The NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) is a network protocol used in some products from Novell, Inc. It is usually associated with the NetWare operating system, but parts of it have been implemented on other platforms such as Linux, Windows NT and various flavors of Unix.

It is used to access file, print, directory, clock synchronization, messaging, remote command execution and other network service functions. TCP/IP and IPX/SPX (obsoleted, technical support is provided only for NetWare platform) are the supported underlying protocols. TCP/IP implementations use TCP/UDP port 524 and rely on SLP for name resolution.

Novell eDirectory uses NCP for synchronizing data changes between the servers in a directory service tree.