How to Keep Your CAQH Profile Current (Attestation)

CAQH attestation is the electronic signature confirming your profile data is accurate and complete, and CAQH requires you to re-attest every 120 days. A lapsed attestation makes your profile invisible in practice: payers treat un-attested data as unusable, credentialing reviews stall, and recredentialing cycles miss their windows. Keeping current takes minutes per cycle: log in, review each section, update anything changed, replace expired documents, and click attest.

Attestation is the recurring cost of the entire CAQH bargain. In exchange for filling out one profile instead of dozens of payer applications, you accept a rolling obligation to affirm the data three times a year. Providers who treat the profile as a one-time task learn the consequences at the worst moment, usually mid-enrollment.

What Is CAQH Attestation?

Attestation is a legal affirmation, executed inside the CAQH portal, stating your professional information is true, accurate, and complete as of the date you sign. It carries weight because payers rely on the data for credentialing decisions; knowingly attesting to false information exposes a provider to contract termination and worse.

The 120-day cycle exists because provider data decays quickly. Industry estimates put monthly provider data change rates in the low single digits percentagewise, which sounds minor until you multiply it across a career’s worth of licenses, addresses, coverage policies, and affiliations. Three attestations a year is CAQH’s mechanism for keeping the utility’s data fresher than the paper applications it replaced.

Re-attestation is required even when nothing changed. The affirmation itself, not the edits, is what payers check. An untouched profile with a current attestation is credentialing-ready; a perfect profile with an expired attestation is not.

How Do I Attest or Re-Attest My CAQH Profile?

The cycle takes five steps:

1. Log in at proview.caqh.org. Locked out? Use the credential recovery flow rather than creating a new account; duplicate profiles cause ID conflicts payers struggle to untangle.

2. Review every section for changes. Walk the profile: practice locations, phone numbers, hospital affiliations, licensure, board status, malpractice coverage, and work history. New job, new address, new state license, renewed DEA registration, all of it belongs in the profile before you attest, not after.

3. Replace expiring documents. Check the document library for anything expired or inside 30 days of expiring. Malpractice face sheets are the most common lapse, since policies renew annually. State licenses and DEA registrations follow. Upload current versions and confirm legibility.

4. Resolve flagged errors. The portal flags incomplete required fields and failed validations. Clear every flag; a profile with open errors either blocks attestation or attests with defects payers will bounce back.

5. Attest. Complete the attestation action confirming accuracy. The portal records the date and starts the next 120-day clock. Note the date, because every deadline for the next cycle counts from it.

CAQH sends reminder emails as the deadline approaches. Treat the reminders as backup, not as the system. Emails land in spam, go to departed staff, or arrive at an inbox from two jobs ago. The providers who never lapse are the ones with the deadline on their own calendar.

What Happens If My CAQH Attestation Expires?

The profile enters an expired status, and the practical effects arrive fast:

• Payers stop pulling your data. Plans running credentialing or recredentialing treat the profile as unavailable. Applications in flight stall without notice; nobody at the payer is obligated to chase you.
• Recredentialing windows get missed. Payers recredential roughly every three years, and an expired profile during a plan’s recredentialing sweep triggers requests, warnings, and eventually termination from the network for non-response.
• Enrollment timelines restart their worst phase. The document-collection stage a current profile eliminates comes back, adding weeks to payer enrollment.

Recovery is simple: log in, update, and re-attest. The status refreshes once attestation completes. The damage is rarely the fix; it is the weeks a stalled application sat unnoticed while the profile was dark.

How Do I Update My CAQH Profile Between Attestations?

Update immediately when anything material changes; never hold changes for the next attestation deadline. Material changes include:

• A new practice location, mailing address, or phone number
• A new employer or hospital affiliation
• A new, renewed, or lapsed state license or DEA registration
• A change in malpractice carrier, coverage limits, or claims history
• Board certification earned or renewed
• A legal name change

After editing, the portal prompts a fresh attestation covering the new data, which resets the 120-day clock. Payers pulling your profile mid-cycle see the corrected record instead of stale data feeding their credentialing verification and directory listings. Directory accuracy regulations make this more than housekeeping: payers face federal and state requirements to publish current provider information, and your profile is upstream of what patients see.

How Do Organizations Manage Attestation at Scale?

For a solo provider, the cycle is a calendar reminder. For a group, the math turns unforgiving. A 100-provider organization faces 300 attestation deadlines a year, spread unevenly, each anchored to a different start date, on top of a rolling wall of license, DEA, and malpractice expirations feeding the same profiles. Miss a handful and enrollment revenue stalls in ways nobody traces back to a checkbox in a portal.

Credentialing teams handle this three ways, in ascending order of durability. Spreadsheets with expiration columns work until the roster grows or the owner of the spreadsheet leaves. CAQH’s own practice-manager tooling helps administrators handle common sections across providers. Provider data management platforms like Madaket Health go furthest, maintaining one canonical record per provider, tracking every attestation and document deadline against it, and syncing updates out to CAQH and payers so the 120-day clock never becomes the reason a claim denies.

Frequently Asked Questions About CAQH Attestation

How often do I need to attest my CAQH profile?

Every 120 days, roughly three times per year. The requirement applies even when no information changed; payers check the attestation date, not the edit history.

How do I know when my attestation is due?

The portal displays your attestation status and date after login, and CAQH emails reminders as the deadline approaches. Reliable teams track the date independently, since reminder emails routinely go to stale inboxes.

Does updating my profile reset the attestation clock?

Yes. Material edits prompt a fresh attestation, and completing it starts a new 120-day cycle from the attestation date.

Will payers tell me if my attestation lapses?

Rarely, and never quickly. A payer encountering an expired profile typically lets the application sit or sends a routine request through channels nobody monitors daily. Assume silence, and own the deadline yourself.