SAA-C03 · AWS
Taking SAA-C03? What you need to know before you book
Before you book SAA-C03: how the exam is actually scored, what each of the four domains weighs, whether a new version is coming, and where the task statements get specific.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) checks that you can design solutions on AWS based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework: architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing and cost-optimized, for today's requirements and for projected ones. The exam guide describes the target candidate as someone with at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS.
What the exam measures
| Domain | Weight of scored content |
|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
AWS gives a single percentage for each SAA-C03 domain. Security is the largest, but the spread is narrow: even the smallest domain, cost-optimized architectures, accounts for 20% of scored content.
Which version you will sit
SAA-C03 is the current exam code, and AWS names no successor. Its objectives date from 30 August 2022, the date of AWS's own announcement of the update. The exam guide itself carries no revision table, so that announcement is the only place AWS fixes the date.
AWS announced that the Italian version of the exam would retire after 31 December 2026. This affects language availability, not the exam objectives or credential. We covered it in AWS is retiring the Italian version.
How the exam is scored and delivered
- Format: 65 questions in 130 minutes, either multiple choice (one correct response and three distractors) or multiple response (two or more correct out of five or more options).
- Unscored items: 15 of the 65 questions do not count and are not identified. 50 affect your score.
- Guessing: unanswered questions are scored as incorrect, and there is no penalty for guessing, so never leave one blank.
- Scoring: a scaled score from 100 to 1,000, with 720 as the minimum passing score. The model is compensatory: you are assessed on the exam as a whole, not domain by domain.
- Delivery: at a Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored.
- Languages: At the recorded check on September 19, 2026, AWS listed English, French (France), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. AWS announced that the Italian version would retire after December 31, 2026. Check AWS for current availability.
Where the task statements get specific
AWS guides list, under each task statement, the knowledge and skills behind it. That is where the exam turns concrete:
- Database choices. Choosing a database engine (the guide's example is MySQL compared with PostgreSQL) and a database type, such as relational or non-relational.
- Disaster recovery. Backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active failover, with recovery point and recovery time objectives. Know what each strategy costs you in RPO, RTO and money.
- Resilience building blocks. Load balancing, proxy concepts such as Amazon RDS Proxy, service quotas and throttling, and removing single points of failure.
- Edge and network design. Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator for edge use cases, and subnet and routing design for performance.
- Cost of data movement. Network routes chosen to minimize transfer costs: Region to Region, Availability Zone to Availability Zone, private to public. This is easy to skip and shows up in the cost domain.
- Storage cost. Storage tiers, S3 object lifecycles, when storage auto scaling is required, and the lowest cost way to move data into AWS storage.
- Purchasing options. Spot Instances, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, and when each fits a workload.
A study plan that follows the guide
- Read the guide by task statement, not by service. Each domain is a handful of task statements, and each task statement lists its knowledge and skills. That list is your checklist.
- Weight your time by domain: security (30%) first, then resilience (26%), performance (24%) and cost (20%). Because scoring is compensatory, a weak domain can be offset, but none can be ignored.
- Study services as trade-offs. The guide's task statements focus on choosing designs that meet requirements, including cost and resilience trade-offs. For every in-scope service, know what it is compared against.
- Check the appendix. The guide lists in-scope and out-of-scope services. The out-of-scope list tells you what not to spend time on.
Every date we track for this and the other exams we cover is in the exam calendar.