What AWS Certification Costs, Line by Line
Three exam prices, one retake rule, and a training market that can multiply the bill by twenty. Every figure here comes from AWS’s own pages.
An AWS certification costs $100, $150 or $300, depending on the level, and nothing else is fixed. The exam fee is the only price AWS sets; everything else on your invoice is training you chose to buy.
That sentence is the whole answer, and it is why this page is short on totals and long on what the totals are made of. The prices below were read off AWS’s own exam pages on 24 September 2026, and the level structure is laid out in full on the AWS certification path.
The three exam prices
Foundational exams — Cloud Practitioner and AI Practitioner — are $100 each, for 90 minutes and 65 questions. Associate exams — Solutions Architect, Developer, Data Engineer, CloudOps Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer — are $150 each, for 130 minutes and 65 questions. Professional and specialty exams are $300 each: 180 minutes and 75 questions at professional level, 170 minutes and 65 questions for the specialties.
One exception is live today. The AWS Certified AI Business Strategist exam is in beta, and AWS prints the beta price and the standard price on the same page: $50 now, 100 USD standard. Beta pricing is temporary by definition, so treat it as an offer with an expiry you do not control.
AWS prices in US dollars on these pages and settles other currencies and tax at registration. No figure on this site has been converted from one currency to another, because a converted price is a guess wearing a decimal point.
What a failure costs
The full fee again, plus a fortnight. AWS’s policy is direct: you must wait 14 calendar days before retaking a failed exam, and “you must pay the full registration fee for each exam attempt”. There is no reduced resit and no limit on attempts.
That rule is the strongest financial argument for buying practice questions, and the arithmetic is simple: any preparation that costs less than the exam fee and prevents one failure has paid for itself. A month of AWS Skill Builder at $29 against a $300 professional retake is the clearest version of that trade. It is a very different argument from “invest in your career”, which has no arithmetic in it at all.
What AWS gives away
Three preparation products are free on AWS’s certification prep page, and they are not token offerings.
- Official Practice Question Sets — “20-question sets, developed by AWS”, written to “demonstrate the style of our certification exams”.
- Exam Prep Courses — two-hour digital courses that walk an exam’s topic areas and review sample questions for each domain.
- AWS Cloud Quest — game-based training, and the free recertification route for Cloud Practitioner three years later.
AWS’s training pages advertise “1,000+ free learning resources” and over 900 free self-paced digital courses on top of those. For a foundational exam, that is enough. It pays this site nothing, which is worth saying plainly on a page about money.
What AWS charges for
One subscription: AWS Skill Builder, at $29 a month or $449 a year, the annual plan adding Digital Classroom. Behind that paywall sit the Official Practice Exams, the enhanced Exam Prep Course with “6-8 hours of practice materials like videos, hands-on labs, additional practice questions”, and the labs.
The monthly price is the interesting one. A single month timed for the fortnight before an exam is $29 — less than a fifth of an associate exam fee, and it buys the official practice exam for that specific test. Twelve months of it, for one certification, is $449 and mostly unused. Which side of the paywall each product sits on has the full breakdown.
The third-party market, and what it is worth
Outside AWS the prices spread out enormously. Practice-exam libraries such as Whizlabs sell question banks cheaply; Udemy sells single video courses outright, frequently discounted; Coursera carries AWS-authored material on subscription; and Simplilearn, KnowledgeHut and Edureka run instructor-led certification courses that run into the hundreds or low thousands. Those are partner links, tagged sponsored and nofollow, and they may pay Stackrung a commission — which is the reason this section comes after the free one and not before it.
Our view, stated as a view: question banks are the best-value paid category because they attack the thing that actually fails candidates, which is format. Instructor-led courses are worth it when an employer pays and you learn badly alone. Neither can promise you a pass, and no training vendor’s advertised outcome figures appear on this site.
What the bill looks like in practice
Three worked cases, using only prices from this page.
- Cheapest honest route to a foundational certification. $100 exam, free AWS preparation, no subscription. Total: $100.
- A working engineer taking an associate exam. $150 exam plus one month of Skill Builder at $29 for the official practice exam and labs. Total: $179.
- Foundational, then associate, then professional, passed first time. $100 plus $150 plus $300 in fees. Total: $550, spread over however many months you need, plus whatever preparation you chose.
Those numbers are arithmetic on figures already on this page. They are not a forecast of what you will spend, because the variable is you.
The costs nobody puts in the total
Renewal, every three years: an AWS certification is valid for three years, and the default renewal is retaking the current version at full price. AWS softens that with a 50% discount voucher in your certification account when you recertify or upgrade, a free Cloud Quest recertification for Cloud Practitioner only, and a Skill Builder maintenance route that extends a certification by one year — with an active paid subscription, inside the last 90 days. Renewal, route by route works through each.
And the cost that never appears on an invoice: time. AWS recommends a year of hands-on experience for most associate exams and two or more for the professionals. That is the real price of the ladder, and no discount code touches it.
Who actually pays, and how to ask
A large share of AWS exams are paid for by employers, and the request is easier to make when it is framed as the small number it is. An associate exam plus one month of official practice material is $179 — a line item rather than a budget conversation.
Two arguments tend to work better than “it will help my career”. The first is partner-network staffing: organisations that hold AWS partner status need certified people on the books, which makes your exam fee an operational cost rather than a personal favour. The second is the syllabus argument — the exam guide is AWS’s own description of what a competent person in that role knows, and working through it closes gaps that show up in production.
Ask for the retake in the same conversation. AWS charges the full fee for each attempt after a 14-day wait, and an employer who has agreed to one exam rarely refuses the second if it was mentioned at the start.
The costs that are not money
Time is the real price, and it is the one no article quantifies honestly because it varies so much. AWS recommends about a year of hands-on experience for most associate exams and two or more years for the professional ones. Those recommendations are not study estimates — they describe experience you either have or do not.
What we will not do is tell you how many hours of study an exam takes. Every published figure of that kind comes from someone selling a course of exactly that length, and the honest answer depends on how much of the recommended experience you already hold. Work through AWS’s free 20-question sets early: they are the cheapest way to find out how far off you are, and they cost nothing at all.
Prices that are not in dollars
AWS prints a USD figure on each exam page and settles other currencies at registration, which means the number you pay depends on where you sit the exam and what tax applies there. Google does the same thing more explicitly, printing “$99” and “$125” with “plus tax where applicable” beside them.
Microsoft does not print a dollar price at all for Azure Fundamentals — its page says the price is “based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored”. That is why you will not find an Azure exam price anywhere on this site, converted or otherwise. The full comparison of what each cloud publishes covers where that leaves you if you are choosing between platforms.
Cost questions, answered from the source
How much does AWS certification cost in total?
Does AWS offer free exam vouchers?
Is the AWS Skill Builder subscription required?
What does a retake cost?
This guide sits on one rung. The whole AWS certification path, level by level shows where it falls, what the next exam costs, and which exams AWS has dated for retirement. Exam facts here come from AWS’s own pages on 24 September 2026; check the exam page again before you pay, because versions and prices change.