EASA Part-66 Recency Explained: 66.A.20(b)(2) in Plain English

If you hold an EASA Part-66 licence, you already know the rule exists. What trips up most engineers isn't the regulation itself — it's tracking it in practice, across years, multiple aircraft types, and sometimes multiple employers. This guide breaks down exactly what 66.A.20(b)(2) requires, how it's actually calculated, and the mistakes that catch engineers out at licence renewal or an authority audit.

What is 66.A.20(b)(2)?

Regulation (EU) No 1321/2014, Annex III (Part-66), Article 66.A.20(b)(2) sets the recency requirement for certifying staff: to exercise the privileges of your licence on a given aircraft type, you must demonstrate recent, relevant experience on that type.

In plain terms: holding the licence isn't enough on its own. You need to show you've actually worked on that type recently enough that your competence is current — not experience from five years ago that's since gone cold.

The two paths to currency

EASA gives you two ways to satisfy the recency requirement, within the preceding 24-month period:

Path 1 — 100 distinct working days. You need at least 100 days on which you performed maintenance tasks on the endorsed type, spread across the 24-month window.

Path 2 — 180 tasks. Alternatively, at least 180 individual maintenance tasks on the type, within the same 24 months.

You only need to satisfy one of the two paths, not both. Whichever comes easier for your work pattern — someone doing frequent short tasks might rack up 180 tasks well before 100 distinct days; someone on long, complex jobs might hit 100 days of presence on type without needing 180 separate task entries.

The part everyone forgets: the 6-month spread

Here's where most logbook tracking — spreadsheets included — quietly gets it wrong. It's not enough to hit 100 days or 180 tasks concentrated in a short burst. EASA requires that experience be spread across at least 6 months of the 24-month window.

Why this matters in practice: an engineer who does an intense 3-month contract on a type, racking up 120 days of work, then does nothing on that type for the following 21 months, does not meet recency at the end of the 24-month period — even though the raw day count looks fine. The spread requirement exists precisely to stop a short burst of experience from counting as "current" long after the fact.

This is the single most common reason engineers get an unpleasant surprise when applying for a job or renewing authorisations: the numbers "look right" until someone checks the spread.

Recency is tracked per aircraft type AND per licence category

Recency isn't a single number for your whole career — it resets per combination of aircraft type and licence category. A B1.1 engineer with type ratings on the 737NG and the A320 has two separate recency clocks, one per type. Hold a B2 rating on the same aircraft as well, and that's a third clock, tracked independently.

This is exactly why so many engineers lose track manually: keeping three or four independent 24-month rolling windows in a notebook or spreadsheet, each needing its own day count, task count, and spread check, is exactly the kind of bookkeeping that's easy to get right in January and wrong by October.

Dual licences and Category C

Two situations add extra nuance that a lot of guidance skips over:

Dual licence categories. If you're endorsed under both B1 and B2 on the same type — common for engineers who trained across mechanical and avionics — a single task can count toward both recency clocks simultaneously, if it was genuinely performed under both sets of privileges. Each category still needs its own 100-day/180-task/6-month tally.

Category C. Base maintenance certifying staff (Category C) work under a different model — there's no per-type 66.A.20(b)(2) currency clock in the same sense as B1/B2. What actually matters for Category C is your organisation's procedures and your task history on the type, which is more of a running record than a rolling recency calculation.

The authorities that check this

It's not an abstract requirement — it's checked at points that matter for your career:

Licence renewal or extension applications to your competent authority
Internal authorisation renewals within your Part-145 organisation
Quality department audits and spot-checks
When a new employer wants proof of currency before issuing you a company authorisation

In every case, the burden of proof is on you. "I've definitely worked on that type recently" doesn't hold up without dated, task-level records to back it.

How to actually track this without losing your mind

The manual approach — a spreadsheet with dates, types, and a running count — works until you have more than one or two types, or more than a year of history. The spread requirement in particular is very easy to get wrong by eye: it requires checking not just totals, but the distribution of dates across the window, recalculated every time the 24-month window rolls forward.

This is precisely the gap AirMXTrack was built to close. Every entry you log — imported from a photo of a work order, a PDF, or typed manually — is automatically tracked against 66.A.20(b)(2): distinct days, task counts, and the 6-month spread, calculated independently for every aircraft type and licence category you hold, updated the moment you save an entry. When you need to prove currency, a Recency Letter is one click away, formatted and ready to submit.

Track your EASA Part-66 recency automatically → airmxtrack.com

AirMXTrack is a digital maintenance logbook built by a Licensed Aircraft Engineer, for Licensed Aircraft Engineers. Free to start, no credit card required.