AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)
Solutions Architect – Associate is the most widely held AWS certification and the one most often named directly in cloud job postings. It tests design judgment rather than recall: given a workload with constraints on security, resilience, performance and cost, which combination of AWS services is the right answer. Every domain is framed as "design" — there is no operations or coding content.
- 65
- Questions
- 130 min
- Duration
- 720 on a 100–1000 scaled
- Passing score
- US$150
- Exam cost
50 scored, 15 unscored
score
confirm current local pricing on aws.amazon.com
Exam facts reviewed July 2026 · Independent study resource, not affiliated with Amazon Web Services
Who should take it
Engineers, architects and senior operations staff who already work on AWS and need the credential that hiring managers recognise. AWS recommends at least a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS. That recommendation carries more weight here than on Cloud Practitioner — the exam is written around trade-offs that are hard to reason about if you have never had to make them.
Skills measured
Domains and weightings as published by Amazon Web Services. Full objectives →
- 30%Design Secure Architectures
- 26%Design Resilient Architectures
- 24%Design High-Performing Architectures
- 20%Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
What’s inside
What you get on Kwizza for this certification — free, no account needed to start.
- 328
- Practice questions
- 5
- Full exams
- 4
- Domains covered
- Free
- Cost
weighted to the official blueprint
every answer explained
Prepare with Kwizza
- Free practice exam — full-length, weighted to the official blueprint, every answer explained
- Study guide — domain-by-domain focus areas, common mistakes, exam-day tips
- Exam objectives — the official domains, unpacked
- Sample questions — real items from our bank, with answers and explanations
- How our exams are made — the quality pipeline behind every question
Frequently asked questions
- Should I take Cloud Practitioner first?
- Only if you are new to AWS. If you already build on AWS, go straight to this exam — it is the credential employers actually ask for, and Cloud Practitioner is not a prerequisite.
- What score do I need to pass?
- 720 on a scaled range of 100–1000. That scaling is not a straight percentage of questions correct, so treat any percentage you see — including on practice exams — as an approximation rather than a threshold.
- How much hands-on experience do I really need?
- AWS recommends about a year designing on AWS. You can pass with less through disciplined study, but the exam rewards having felt the trade-offs — the difference between knowing what Multi-AZ is and having chosen it over multi-Region for a real budget.
- How is this different from the Developer – Associate exam?
- Solutions Architect asks which services to combine and why; Developer asks how to build, secure and ship application code on them. Architect never asks you to read code, and Developer goes far deeper on SDKs, APIs and CI/CD.
- How long does the certification last?
- Three years. You can recertify by passing the current version of the exam, or automatically by earning a higher-level AWS certification.
Related certifications
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) — The foundational exam to take first if AWS is new to you
- AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) — The same level, from the application-building side
- Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer — The closest associate-level equivalent on Google Cloud