About the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) Exam

Quick Answer: The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam has 65 questions, a 130-minute limit, and requires a scaled score of 720 out of 1,000 to pass. It costs 150 USD and tests four domains: Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%).

What the Credential Validates

The SAA-C03 is the current version of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam, having replaced SAA-C02 in August 2022. It validates that you can design solutions that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized on AWS, choosing the right service for a given set of requirements and trade-offs. It is an associate-tier credential, sitting above the foundational Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) and below the Professional (SAP-C02) and specialty exams.

Exam Format at a Glance

The Four Domains and Their Weights

The single most important table to memorize is the domain breakdown, because it tells you exactly where to spend your study hours. Roughly 28 of the 50 scored questions come from the first two domains alone.

On the Exam: Security (30%) plus Resilience (26%) equal 56% of the scored content. If you are short on time, master IAM, encryption, VPC isolation, Multi-AZ, and decoupling first.

Domain Task Statements

Each domain decomposes into task statements that map directly to clusters of services:

• Domain 1 - Secure: secure access to resources (IAM, AWS STS, Organizations, federation); secure workloads (VPC design, security groups, network access control lists, AWS WAF, AWS Shield); data security controls (AWS KMS, encryption in transit and at rest, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Macie).
• Domain 2 - Resilient: scalable and loosely coupled designs (Auto Scaling, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge); highly available and fault-tolerant designs (Multi-AZ, Multi-Region, disaster recovery strategies).
• Domain 3 - High-Performing: storage (Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx); compute (Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, containers); databases (Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache); networking (Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, Transit Gateway); and data ingestion (Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue).
• Domain 4 - Cost-Optimized: storage cost (S3 lifecycle policies, storage classes); compute cost (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, right-sizing); database cost (Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB on-demand, reserved capacity).

Question Types and Scoring

Multiple-choice questions give four options and exactly one is correct. Multiple-response questions give five or more options and ask you to select a stated number (for example, "Choose TWO"). Critically, there is no partial credit: on a multi-response item you must select every correct option and no incorrect option to earn the point.

Of the 65 questions, 15 are unscored pretest items that AWS uses to validate future questions. They are indistinguishable from scored items, so treat every question as if it counts. Scoring is scaled from 100 to 1,000, with 720 as the pass mark. Because difficulty is equated across exam forms, AWS does not publish a raw question count needed to pass; aim for roughly 72%+ accuracy on practice exams as a safety margin.

Prerequisites and Audience

There are no formal prerequisites. AWS recommends at least one year of hands-on experience designing distributed systems on AWS plus familiarity with compute, networking, storage, and database services. Typical candidates are cloud architects, DevOps and platform engineers, and developers who passed the Cloud Practitioner and want to advance.

Registration, Cost, and Recertification

1. Sign in at the AWS Certification portal (CertMetrics-backed) via your AWS Skill Builder account.
2. Select SAA-C03 and choose Pearson VUE or PSI delivery.
3. Pick a test center or online proctored slot and pay 150 USD.

Holding an active AWS certification gives you a 50% discount voucher for your next exam and a free Official Practice Question Set on AWS Skill Builder. The credential is valid for 3 years; you recertify by passing the current version of this exam (or a higher-level one) before expiry. Pass/fail appears on screen immediately; the detailed score report with domain-level performance posts to your account within 5 business days.

Languages and Accommodations

The exam is offered in English plus Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. Non-native English speakers taking the exam in English can request a free ESL +30 accommodation that adds 30 minutes, but the request must be approved before scheduling, not during the exam. Other accommodations (such as additional break time) are also requested through the AWS Certification portal in advance.

What 'Best Answer' Really Means

A defining feature of SAA-C03 is that most questions present multiple options that would technically function. The exam is testing judgment: given a stated constraint, which design is the most appropriate? For example, a question may offer both an EC2-hosted relational database and Amazon Aurora; both store data, but if the qualifier is 'least operational overhead', Aurora wins. Training yourself to read the qualifier and rank the working options against it - rather than hunting for the single 'correct' fact - is the core skill the credential certifies.

This is also why rote memorization of service feature lists is insufficient; you must understand trade-offs between cost, durability, latency, and management effort.

Score Report and Retakes

If you do not pass, you must wait 14 days before retaking, and each attempt requires a new 150 USD registration (or a discount voucher if you hold another active certification). There is no limit on the total number of attempts within a year beyond the 14-day spacing rule. Use the domain-level breakdown in your score report to target weak areas before rebooking.