What is a B Corp?

A B Corp is a for-profit company that has been certified by the nonprofit B Lab for meeting a defined standard of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. The certification is voluntary, it has to be earned through an assessment and it has to be renewed. As of 2026 there are roughly 10,000 certified B Corps across more than 100 countries.

That is the short version. The rest of this post covers what the certification actually requires, what it does not cover and how to read it as a job seeker.

Who runs it

B Lab is a nonprofit founded in 2006 in the United States. It created the certification, maintains the standards and verifies each company that applies. B Lab is the only organization that can grant B Corp status. A company cannot self-certify.

What a company has to do

Certification has three parts.

1. Pass an assessment. Companies complete the B Impact Assessment, a detailed questionnaire covering five areas: governance, workers, community, environment and customers. It asks about things like pay ratios, benefits, supply chain practices, energy use and how the company makes decisions. B Lab reviews the answers and asks for documentation on a sample of them.

2. Meet a legal requirement. The company has to build stakeholder consideration into its legal structure, so that the board is required to weigh the interests of workers, customers, the community and the environment, not only shareholders. In the United States this usually means registering as a benefit corporation in the state where the company is incorporated.

3. Commit to transparency. Each certified company's assessment results are published on B Lab's public directory, so anyone can look up how a company scored and in which areas.

Certification is not permanent. Companies recertify every three years and are expected to improve over time. B Lab's updated standards, rolling out from 2026, replace the single passing score with minimum requirements a company must meet across several impact topics.

B Corp vs. benefit corporation

These get confused constantly, so here is the distinction.

• B Corp is a certification from a nonprofit. It measures how a company actually performs.
• Benefit corporation is a legal status granted by a state. It changes what a company's board is legally allowed and required to consider.

A company can be one without being the other. Many B Corps are also benefit corporations because the certification requires a legal commitment, but a benefit corporation has not necessarily been assessed by anyone.

What the certification does not tell you

A B Corp certification is a signal, not a guarantee. It tells you a company has been assessed against a public standard and cleared it. It does not tell you what a specific job pays, what the benefits are or what a specific team is like to work on. Those still have to be checked role by role.

It also does not mean a company is small, a startup or a nonprofit. Certified B Corps include large consumer brands with thousands of employees.

A few recognizable examples

• Patagonia
• Ben & Jerry's
• Dr. Bronner's
• King Arthur Baking (also employee-owned)
• Allbirds

Why it matters when you're job hunting

The practical value of the certification is that someone else has already done a first round of checking. If a company is a certified B Corp, you know it has documented its practices around pay, benefits, governance and environmental impact, and that the results are public. That narrows the research you have to do before applying.

It is one of the categories of employer listed on The Better Work Co., alongside benefit corporations, employee-owned businesses, worker cooperatives, climate and sustainability companies, nonprofits and social enterprises.