a UHF handheld reader for a count by lot in minutes.
• A dispatch-lane check. A fixed RFID gate reader on the outbound lane flags a unit whose stock state does not match the order, catching the mixed part-pallet nobody noticed at put-away.
• A weekly repeatable audit. A one-off count says nothing about drift. Repeating it on the same route each week shows whether segregation is holding.

For the put-away and cycle-count mechanics this rests on, see our RFID warehouse inventory management guide. India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band is 865–868 MHz (G.S.R. 853(E), 2021), so specify readers and tags for that band.

Which tag suits which of the October product families?

Three of the six are bare or dense metal, one arrives already cartoned, one is bulk liquid and one is abrasive and dusty. Tag choice follows the physics, not the SKU.

The recurring mistake is tagging the item when the carton is the unit you actually move. For the metal cases, read how to choose on-metal RFID tags first, because a plain label on aluminium detunes and reads at a fraction of its rated range; on-metal RFID tags are built for exactly this. For crated hand tools and metal cases, an ABS on-metal tag such as the IDTS-7025 (70 × 25 mm) goes on the case.

For carton work, UHF inlays and labels are the consumable, and an RFID printer-encoder prints the lot code and writes the same lot into the chip in one pass. Our guide to RFID printer prices in India covers what the encoder tier actually costs against a plain label printer. A typical pairing is a 1642-U8 warehouse label on the carton and an iX4R industrial printer-encoder at the packing station.

What should importers do with pre-deadline consignments?

If you import, there is a third state on the floor: consignments that landed before the enforcement date, sitting alongside later stock. Bonded-goods accountal is a separate discipline with its own rules. But for stock already in your godown, landing date is a fact only your records hold. It is not on the carton, and it disappears the moment that pallet merges into open stock. Capture it at the gate and tie it to the carton or pallet identity while the paperwork is still in your hand.

How should you encode the lot and serial?

Keep the scheme boring. A bespoke string packing plant, line, shift and a counter works right up until a field width changes or its author leaves. Use a standard encoding instead, so the identifier means the same thing to your WMS, your customer and any auditor. Our GS1 SGTIN-96 EPC encoding guide covers how lot and serial fit together. Two rules pay for themselves: keep the lot identifier unique across years, and the serial unique across the lot.

Does the Transition Facilitation (Quality Control) Order, 2026 change the October dates?

No. One clearly dated piece of context for readers in other sectors: the Transition Facilitation (Quality Control) Order, 2026 was notified on 25 June 2026. As reported in the trade press at the time, it gives manufacturers a five-year window to comply with quality control norms, with initial manufacturing licences valid two years before renewal, and applies to ten product categories including toys, personal protective equipment, air conditioners, footwear, furniture, washing machines and water heaters. A DPIIT evaluation committee drawn from Commerce, Consumer Affairs, DGFT and BIS sits over it.

Read that as separate information, not relief. It changes no enforcement date in the table above, and none of the six families in that table appear in the sector list we can verify. If you believe a product of yours sits in both places, confirm your position with BIS and DPIIT in writing rather than assuming a deferral.

A seven-step checklist for segregating pre-deadline stock

1. Freeze a count. Stop receipts for an hour and establish how much pre-deadline stock exists per SKU. Without that baseline, nothing you do afterwards is auditable.
2. Split locations physically. Separate bays or aisles, not shared pallets with markers. If the two states can be lifted together, they will be.
3. Label the pre-deadline stock. Label it at the unit you actually move: carton, bale, crate or drum. Print the lot code and encode it in the same pass.
4. Write the traceback route down. Unit, then lot, then production or landing date, then every location holding that lot. Test it on a carton picked at random.
5. Put the dispatch-lane check live. A handheld check at the dock beats nothing at all while a fixed reader is being installed.
6. Cost it before you commit. Tagging cartons and tagging items price out very differently once printers and readers are in scope; our RFID project cost and ROI guide for India sets out the line items.
7. Name an owner. Name the person who answers the questions, and re-check the BIS page before you finalise anything.

Two regimes get confused because they share the letters BIS. Our guide to WPC, ETA and BIS certification for RFID readers is about certifying the hardware you buy. This post is about QCOs on the goods you make.

Tell us the product, the unit of handling and the rack layout, and we will suggest what to tag and how to read it. For volume orders of labels, tags or readers, send an enquiry through our bulk RFID orders page.

Verify enforcement dates, standards and licence conditions with the Bureau of Indian Standards directly at bis.gov.in. This is stock-control guidance, not legal or certification advice.