IPVanish Passes a Third Independent No-Logs Audit

IPVanish has passed a third independent audit of its no-logs policy. Schellman Compliance completed it on 25 September 2026, and IPVanish announced the result on 5 November. The auditors found that “no logs were retained by IPVanish”.

TechRadar’s Mark Gill reported the audit on 6 November. We read IPVanish’s announcement, its Trust Center and its policy pages on 7 November. Our IPVanish review sets the audit against the rest of its record.

What happened

IPVanish says the auditors had “unrestricted access to our systems, configurations, and teams”. According to its announcement, they checked four things:

• how its servers are configured
• test traffic, in which they looked for any sign of logging in DNS queries, VPN metadata and server responses
• the data used to detect abuse of the network, which is processed in memory only, with no logs kept
• the rule that any change to systems or settings needs approval from two people

The announcement quotes the report: “During the assessment, it was validated that no logs were retained by IPVanish and that a standardized change release process was in place.”

Customers can download the full 2026 report from the Security Reports page in the account portal, and journalists can ask for a copy. The same post links the 2025 report and Leviathan Security Group’s 2022 letter as free downloads, so anyone can read those two.

One detail does not match: the announcement and the Trust Center date the audit to September 2026, but IPVanish’s no-log policy page says “October 2026”. We follow the announcement, which gives the exact day.

Why it matters

A no-logs promise is only as good as the evidence behind it, and IPVanish has more to prove than most. In 2016, under its previous owner Highwinds, it gave the US Department of Homeland Security a subscriber’s name, email address, real IP address and connection times. It was advertising a no-logs policy at the time. Court documents reported by TorrentFreak in 2018 revealed the case.

Ziff Davis owns IPVanish today, and its current policy has now been checked three times, by Leviathan in 2022 and by Schellman in 2025 and 2026. The policy page now promises “annual independent audits”. In our data, 7 of the 12 VPNs we track have a no-logs audit from the past two years, while PrivadoVPN and Windscribe have none.

An audit still has limits. It shows what the auditors saw while they looked, not what happens afterwards. It also cannot stop a US court from ordering a company to log a particular user in future.

IPVanish is based in the US, and part of its network still runs on hard drives rather than RAM-only servers, which wipe their data on every restart. It plans to finish the switch by 2027. Our no-logs explainer covers what audits can and cannot prove.

Its score does not change, because the 2025 audit already earned the full points our methodology gives a recent audit. The new one keeps those points for longer.

What to do

1. If you already use IPVanish, nothing changes for you. You can read the full 2026 report under Security Reports in your account portal.
2. If you are choosing a VPN for privacy, download the 2025 report from IPVanish’s announcement and read it before you pay. Then weigh the audits against the US base and the 2016 case. Our best VPNs for privacy page compares the options.
3. If you buy, plan for the renewal. The 2-year Essential plan costs $52.56, then renews at $99.99 a year. The 30-day money-back guarantee covers yearly and 2-year plans only, not monthly ones.

What we changed

We added the audit to our IPVanish data. That updates the audit timeline in our IPVanish review and the audit table in our no-logs explainer. IPVanish reused the web address of its 2025 announcement for this one, so our 2025 entry now links to its Trust Center.

We also updated the text of the review, the explainer and our best VPNs for streaming page. The review had said that only customers could read IPVanish’s audit reports. It now says that the 2025 report and the 2022 letter are free to download.