How Often Is NVD Updated?

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a central reference for security teams, researchers, and software vendors. It aggregates publicly discovered vulnerabilities (CVE entries) and enriches them with standardized metadata, such as CVSS scores and impact scores, to help organizations prioritize remediation. Understanding the update cadence of the NVD is essential for risk assessment, vulnerability management, and automation workflows. If you’re wondering how often is nvd updated, the answer is straightforward: the official data feeds are refreshed daily with new CVEs and updates to existing entries.

What is NVD and why does cadence matter?

The NVD is maintained by NIST and relies on collaboration with MITRE and the wider security community. It provides three primary public data feeds: CVE (the vulnerability records themselves), CPE (Common Platform Enumeration, which standardizes affected software and hardware), and CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration, which documents root causes and classes of weaknesses). The cadence matters because many security programs—vulnerability scanners, threat intel dashboards, and asset inventories—pull these feeds to keep risk scoring, patching priorities, and remediation timelines aligned with current reality.

How often are the data feeds updated?

In practice, NVD publishes updates to its data feeds on a daily basis. This daily cadence is designed to ensure that newly disclosed vulnerabilities become visible to tooling and processes as soon as possible, while also allowing for corrections and refinements to existing entries. The wording you’ll often see is that the feeds are refreshed “daily” or “each day,” with additional revisions and refinements occurring as needed. For teams that rely on automation, this means you can plan around a predictable daily update window while recognizing that some updates may occur more frequently if urgent corrections or additions are identified by MITRE or the NVD team.

What drives updates besides new CVEs?

New CVEs are the most visible driver of updates. When MITRE assigns a new CVE, NVD ingests it, validates the data, and enriches it with CVSS scores, impact metrics, and vendor-specific details. But updates also happen for other reasons:

• The CVE records themselves may be revised as more details become available from vendors or researchers.
• CVSS scores can be recalculated or revised to reflect improved scoring methodologies or new guidance.
• CPE data may be refined to better describe affected platforms and configurations.
• Widespread false positives or duplicate entries may be merged or removed as part of data quality work.

These activities ensure that the NVD remains a trustworthy, up-to-date source, even when a vulnerability life cycle involves evolving information. The ongoing maintenance is why many security teams automate checks against the NVD feeds rather than relying on manual lookups.

How to integrate NVD updates into your workflow

For organizations building vulnerability management pipelines, there are two common approaches to consume NVD data:

• Public data feeds (JSON/XML): NVD offers downloadable feeds for CVE, CPE, and CWE that can be ingested by internal tools, SIEMs, or vulnerability scanners. These feeds are designed for machine consumption and can be scheduled to refresh daily.
• APIs and search services: Some tools and portals offer API access to NVD data with query capabilities, enabling lookups by CVE ID, product, vendor, or keyword. API access often complements the feeds and can support on-demand checks in addition to daily refreshes.

When architecting your integration, consider:

• Automated refresh cadence (daily feeds plus on-demand checks as needed).
• Data normalization to align NVD fields with internal risk scoring and ticketing systems.
• Change tracking to identify newly published CVEs and updated CVSS scores.
• Error handling and retry logic in case feeds fail to download.

By aligning your tooling with the NVD cadence, you can ensure timely prioritization and more accurate remediation planning.

What to expect in practice

Most days will bring new CVEs and updates to existing records. In busy vulnerability ecosystems, some days may see more activity than others, especially when widely used software versions are affected or when new exploit details become public. It is normal to see:

• New CVEs added to the CVE feed as researchers disclose vulnerabilities.
• Updates to CVE entries, including changes to affected products and revised CVSS metrics.
• Periodic refinements to CPE entries to better capture the affected configurations.

For defenders, this means you should expect a reliable daily update rhythm and plan for automated ingestion, normalization, and alerting. Human review remains important when prioritizing remediation, but the automated feeds should keep you aligned with the latest vulnerability landscape.

Practical tips for staying current

• Subscribe to or automate the NVD data feeds to minimize delays between publication and internal visibility.
• Integrate CVE updates with your ticketing system so new vulnerabilities generate work items and risk scores automatically.
• Set up change detection to trigger reviews when CVSS scores or affected product lists change.
• Monitor for revised entries and verify that remediation plans reflect the latest data.
• Document your data sources in security runbooks, so team members understand where risk data originates and how it’s refreshed.

Common questions about NVD cadence

Does the NVD update on weekends or holidays? In practice, the feed updates follow a daily cadence, and updates can occur multiple times within a day as new CVEs are published or records are corrected. While the official documentation emphasizes daily data feeds, the operational reality is that data quality and completeness are continuously improved, which can lead to additional entries or revisions outside the core daily window. For teams, this means building resilience into pipelines to accommodate both scheduled updates and ad-hoc corrections.

Frequently cited phrase to guide teams

For teams seeking a simple anchor, think in terms of the core rhythm: how often is nvd updated? The short answer is daily updates with ongoing refinements. This cadence is designed to keep vulnerability data timely and actionable, while allowing ample capacity for data validation and quality improvements.

Conclusion

Understanding the update cadence of the NVD helps security teams align their monitoring, prioritization, and remediation activities with an authoritative source of vulnerability data. While new CVEs arrive at a steady daily pace, updates to existing records—such as recalibrated CVSS scores or refined CPE descriptions—ensure the data stays accurate over time. By automating feed ingestion, normalizing data, and integrating NVD outputs into your vulnerability management workflow, you can maintain up-to-date risk visibility without manual scrubbing. In short, how often is nvd updated? The answer is: daily, with ongoing improvements to keep the vulnerability picture current for defenders and developers alike.