Study guide · Exam overview
The format and five content domains AWS announced for the Solutions Architect – Professional update, plus the dates that retire SAP-C02 and the numbers AWS has not published yet.
Exam version notice: This overview follows the AWS Training and Certification announcement of September 1, 2026. SAP-C03 registration opens October 27, 2026. The last day to take SAP-C02 is November 16, 2026. SAP-C03 delivery begins November 17, 2026. AWS said the full exam guide, with task statements, will be available when registration opens. Domain weights and a passing score are not in the announcement. This page does not invent them. The Associate exam is a different certification. Start there if you still need the SAA-C03 overview.
SAP-C03 checks whether you can design optimized AWS solutions for a complex organization. AWS describes the target candidate as an architect with 2 or more years of experience using AWS to design and implement cloud solutions, who can judge requirements and give guidance across more than one application. The September 2026 update keeps that role and adds the work architects now do: generative and agentic AI, post-quantum cryptography, resilience engineering, and DevSecOps in the design.
A question usually gives a constraint that two real services could almost meet. The better answer is the one that meets the constraint the stem named: the tenant that cannot share a database, the workflow that must wait for a person, the image that must not deploy with a critical finding, the Region that must take traffic when the other one fails, or the spend the design is actually creating. Read the noun the stem cares about before you pick the service you like.
Day-to-day alarm response belongs on the CloudOps path. Application code belongs on the Developer path. The Associate design exam stays on the SAA-C03 path.
Figures below come from the September 1, 2026 AWS announcement and the current Professional certification page, reviewed in October 2026.
| Specification | What AWS has said |
|---|---|
| Level | Professional. There is no required prerequisite certification. |
| Number of questions | 75. The announcement does not say how many are unscored. SAP-C02 used 65 scored questions and 10 unscored questions. |
| Question types | The current Professional exam uses multiple choice and multiple response. The announcement does not describe a change for SAP-C03. |
| Length of test | 180 minutes. Delivery is Pearson VUE, at a test center or online. |
| Passing score | Not published for SAP-C03. SAP-C02 used 750 on a scale of 100–1,000. Do not treat 750 as the SAP-C03 standard. |
| Recommended experience | 2 or more years designing and implementing solutions on AWS, including guidance on cloud-native, serverless, and AI-integrated architectures. |
| Exam price | 300 USD in the announcement. Taxes and local-currency prices can differ. Confirm the fee before you book. |
| Languages | All languages the Professional exam supports at launch. Confirm the list when you register. |
| Validity | The current Professional certification is valid for three years. A SAP-C02 credential stays active through its original expiration date. |
| Exam guide | Scheduled for October 27, 2026, when registration opens. Task statements and domain weights are not public before that. |
On the current Professional exam, a blank answer is incorrect and there is no penalty for guessing. The SAP-C03 announcement does not say that scoring rule changed. Answer every question unless the published guide says otherwise.
These names are from the September 1, 2026 announcement. Percentages are not included because AWS has not published them. The 200 practice questions use 40 items in each domain so you can practice all five. That split is not an exam weight.
Choose the pipeline, the workflow, the service network, and the tenant boundary the constraint names.
Keep the model, the agent, and the account inside the boundary you were given.
Meet the availability number, then remove the spend the design does not need.
Name the failure, the recovery objective, and the tool that moves the workload.
Ship through a pipeline, watch the container, and learn from the user path.
The announcement names these additions. The same map is in the core notes and flashcards.
| Design need | Prefer | Remember |
|---|---|---|
| Answers from your documents, without training a model | A Bedrock knowledge base | Fine-tuning changes the model. Guardrails filter. They do not retrieve the document. |
| An agent that must not hold a long-term key | AgentCore Identity | A key in the prompt is the exposure. A person still approves the dangerous action. |
| Block disallowed model output | Bedrock Guardrails | A bucket policy does not read the model response. |
| A workflow that survives a long wait | A Step Functions standard workflow and a task token | Express workflows are the short, high-volume path. They are not the year-long audit. |
| Service auth across VPCs and accounts | VPC Lattice | ECS Service Connect is discovery inside ECS. It is not that multi-account network. |
| Stop an image with a critical finding | Scan on push, then fail the pipeline | Turning the scan off ships the finding. It does not close it. |
| A tenant that cannot share a data store | A silo for that tenant | A pool is the cheap shared design. It is the wrong answer when isolation is the constraint. |
| Replay and your own consumers | Kinesis Data Streams | Data Firehose delivers and buffers. It is not the replay log. |
| A signature that stays sound against a quantum computer | KMS with ML-DSA | ML-KEM encapsulates a key. It is not the signature algorithm. |
| Prove the design meets an RTO before the outage | Resilience Hub, then a Fault Injection Service experiment | A dashboard shows the last failure. It does not assess the target. |
| Move traffic off a failing Availability Zone | Application Recovery Controller | Multi-AZ failover of one database is not a zonal shift for the whole stack. |
| Lift a server with continuous replication | AWS Application Migration Service | Database Migration Service moves the database. DataSync moves files. Snow is the offline truck. |
| A steady fleet at a lower rate | A Compute Savings Plan | Spot is for work that can stop. It is not the only copy of a stateful primary. |
| Private S3 from a VPC without NAT processing fees | A gateway endpoint | An interface endpoint is a different hourly ENI. |
On the current Professional exam, multiple choice has one correct response and three distractors. Multiple response has two or more correct responses out of five or more options. The stem tells you how many to choose. The SAP-C03 announcement does not describe a new question type.
Distractors are real services that solve a nearby problem. If the need is “retrieve our documents,” fine-tuning is the nearby wrong answer because it changes the model instead of reading the corpus. If the need is “wait a week for a legal approval,” an Express workflow is the nearby wrong answer because it is not the durable execution. If the need is “this tenant’s data cannot sit with the others,” a shared table with a tenant column is the nearby wrong answer because the stem already forbade sharing.
Words such as MOST, BEST, and LEAST are the constraint. MOST cost-effective still has to meet the recovery number. LEAST operational overhead usually means a managed service. There is no published penalty for a wrong guess on the current exam. A blank answer is incorrect.
A practical sequence once you can already design a single-account workload. Re-read the exam guide on October 27, 2026, when AWS publishes the task statements and weights.
Write the isolation, the latency, the approval, or the recovery number before you name a service. Two Amazon services can both be real and only one fits.
Retrieval, a guardrail, an agent identity, and a human approval are four different controls. Do not fine-tune a model because the documents changed this morning.
Lattice is the cross-account service network. Service Connect stays inside ECS. A silo is for the tenant that cannot share. A pool is for the tenants that can.
Resilience Hub assesses the objective. Fault Injection Service runs the experiment. Application Recovery Controller shifts the zone or the Region. Multi-AZ is not that Regional plan.
Savings Plans for the steady fleet, Spot for the interruptible slice, a gateway endpoint instead of NAT for S3, and a storage class that matches how soon you must read the object.
Use the five flashcard decks, then the original questions. Review every explanation. AWS has not published a SAP-C03 passing score, so treat percent correct as your own trend, not as a prediction.
The overview, core notes, flashcards, and practice exams are all published.
Exam format, five announced domains, the SAP-C02 dates, and a study plan.
Reference notes for cloud-native design, security, cost, resilience, and operations.
50 recall cards in five decks, plus memory notes for mesh, tenancy, recovery, and spend.
200 original questions with custom exams, explanations, and a score report by domain.
The exam you can book today is SAP-C02. AWS announced SAP-C03 on September 1, 2026. Registration for SAP-C03 opens October 27, 2026, the last day to take SAP-C02 is November 16, 2026, and SAP-C03 delivery begins November 17, 2026. This path follows that announcement. Confirm the code on the AWS certification page before you book.
AWS has not published a SAP-C03 passing score. The September 1, 2026 announcement lists 75 questions, 180 minutes, and a price of 300 USD. It does not list a scaled score or a minimum. SAP-C02 used a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 with a minimum of 750. Do not treat 750 as the published SAP-C03 standard.
The announcement says 75 questions and 180 minutes. It does not say how many of those questions are unscored. SAP-C02 had 65 scored questions and 10 unscored questions. Question types on the current Professional exam are multiple choice and multiple response. The announcement does not describe a change to those types.
There is no required prerequisite certification. AWS describes the candidate as someone with 2 or more years of experience using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions, who can evaluate requirements and give guidance across cloud-native, serverless, and AI-integrated architectures.
Take SAP-C02 by November 16, 2026 if you are already prepared and want the credential now. AWS says that credential stays active through its original expiration date. Wait for SAP-C03 if you want the exam that adds cloud-native design, generative and agentic AI, and modern resilience engineering. The full exam guide is scheduled for October 27, 2026.
The current Professional certification is valid for three years. AWS says a SAP-C02 credential does not end early because SAP-C03 launches. Recertify by passing the latest version of this exam. Confirm the policy with AWS before your expiration date.
No. The practice questions on this site are original. They are not AWS exam items, and a practice score does not predict a result.
Service names and prices change. Use the exam guide AWS publishes on October 27, 2026, and the AWS certification site, as the authority when they differ from these notes.
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Exam versions, objectives, prices, languages, and retirement dates can change. Verify the details on the AWS certification page before you register.
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