What is it?

What exactly is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

Design resilient, secure, cost-smart AWS architectures.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) is the most widely held AWS certification. It validates the ability to design resilient, high-performing, secure and cost-optimised architectures using core AWS services. It is the default AWS exam for architects and a common next step after Cloud Practitioner.

The path in brief

1. Learn core AWS services
2. Book SAA-C03
3. Study the four weighted domains
4. Pass at 720
5. Advance to SAP-C02

Before you book

Who is eligible to sit the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

Who it is for: Solutions architects and engineers.

The test itself

What is the format of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate is administered by Remote proctored (Pearson VUE) and runs 130 minutes, contains 65 questions (50 scored + 15 unscored) questions and requires 720 to pass.

Money & time

How much does the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate cost?

For the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, the exam fee is $150; the all-in cost is typically $150; most candidates spend 6-10 weeks preparing.

The fine print

What are the retake and renewal rules for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

Proctoring & delivery

Delivered by Pearson VUE at a test centre or online with a live proctor. A government photo ID is required and the online environment is scanned before the session.

Retake policy

If you do not pass, you must wait 14 days before retaking the same exam. Each attempt is paid; there is no limit on attempts.

Score reporting

Exams are scored on a 100-1000 scale. Foundational pass at 700, Associate at 720, Professional and Specialty at 750. A score report shows section-level feedback under a compensatory model (no section minimum).

Recertification

All AWS certifications are valid for three years. Recertify by passing the latest version of the same exam, or by earning a higher-level credential that automatically refreshes lower ones (for example, DevOps Pro refreshes CloudOps Associate).

Refunds & rescheduling

Cancellation and reschedule rules follow Pearson VUE; refunds are generally not given for no-shows, and reschedules must occur before the cut-off window.

What it pays

How much does this credential pay?

$130,390 median for computer network architects, SOC 15-1241 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2024)

Start with a correction you will not find on most salary pages: the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish an occupation called cloud engineer, cloud architect or solutions architect. There is no SOC code for any of those titles, so every "average AWS Solutions Architect salary" you see quoted is a job-board aggregate of self-reported figures, not government data, and it is usually built from a self-selecting sample of people who bothered to report. Since BLS classifies by job duty rather than by job title or certificate, the honest approach is to name the official series whose duties actually match the SAA-C03 blueprint and read it carefully. The closest fit is Computer Network Architects, SOC 15-1241, which covers designing and implementing data communication infrastructure — the work that Domain 1 (secure architectures), Domain 2 (resilient architectures) and Domain 3 (high-performing architectures) describe in AWS terms. That occupation had a May 2024 median annual wage of $130,390, or $62.69 an hour, with the lowest 10 percent under $79,520 and the highest 10 percent above $198,030, across 179,200 jobs. Two adjacent series bracket it and are worth knowing. Software Developers, SOC 15-1252, had a May 2024 median of $133,080, and a large share of people who hold SAA-C03 are developers who architect as part of the job rather than full-time architects. Network and Computer Systems Administrators, SOC 15-1244, sat at $96,800, and that is the realistic classification for someone who passes SAA-C03 without prior design responsibility. AWS states the exam targets candidates with at least one year of hands-on experience designing AWS solutions; BLS notes that network architects typically need five or more years of related experience. The certificate does not close that gap on its own — it gets you into the conversation.

Job growth.+12% projected change 2024-34 for computer network architects (much faster than average, +21,400 jobs) with about 11,200 openings a year; software developers are projected +15% with about 129,200 annual openings across that broader group

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — Computer Network Architects (15-1241)

Your schedule

How long should I study for it?

110-140 hours of focused study

The current exam is SAA-C03, which replaced SAA-C02 on 30 August 2022 and remains the version in market. AWS has not announced a successor at the time of review, but the practical warning is the same as for any cloud exam: check the code on every course, book and question bank you buy, because SAA-C02 material is still circulating and it predates several services that now appear regularly. The SAA-C03 blueprint has four domains — Design Secure Architectures 30 percent, Design Resilient Architectures 26 percent, Design High-Performing Architectures 24 percent and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20 percent — and the ordering matters. Security is the largest single domain, which surprises candidates who expect an architecture exam to be dominated by compute and storage selection. Cost optimisation at 20 percent is also larger than most people study for, and it is the domain where the question wording does the work: "MOST cost-effective" and "LEAST operational overhead" are the qualifiers that separate two technically correct answers. AWS states the target candidate has at least one year of hands-on experience designing AWS solutions; the plan below assumes some cloud exposure but not that year, and runs ten weeks at 11 to 14 hours a week. Build it around a real AWS account within the Free Tier from day one, with a billing alarm set before you launch anything. Clicking through a VPC build once teaches you more about subnets, route tables and NAT charges than three chapters will, and the cost domain becomes concrete the first time you see a NAT gateway line item on your own bill.

1. Week 111-13 hrs

   Orientation, account setup and the Well-Architected Framework

   • Read the SAA-C03 exam guide end to end, including the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists — the out-of-scope list saves you weeks
   • Open an AWS account, enable MFA on the root user, create an admin IAM user, and set a billing alarm and a budget before launching anything
   • Read the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper; the exam is explicitly built on its pillars
   • Learn the global infrastructure vocabulary properly: Region, Availability Zone, Local Zone, edge location, and what each implies for latency and blast radius
2. Week 212-14 hrs

   Domain 1 — Design Secure Architectures, part one: identity (30%)

   • IAM in depth: users, groups, roles, policy evaluation logic, and why an EC2 instance role beats an access key every time
   • AWS Organizations, service control policies, and multi-account landing-zone patterns
   • Federation and identity: IAM Identity Center, SAML, Cognito user pools versus identity pools
   • Hands-on: assume a cross-account role, then write a resource policy that grants access to a bucket from another account
3. Week 312-14 hrs

   Domain 1 — Design Secure Architectures, part two: network and data protection (30%)

   • Build a VPC by hand: public and private subnets, route tables, internet gateway, NAT gateway, security groups versus network ACLs (stateful versus stateless)
   • Gateway and interface VPC endpoints, and when each removes both an internet path and a NAT charge
   • Encryption: KMS keys and key policies, envelope encryption, SSE-S3 versus SSE-KMS, ACM, Secrets Manager versus Parameter Store
   • Edge and detective controls: WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config, Macie — know what each one is for in one sentence
4. Week 412-14 hrs

   Domain 2 — Design Resilient Architectures, part one (26%)

   • Multi-AZ as the default answer for availability: EC2 Auto Scaling groups across AZs, Application versus Network versus Gateway Load Balancers
   • RDS Multi-AZ versus read replicas — the classic exam discrimination between availability and read scaling
   • Route 53 routing policies (simple, weighted, latency, failover, geolocation, multivalue) and health checks
   • Hands-on: put an ASG behind an ALB across two AZs, then terminate an instance and watch it heal
5. Week 511-13 hrs

   Domain 2 — Design Resilient Architectures, part two: decoupling and DR (26%)

   • Decoupling: SQS standard versus FIFO, visibility timeout, dead-letter queues, SNS fan-out, EventBridge rules, Step Functions
   • The four DR strategies by RPO and RTO: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site active-active
   • Data durability: S3 versioning, cross-Region replication, AWS Backup, EBS snapshots, Aurora global databases
   • Practise reading a requirement and converting "RPO of 5 minutes, RTO of 1 hour" into a named strategy
6. Week 612-14 hrs

   Domain 3 — Design High-Performing Architectures: storage and data (24%)

   • S3 storage classes and their retrieval characteristics; EBS volume types (gp3, io2, st1, sc1) and when each is right
   • EFS versus FSx for Windows File Server versus FSx for Lustre — the shared-storage discrimination the exam loves
   • Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB (partition key design, on-demand versus provisioned, DAX, global tables), ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached
   • Analytics touchpoints: Athena, Glue, Kinesis Data Streams versus Firehose, Redshift
7. Week 712-14 hrs

   Domain 3 — Design High-Performing Architectures: compute and network (24%)

   • EC2 instance families and placement groups; Lambda concurrency, timeouts and event sources; ECS versus EKS versus Fargate
   • CloudFront behaviours, origins and cache policies; Global Accelerator and how it differs from CloudFront
   • Hybrid and interconnect: Transit Gateway, VPC peering, Site-to-Site VPN, Direct Connect and Direct Connect with VPN backup
   • Migration and transfer: DataSync, Transfer Family, Snowball, Storage Gateway, DMS
8. Week 811-13 hrs

   Domain 4 — Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)

   • Purchase options: On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances — and which workload characteristics justify each
   • S3 lifecycle policies, Intelligent-Tiering, and the retrieval-time trade-off across Glacier tiers
   • The costs candidates forget: cross-AZ and cross-Region data transfer, NAT gateway hourly plus per-GB charges, idle load balancers, unattached EIPs and EBS volumes
   • Cost tooling: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, Compute Optimizer, Trusted Advisor
9. Week 911-13 hrs

   Question technique and timed practice

   • Take the AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set, then a full official practice exam under 130-minute conditions
   • Drill the qualifiers: MOST cost-effective, LEAST operational overhead, MOST secure, HIGHEST availability — build the habit of finding the qualifier before reading the options
   • For every miss, write one sentence explaining why the correct answer beat the one you chose; the gap is almost always a qualifier, not a service
   • Review the AWS service short-name list published for the exam so an abbreviation never costs you a question
10. Week 1011-13 hrs

    Gap closing and consolidation

    • Two more timed full-length practice exams, weighted 30/26/24/20 to the real domains
    • Rebuild from memory the three architectures the exam returns to most: a three-tier VPC, a decoupled queue-worker pipeline, and a static site on S3 behind CloudFront
    • Final pass over the discriminations that decide borderline results: Multi-AZ versus read replica, security group versus NACL, gateway versus interface endpoint, SQS versus SNS versus EventBridge
    • One quiet day before the exam

What to buy

Which study resources are worth paying for?

The SAA-C03 market is the most crowded in cloud certification, and the quality spread is enormous. Two structural facts should shape your spending. First, AWS itself gives away more than most candidates realise: the exam guide, the Exam Prep Review video series, Exam Prep Practice, flashcards and the Official Practice Question Set are all available on a free Skill Builder account, and the AWS documentation and service FAQ pages are the primary source the questions are written from. Second, the paid resource with the clearest evidence base is a good question bank, because SAA-C03 is a question-technique exam as much as a knowledge exam and no amount of video watching builds the habit of hunting for the qualifier. The AWS Skill Builder subscription at $29 monthly or $449 annually is the only paid option that includes the Official Practice Exams written by the people who write the real items, and it also unlocks AWS Builder Labs and the Certification Maintenance path that extends a certification by a year. Third-party video courses are largely interchangeable in coverage; pick one instructor whose pace you can tolerate and finish it rather than sampling four. The single most important check is the exam code: SAA-C03 replaced SAA-C02 on 30 August 2022, and SAA-C02 courses and question banks are still on sale. Prices below were checked at review time in USD. Udemy list prices are close to meaningless because the platform runs near-continuous sales, so the number you should compare against is the sale price, not the strikethrough. We take no affiliate payment and do not rank by commission.

Prices checked 2026-08 in USD before tax. The $150 exam fee is AWS’s published Associate-tier price and AWS notes it updates local-currency pricing at least annually for exchange rates. Third-party course and practice-test prices move constantly and Udemy list prices are meaningless outside a sale — confirm at the source before buying. We do not rank by commission and take no affiliate payment for placement.

What you'll face

What question types will I see?

SAA-C03 is 65 questions in 130 minutes — 50 scored plus 15 unidentified unscored pretest items — with a scaled score of 100 to 1,000 and a passing standard of 720. There are exactly two question formats and no performance-based tasks, no labs and no simulations. Multiple-choice items have one correct response and three distractors; multiple-response items have two or more correct responses among five or more options and the stem tells you how many to select. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect and there is no penalty for guessing, so leaving anything blank is strictly worse than a guess. The domain weightings are Design Secure Architectures 30 percent, Design Resilient Architectures 26 percent, Design High-Performing Architectures 24 percent and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20 percent, and scoring is compensatory — you pass on the overall scaled score, not domain by domain. The house style is consistent enough to prepare for: one or two lines of scenario, a qualifier in capitals, then four options of which two are usually workable and one is usually a service that does not do what the option claims. Pacing works out at roughly two minutes per question, which is generous by certification standards, but the generosity is deliberate — the questions are long enough that careless reading, not time pressure, is the main failure mode. The exam also uses short service names, and AWS publishes the abbreviation list in advance and makes it available through the Help button during the exam.

Samples are editor-written illustrations of the published blueprint, not live exam items.

Reference

What are the key facts about the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate is a certification credential; awarded by Amazon Web Services; the exam fee is $150; typical preparation is 6-10 weeks; holders typically earn $120,000-$165,000.

In short

Is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate worth it?

• AWS solutions architect associate exam
• Covers secure, resilient, performant, cost-optimized design
• 720 pass, $150, 130 minutes
• Valid for three years

Worth comparing

How does the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate compare with similar credentials?

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Amazon Web Services

Trust

Where does this information come from?

Everything above is taken from the awarding body's own published material. Fees, question counts and domain weights are revised regularly — check the official page before you pay.

• Amazon Web Services Awarding body
• Official AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam page Exam page

Research confidence: high · Last reviewed 2026-08