How Long Does FedRAMP Authorization Really Take?

If you ask ten people how long FedRAMP takes, you’ll usually hear some version of: “plan for 12–18 months.” That’s not wrong, but it’s not very useful either.

The better question is: what actually drives the FedRAMP timeline, and what can a CSP or consultant do to shrink it?

This guide breaks the journey into realistic phases, explains where time really goes, and shows how better preparation and automation can pull the date of your ATO closer instead of letting it drift further away.

The short answer: 9–18+ months for most CSPs

For a cloud service provider that is serious about getting authorized, a realistic expectation is:

• Pre-readiness & strategy: 1–3 months
• Readiness & control implementation: 3–6 months
• Documentation & package build (SSP, attachments): 3–6 months
• 3PAO assessment & SAR: 1–3 months
• Authorization decision & remediation: 1–3 months

These phases overlap, and the critical path depends heavily on your starting point. A security-mature SaaS with strong documentation can move faster; a team treating FedRAMP as its first serious security program will feel every month of the journey.

Phase 0: Strategy and go/no-go (1–3 months)

Before you “start FedRAMP,” you should answer a simpler question: why are we doing this at all?

• Which federal agencies or programs are we targeting?
• What impact level do we need (Low, Moderate, High, LI-SaaS)?
• Are we aiming for an Agency ATO or longer, more complex JAB authorization path?
• Do we have the engineering and security capacity to sustain FedRAMP, not just achieve it?

Good strategy work at this stage saves months later by preventing mid-stream scope changes like “we actually need a different impact level” or “this architecture won’t support our target customers.”

Phase 1: Readiness and groundwork (2–4 months)

Readiness is where you discover how far your current environment is from the FedRAMP baseline. Typical activities:

• System boundary definition and data flow diagrams
• Initial gap assessment against the appropriate FedRAMP baseline
• Policy and procedure review (or creation)
• Early conversations with potential 3PAOs and agency sponsors

Where time disappears:

• Unclear or shifting system boundaries
• Debates over multi-tenant vs dedicated architecture for federal customers
• Underestimating the number of control gaps that must be addressed before assessment

Many CSPs rush through readiness to “get started” and then discover those same issues again—this time under a microscope—during the formal assessment.

Phase 2: Control implementation and hardening (3–6 months)

Once you know your gaps, you have to close them. This phase includes:

• Implementing missing security controls and technical safeguards
• Hardening cloud environments to meet FedRAMP baselines
• Rolling out new processes: incident response, change control, access reviews, etc.
• Building logging, monitoring, and vulnerability management workflows

In reality, this looks like a lot of engineering work:

• Refactoring IAM and network architectures
• Enabling encryption where it was optional before
• Building stronger backup, DR, and availability guarantees
• Centralizing logs and standing up a SIEM or log analytics solution

Teams often underestimate the time it takes for real changes to make it through design, implementation, testing, and rollout—especially in production environments that already support paying customers.

Phase 3: Documentation and SSP build (3–6 months)

This is where FedRAMP often feels slowest: writing and refining the documentation that explains what you built.

The biggest artifact here is the System Security Plan (SSP), including:

• System description, boundary, and architecture
• Component inventory and interconnections
• Detailed control implementation narratives for every applicable control and enhancement
• Supporting plans and procedures referenced by the SSP

Even for a well-designed system, capturing that reality in a way that assessors and Authorizing Officials can follow is a heavy lift. Most CSPs underestimate:

• How long detailed, control-by-control narratives take to write
• How many iterations are needed to align architecture diagrams, text, and reality
• How much time is wasted hunting for evidence and linking it to controls

For many teams, this phase alone can consume six months or more if done manually and in isolation from engineering.

Phase 4: 3PAO assessment and SAR (1–3 months)

With a reasonably mature SSP and environment, the 3PAO will finalize the Security Assessment Plan (SAP) and execute testing. This includes:

• Interviews and evidence review
• Technical testing (vulnerability scans, configuration reviews, control sampling)
• Validation that what is described in the SSP matches reality
• Drafting and finalizing the Security Assessment Report (SAR)

The pure calendar time here is often shorter than earlier phases, but you are constrained by:

• 3PAO scheduling and resource availability
• How often you can safely schedule production testing windows
• How quickly you can respond to requests for clarifications and additional evidence

A prepared team with clean documentation and centralized evidence can move through this phase much more smoothly than a team still writing their SSP while the 3PAO is trying to test against it.

Phase 5: Authorization decision and remediation (1–3 months)

After the SAR is complete, your prospective Authorizing Official (or the JAB) reviews the package:

• SSP and attachments
• SAP and SAR
• POA&M with identified weaknesses and remediation plans

At this stage, the key questions are:

• Do the documented risks align with the agency’s risk tolerance?
• Are the remediation plans in the POA&M credible and time-bound?
• Is there enough evidence to support the stated control implementations?

Back-and-forth at this stage is normal, but extended delays often trace back to earlier issues: vague SSP content, inconsistent evidence, or a POA&M that doesn’t clearly show how and when gaps will be closed.

What really slows FedRAMP down

Across CSPs and consultants, the biggest timeline killers tend to look like this:

1. Starting without a clear boundary. You can’t document or secure what you can’t draw.
2. Writing the SSP too late. Treating documentation as an afterthought instead of a first-class artifact.
3. Evidence chaos. Screenshots and files scattered across tickets, wiki pages, and individual laptops.
4. Wishful scheduling. Assuming engineering can absorb all remediation work “on the side.”
5. One-person bottlenecks. A single SME owns the SSP, control mapping, and all responses to the 3PAO.

The FedRAMP process itself is demanding, but most of the pain comes from these practical, day-to-day realities rather than the templates.

Where FedRAMP timelines can be shortened

The good news: not every part of the journey is locked in. CSPs and their consultants can pull on a few big levers:

• Do real readiness, not just a checkbox. Invest early in boundary definition, architecture clarity, and realistic gap assessment.
• Parallelize work. Don’t wait for “perfect” architecture before starting SSP drafting; iterate in lockstep.
• Standardize evidence. Choose systems of record for logs, tickets, and artifacts and stick to them.
• Treat documentation as code. Version control your SSP, templates, and diagrams; review them like you would code.
• Use automation wherever possible. Especially for evidence collection, control mapping, and first-draft narratives.

How automation and AI can save months

Much of the FedRAMP calendar time isn’t spent on deep security work, it’s spent on searching, copying, and re-phrasing information you already have:

• Pulling configuration and logging details from AWS, Azure, GCP, or your CI/CD pipelines
• Describing the same technical reality dozens of times across control narratives
• Keeping POA&M items and SSP descriptions in sync as changes roll out

Modern tools can help by:

• Automatically collecting evidence from your cloud, identity, and monitoring systems
• Mapping controls to what you already do in your environment
• Generating first-draft narratives that engineers and compliance leads can refine instead of writing from scratch
• Keeping POA&M items tied to real tickets and infrastructure changes instead of isolated spreadsheets

The exact number of months saved will vary, but teams that invest early in automation usually feel the difference in the SSP phase and every assessment after the first one.

What is a realistic best case?

In practice, a “best case” FedRAMP timeline looks something like this:

• You already have strong security practices, policies, and monitoring in place.
• Your architecture is well-documented, and your boundary is clear.
• You centralize evidence and treat documentation as a living artifact.
• You use automation to keep SSP content and evidence in sync with your real environment.

Under those conditions, it is possible to move from serious start to ATO in roughly 6–9 months. It’s still a heavy lift—but it feels like running a disciplined project rather than pushing a boulder uphill.

Bringing it all together

When someone says “FedRAMP takes 12–18 months,” what they are really capturing is a mix of:

• Time spent deciding what you’re actually building for federal customers
• Time spent designing and implementing the right controls
• Time spent turning that reality into an SSP that assessors can understand
• Time spent coordinating with a 3PAO and agency or JAB
• Time spent fixing what the assessment uncovered

You can’t control every part of that, but you have more influence than it might seem at first glance. The earlier you invest in clarity, documentation quality, and evidence automation, the closer your target ATO date moves toward you instead of receding into the distance.