The Welsh Language Standards, Explained

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave Welsh official status in Wales and created the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner. It also replaced the older system of Welsh language schemes, which organisations wrote for themselves, with standards written by the Welsh Government and approved by the Senedd.

The Standards do not apply automatically. The process has three steps. First, the Welsh Government makes a set of regulations for a sector, for example councils or health boards. Second, the Commissioner investigates each organisation in that sector and decides which individual standards are reasonable and proportionate for it. Third, the Commissioner issues a compliance notice that lists those standards and the date each one takes effect. From that date the duties are enforceable.

Some UK-wide bodies, including UK Government departments and Crown bodies, still operate Welsh language schemes under the Welsh Language Act 1993 rather than standards. The Commissioner has told those bodies to prepare for the move to standards.

Regulations have been made in numbered sets since 2015, each one bringing a new group of organisations under the Standards. The sets in force are:

• No. 1 Regulations 2015, the Welsh Ministers, county and county borough councils and national park authorities. The first compliance notices were issued on 30 September 2015 and the first standards came into force on 30 March 2016.
• No. 2 Regulations 2016, national public bodies such as Natural Resources Wales, the National Library of Wales and the Arts Council of Wales. Community Housing Cymru joined this group in March 2026.
• No. 4 Regulations 2016, Welsh tribunals, the Education Workforce Council and social care bodies, in force from 22 March 2016.
• No. 5 Regulations 2016, police forces, police and crime commissioners and fire and rescue authorities.
• No. 6 Regulations 2017, universities and further education institutions.
• No. 7 Regulations 2018, local health boards and NHS trusts.
• No. 8 Regulations 2022, health professional regulators.
• No. 9 Regulations 2023, water and sewerage companies, with standards applying from August 2025.
• No. 10 Regulations 2026, registered social landlords in Wales. Made on 25 March 2026 and in force from 31 March 2026, this is the newest set. The Commissioner's statutory imposition process comes next, and no compliance notices had been issued to individual landlords as of September 2026.

Private businesses and most charities are not covered. For them the Commissioner runs a voluntary recognition scheme, Cynnig Cymraeg, for organisations that choose to offer Welsh.

The regulations group the duties into classes. A compliance notice picks the specific standards from each class that apply to you.

• Service delivery standards cover the public-facing work: replying in Welsh to letters and emails written in Welsh, answering the telephone with a Welsh greeting and offering a Welsh-language service, publishing website content and social media in Welsh, providing Welsh versions of forms, publications and press releases, putting Welsh on signs no less prominently than English, and offering Welsh at public meetings and reception desks.
• Policy making standards require you to consider the effect of every new policy on opportunities to use Welsh, and on treating Welsh no less favourably than English.
• Operational standards apply inside the organisation: internal policies, staff communications, training, and assessing Welsh language skills when you advertise a post.
• Record keeping standards require records of complaints, staff Welsh skills and the training offered.
• Promotion standards, for councils and national parks, require a five-year strategy to promote the Welsh language in the area.

Most notices also set the order and prominence of the two languages. In practice that means Welsh appears first or level with English on signs and documents, and the Welsh version is published at the same time as the English one, not weeks later.

The Welsh Language Standards (No. 10) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026 No. 99) bring registered social landlords under the Standards for the first time. They were made on 25 March 2026 and came into force on 31 March 2026. Community Housing Cymru, the membership body for housing associations, was added to the No. 2 Regulations at the same time.

For a housing association the practical list is long: tenant letters and emails, rent statements, repairs booking, the website and tenant portal, complaints handling, consultation documents, board and committee papers that are published, signage in offices and schemes, recruitment adverts and the assessment of Welsh skills for new posts. The compliance notice will set the dates. As of September 2026 no landlord had yet received one, which is exactly the window in which to build Welsh capacity, so nobody is scrambling when the notice arrives.

Anyone can complain to the Welsh Language Commissioner about a failure to comply with a standard. The Commissioner can also open an investigation on her own initiative. Where an investigation finds a failure, the Commissioner can require an action plan, require specific steps to comply, publicise the failure, require the organisation to publicise its own failure, and impose a civil penalty of up to £5,000. The enforcement policy that sets this out was approved by the Welsh Ministers on 24 March 2026.

The Commissioner's assurance reports name the areas where organisations most often fail. Telephone services that cannot handle a Welsh caller, job adverts that do not assess Welsh skills, and English-only welcome statements or automated messages come up year after year. None of them needs a large budget to fix, they need the Welsh to exist and to be in place on day one.

The Standards turn Welsh from an occasional request into a weekly production line. A few working rules keep it manageable.

• Design bilingual from the start. A form or a web page that is built with the Welsh column in mind is far cheaper to maintain than one where the Welsh is bolted on after publication.
• Keep one glossary. Tenants, patients and residents notice when the same service has three Welsh names. A locked glossary shared by every translator on the account stops that.
• Use plain Welsh. Cymraeg Clir, the Welsh plain-language standard, keeps public-facing text readable. Formal register still matters in policies and legal notices.
• Build turnaround into the process. Publishing the Welsh at the same time as the English means the translation slot has to be in the publication schedule, not after it.
• Proofread inherited Welsh. Text that came from a previous supplier, a bilingual colleague or a machine translation tool should be checked by a native linguist before it goes on a sign or a website.

Our Welsh Language Standards translation service is built around these rules, with native Welsh translators, a second-linguist revision on every job, client glossaries and same-day options for short notices. For a broader look at what we do in Welsh, see Welsh translation services.

Two free tools sit alongside this guide. The Welsh Language Standards checker tells you which regulations cover your organisation and runs a ten-point readiness check drawn from the Commissioner's own reports. The free Welsh to English and English to Welsh translator gives you the gist of a Welsh sentence in seconds. It is machine translation, so anything you publish should still come from a human Welsh translator.