What Is the EQAR Register of Quality Assurance Agencies?

Updated

The EQAR Register is the European Higher Education Area's official list of quality assurance agencies (QAAs) that substantially comply with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the EHEA (ESG). Use it when you need to check whether a particular agency is a trustworthy reviewer of higher education institutions or programmes, or when you want to see which agencies operate under the agreed European framework. It is a register of agencies, not of institutions or programmes — for institutional and programme review results, EQAR points to a separate database.

What the Register actually contains

The Register lists quality assurance agencies that have been assessed against the ESG and found to substantially comply with them. Because the ESG is the common framework agreed across the EHEA, an agency's presence on the Register is a signal that its external review work follows shared European expectations rather than purely national ones.

The Register is one of three main resources EQAR describes:

Resource What it covers
Register Trustworthy quality assurance agencies in the EHEA
Database (DEQAR) Higher education institutions and programmes that have undergone external quality assurance, with access to the corresponding reports
Knowledge base Country information on national QA frameworks across the EHEA, plus other information on QA in Europe

If your question is "is this agency credible?", the Register is the relevant tool. If your question is "has this institution or programme been reviewed, and what did the report say?", DEQAR is the relevant tool.

How an agency gets onto the Register

Registration is not automatic and is not a one-off label. Agencies apply for registration, and decisions are taken by the Register Committee, which meets periodically — EQAR publishes its decisions after meetings such as the summer and autumn sessions. That means the Register reflects ongoing review rather than a permanent status: an agency's entry depends on continued substantial compliance with the ESG.

For a practical check, this matters in two ways:

  • Look at the agency, not just the country. A national QA system may exist without the agency being on the Register.
  • Check the current status. Because decisions are made at committee meetings, the composition of the Register changes over time.

How to use it in practice

  1. Identify the agency named in a review report, accreditation decision, or institutional claim.
  2. Search the Register on eqar.eu to see whether that agency is listed.
  3. If it is listed, you have evidence that it substantially complies with the ESG — useful when comparing credentials across countries.
  4. If it is not listed, that does not by itself prove the agency is untrustworthy; it may simply not have applied, or not have been assessed. Treat it as a signal to look further.
  5. For review outcomes, move to DEQAR, which currently holds 134,243 reports covering 5,192 institutions, to find the actual external quality assurance reports.

Where the Register is useful — and where it is not

Good fit: students, institutions, and administrators trying to judge whether a QA agency operates within the European framework; anyone comparing how quality assurance is organised across EHEA countries.

Poor fit: checking whether a specific degree or institution is "good" — that requires the review reports in DEQAR, and the Knowledge base for how each country's national QA framework is set up.

EQAR also runs projects and publishes a newsletter (roughly four issues per year) covering new agencies on the Register, policy developments, and how EQAR is used in national QA frameworks — useful if you need to track changes rather than make a one-time check.