The 120-day attestation clock — and what lapsing quietly breaks

How often you actually have to re-attest

CAQH ProView asks for re-attestation at least every 120 days 1Ref 1CAQH (2026).CAQH.That CAQH ProView requires self-reported profiles to be re-attested periodically, and what an expired attestation status means for a profile payers pull., even when nothing in your profile has changed since the last time you confirmed it. The clock resets on the date you attest, not on a shared calendar date, so your personal deadline depends entirely on your own login history — two solo clinicians who created their profiles the same week can have deadlines a month apart if one attested early and the other waited.

That personal-clock detail is the part that catches people: there is no January 1 reset, no quarterly cycle everyone shares. Re-attestation here means logging back into ProView, reviewing every section for accuracy, and re-certifying it — even a profile with zero changes still needs that active confirmation. Skipping it because "nothing changed" is the single most common way solo practices end up expired without realizing it.

Two ways to find your own deadline: - Log into ProView directly 2Ref 2CAQH (2026).CAQH Provider Data Portal Sign In.Where a clinician logs in to check the attestation date and complete re-attestation. and check the attestation date on your dashboard — this is the authoritative number, not a memory of when you last touched the account. - Watch for CAQH's automated reminder emails, sent in the weeks before the deadline — useful as a backstop, not a system, since a filtered inbox defeats them silently.

Anyone starting caqh proview from zero builds this same habit from the first login; the 120-day clock starts ticking the day you first attest, not the day you finish uploading documents.

What re-attesting actually confirms

Re-attesting is not resubmitting your whole application — it is a certification, made under your own name, that every section of the profile is still accurate as of today. That includes practice locations, malpractice history, hospital affiliations, and every disclosure question, which is why a stale address or an unreported claim turns a routine, five-minute task into a liability.

This matters because payers and credentialing committees treat your attestation as your word, not CAQH's verification. CAQH aggregates and stores what you enter; it does not independently confirm that your practice address changed or that a malpractice claim resolved. Attestation integrity — the idea that what you certify has to match reality, not just match what you last typed — is the standard credentialing reviewers hold you to, and it gets checked against primary sources later in the process, not at the moment you click confirm.

Before re-attesting, a genuine five-minute review beats a reflexive click: - Confirm your practice address and phone number still match what is on file elsewhere, including NPPES 3Ref 3Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES).That NPPES is a separate identity record providers must keep current, used here as the cross-check for address consistency during CAQH re-attestation., your license renewal, and your malpractice carrier. - Re-read the disclosure questions in full — a "no" that should now be a "yes" is exactly the kind of gap that surfaces during primary-source verification, not before.

What happens when the window closes

A profile that passes 120 days unattested moves to expired status inside CAQH 1Ref 1CAQH (2026).CAQH.That CAQH ProView requires self-reported profiles to be re-attested periodically, and what an expired attestation status means for a profile payers pull., and that status is what every payer pulling your data sees — not a private flag only you can view. New credentialing applications stall at whatever stage they were in until you log back in and re-attest; a recredentialing cycle already underway pauses rather than advancing, because a committee cannot finalize a decision built on a profile it isn't permitted to treat as current.

Nothing about this is automatic bad news — an expired profile is not the same as a denial, and reactivating it is entirely within your control. The cost is time, not standing: every day the profile sits expired is a day added to whatever application or renewal was depending on it, and that delay compounds if it lands right before a credentialing-timeline-sensitive milestone like a new payer contract's start date.

Why payers treat the clock so strictly

Health plans that credential through CAQH generally follow NCQA's credentialing standards, which require primary-source verification results — license checks, NPDB queries, sanctions screens — to stay inside a 180-day aging window before a committee can act on them 4Ref 4National Committee for Quality Assurance (2026).Credentialing — NCQA.That NCQA's credentialing standards impose a 180-day verification aging window, which explains the margin behind CAQH's 120-day attestation cycle.. CAQH's 120-day attestation cycle is built with margin against that window: it gives a plan roughly two months of buffer before a verification would otherwise go stale and have to be repeated from scratch.

That margin is the whole reason the interval feels tighter than it needs to. CAQH is not picking 120 days arbitrarily — it is protecting the 180-day ceiling that governs what a credentialing committee is allowed to rely on. Letting your own attestation run to the very edge of 120 days removes that buffer for the plans reviewing you, which is part of why a habitually late attester tends to hit more friction at recredentialing than a punctual one, even with an identical clinical and licensure record.

Building a habit that survives a busy caseload

The most reliable fix is mechanical, not memory-based: put your re-attestation date on the same recurring calendar you already use for license, DEA, and malpractice renewals — the expirables calendar many solo practices keep — rather than relying on CAQH's email reminder as your only system. An inbox filter, a vacation, or a changed email address can silently swallow that reminder, and a calendar entry doesn't care whether you saw the email.

A simple version of this takes ten minutes to set up: the moment you attest, add a recurring reminder 100 days out — not 120 — so you have a built-in buffer before the deadline rather than a same-day scramble. Pairing it with whatever system tracks your other license-maintenance renewals means one calendar to check, not five separate deadlines living in five separate places.

If you already missed the window

A lapsed attestation is recoverable, not fatal, and nothing about the process requires outside intervention — the lapsed attestation clears the moment you log back into ProView, review the profile, and re-certify it. Any payer application that stalled while the profile sat expired resumes automatically once the status clears; there is no separate reinstatement request to file with CAQH itself.

What does not reverse is time already lost. If a credentialing deadline, a contract effective date, or a recredentialing cycle was riding on that application, the days spent expired are gone regardless of how quickly you fix the underlying profile — which is the real argument for the calendar system above over a promise to "get to it."