If you supply the petroleum and natural gas industry, you've probably heard both acronyms tossed around interchangeably: API Q1 and API Q2. They sound similar, they're both administered by the American Petroleum Institute, and both lead to a quality management system (QMS) certification your customers will ask about. But they cover different kinds of organizations, and picking the wrong one — or assuming you only need one when you actually need both — can cost you months of rework during an audit.

What API Spec Q1 Covers

API Spec Q1 is built for organizations that manufacture product for the oil and gas industry. It's the standard behind the API Monogram — the mark licensed manufacturers are authorized to stamp on equipment that conforms to an API product specification. If your business machines, fabricates, assembles, or otherwise produces physical product, Q1 is almost certainly the standard your customers expect.

Q1's emphasis is on traceability: knowing exactly where every material and component in a finished product came from, what inspections it passed, and when. It also requires a documented design package for anything you manufacture, unless you qualify for a design exclusion.

API published the 10th edition of Q1 in September 2023, effective September 2024, and it's a meaningful update. Two changes matter most for East Texas suppliers:

It now aligns with ISO 9001:2015 instead of the older 2008 version, closing a gap that had been open for years. And the scope was broadened well beyond traditional manufacturing to include engineering and design, physical product realization activities like welding, heat treating, coating, and testing, and product-related activities like distribution, logistics, and even software development. If your company does any of that work, it's worth a second look at whether Q1 now applies to you even if you don't think of yourselves as a "manufacturer" in the traditional sense.

One more thing worth knowing: the transition window for the 9th edition has already closed. As of March 2026, any remaining 9th edition certificates were withdrawn. If your organization is still operating under the old edition, that's no longer optional — it needs to be addressed now.

What API Spec Q2 Covers

API Spec Q2 is the standard for service supply organizations — companies performing well construction, intervention, production, abandonment, well servicing, equipment repair and maintenance, or inspection activities in the field. It was the first international QMS standard written specifically for E&P service providers, and the current edition has been in place since 2021.

Where Q1 is about product traceability, Q2 is about controlling the delivery of a service: personnel competency, quality planning before the job starts, and identifying and treating risk during execution — whether or not a product is involved in that service. Because Q2 applies to services rather than physical goods, there's no equivalent to the API Monogram; there's nothing to stamp.

Which One Do You Need?

For most companies, the answer is straightforward once you separate what you make from what you do:

If your company manufactures equipment, components, or product that ships out under an API specification, you need Q1. If your company performs field services — servicing, inspecting, or maintaining equipment on location, without manufacturing the underlying product — you need Q2.

Where it gets less obvious is companies that do both: a manufacturer that also runs field service crews, for example, or a service company that fabricates replacement parts in-house. With Q1's 10th edition scope now reaching further into service-adjacent activities, some organizations that were confidently "Q2 only" a few years ago may need to revisit that assumption. The two standards aren't mutually exclusive, and getting the scope right up front is a lot cheaper than discovering a gap mid-audit.

There's a practical upside worth mentioning too: organizations that register to API Spec Q1 can receive ISO 9001 registration at no additional cost once they demonstrate conformance to the applicable requirements — useful if you're weighing certifications and trying to avoid redundant audit cycles.

Getting It Right the First Time

Whether you're pursuing your first certification, transitioning off the 9th edition of Q1, or trying to figure out if your scope of work now touches both standards, the cost of guessing wrong shows up later — in a failed audit, a rejected monogram application, or a customer contract you can't bid on. Qalrix works with East Texas manufacturers and service providers to map your actual scope of work against API's requirements, build a QMS that fits how you really operate, and get you audit-ready without the guesswork.

If you're not sure which standard applies to your business — or both — that's exactly the kind of question worth a conversation before your next audit, not during it.