International Electrotechnical Commission - IEC Standards

IEC Standards

IEC standards have numbers in the range 60000–79999 and their titles take a form such as IEC 60417: Graphical symbols for use on equipment. The numbers of older IEC standards were converted in 1997 by adding 60000, for example IEC 27 became IEC 60027.

The IEC cooperates closely with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In addition, it works with several major standards development organizations, including the IEEE with which it signed a cooperation agreement in 2002, which was amended in 2008 to include joint development work.

Standards developed jointly with ISO such as ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 carry the acronym of both organizations. The use of the ISO/IEC prefix covers publications from ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology, as well as conformity assessment standards developed by ISO CASCO. Other standards developed in cooperation between IEC and ISO are assigned numbers in the 80000 series, such as IEC 82045-1.

The 60000 series of standards are also found preceded by EN to indicate the IEC standards harmonized as European standards; for example IEC 60034 would be EN 60034.

IEC standards are also being adopted as harmonized standards by other certifying bodies such as BSI (Great Britain), CSA (Canada), UL & ANSI/INCITS (USA), SABS (South Africa), SAI (Australia), SPC/GB (China) and DIN (Germany). IEC standards harmonized by other certifying bodies generally have some noted differences from the original IEC standard.