How long a Czech inspection technician's certificate is valid

An inspection technician's certificate is valid for 5 years from the date of issue, a company's licence for inspections for 10 years from the date the decision became final. The first period follows from Section 11(3) of Act No. 250/2021 Coll. (in Czech), the second from Section 8(4) of the same Act. They are independent of each other, which is why they have to be tracked separately: a company with a valid licence can have technicians with expired certificates and cannot legally carry out an inspection.

• A technician's certificate is valid for 5 years, a company's licence for 10. Two different periods, two different records.
• The certificate is only one of five prerequisites of professional competence under Section 11(1).
• The inspection report must contain the certificate's registration number, so expiry can be traced retrospectively.
• Both registers are kept by the authorised organisation, which provides information from them to the public.
• It is not just about validity, but also about scope. A valid certificate in a different scope is useless for the equipment in question.

Two periods that are unrelated

Act No. 250/2021 Coll., in force since 1 July 2022, distinguishes between the competence of a company and the competence of a person, and gives each a different validity.

The licence under Section 8 is issued to a legal entity or a self-employed natural person. The conditions are the appointment of a responsible competent person, ensuring that the individual activities are carried out by a professionally competent person, and the necessary technical equipment. It is valid for 10 years.

The certificate under Section 11 is issued to a natural person after a successful professional competence examination at the authorised organisation. It is valid for 5 years. The responsible competent person named in the company's licence is at the same time a certificate holder, so one expiry can affect both.

The practical consequence is easy to miss. Ten years is a period over which a small company changes both its managing director and its accounting system, and the reminder to renew the licence usually gets lost along the way. Five-year certificates, on the other hand, are renewed often enough for a company to get used to them, but every technician has a different date.

The certificate is only one of five prerequisites

Section 11(1) lists the prerequisites of professional competence for a natural person who carries out inspections and testing of reserved technical equipment, installation and repairs of reserved gas equipment, or the operation of steam and liquid boilers.

For planning, this means that tracking a single date is not enough. Medical fitness has its own cycle under occupational health regulations and does not coincide with the certificate's validity. A company that tracks only the certificate learns about the second problem only during an official check.

Scope matters more than the date

A certificate is not issued across the board, but for a scope. Government Regulation No. 190/2022 Coll. refers to this twice: Section 9 states that an inspection technician holds a certificate in the scope set out in Annex 5, and Section 5 states that a company is professionally competent in the scope under Annex 3.

Equipment is divided into two classes. Class I includes, under Section 4, among other things equipment in explosive atmospheres, equipment in a building that can hold more than 200 people, and electrical installations in medical premises. All other reserved electrical equipment is in Class II.

A technician with a valid Class II certificate therefore may not inspect Class I equipment, even if the certificate were valid for another four years. An error in scope is noticed just as late as an expiry, only it is harder to find.

Why expiry is only noticed in hindsight

Under Section 10 of Government Regulation No. 190/2022 Coll. (in Czech), the inspection report must contain the first name, surname, signature and certificate registration number of the inspection technician who carried out the inspection. Alongside that, it contains the start and end dates of the inspection.

From the report, it is therefore possible to verify retrospectively whether the technician held a valid certificate on the day of the inspection. But nobody does this routinely until an insurance claim or an official check arises. Until then, a report issued the day after expiry looks exactly like any other.

That is the real reason validity is tracked in advance. It is not about a fine for one day, but about the reports issued in the meantime and the orders that follow on from them.

Where validity is verified

Under Section 6 of the Act, the authorised organisation keeps a register of licensed companies and a register of inspection technicians, and provides information from both for the needs of other authorities and the public.

For the register of companies, the Act expressly sets out the content in Section 10: name or business name, identification number, registered office, name of the responsible competent person, and the registration number, activities and scope of the licence with the date it expires. The data is publicly accessible by remote access and is kept for the period of the licence's validity. After it ends, the authorised organisation keeps it in a non-public register for another 20 years.

The expiry date is stated directly in the register, so verifying another company before subcontracting is a matter of a single query. For your own people, though, nobody checks this daily, which is why the record has to be in the tool you plan in.

How to keep it in the plan

Qualifications belong with the technician, not in a separate spreadsheet. As soon as they are kept separately, planning is done by name and scope is checked only when someone remembers to.

In capacity and skills, a technician's qualifications are kept with them, and when planning you can filter for who is free and at the same time has the required qualification. A technician without the matching qualification does not appear in the selection, so they cannot end up on the order by mistake.

The company names its qualifications itself. Customisation without a programmer lets qualifications be named by the scope the certificate actually covers, not generically. The difference between a qualification named "electrical" and one matching a specific scope is precisely the difference that leads to repeat visits.

The document itself belongs with the order. In orders and history, the attachment and a record of every change stay with the order, so a copy of the certificate and the issued inspection report sit in one place and can be found together.

When you do not need to deal with this

A company with one inspection technician and one scope can manage with a calendar reminder, and whoever does not carry out inspections and only orders them does not deal with this at all. Verifying a supplier is then a one-off check against the public register.

The turning point comes with several technicians with different scopes and different renewal dates. From that moment on, the question is not whether a certificate is valid, but whose expires first and who to put in their place until then.

This article describes the legal position as at the date of publication and is no substitute for checking the authorised organisation's register or for a legal assessment of a specific case.

Frequently asked questions