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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03): free practice questions and exam guide

The SAA-C03 is AWS's associate-level architecture certification: 65 questions in 130 minutes, scored 100–1,000 with 720 to pass. This guide covers the four domains, the scoring, registration and how to prepare — with practice questions and flashcards mapped to the official exam guide.

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at a glance

Provider
Amazon Web Services — AWS Training and Certification. Exam code SAA-C03 (the current version when we checked, October 2026), Associate level; validates designing solutions on the AWS Well-Architected Framework
Questions
65, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored trial questions that are not identified
Duration
130 minutes
Format
Multiple choice (one correct of four) and multiple response (two or more correct of five or more). No penalty for guessing; an unanswered question counts as wrong
Scoring
Scaled 100–1,000, minimum passing score 720. Pass/fail; compensatory — the overall score decides, not each domain
Domains
Design Secure Architectures 30% · Design Resilient Architectures 26% · Design High-Performing Architectures 24% · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%
Fee
150 USD (associate level, as of 2026), charged in full for every attempt
Delivery & languages
Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored; English, French, Italian (until 31 December 2026, per AWS), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Latin America and Spain), Simplified and Traditional Chinese
Validity
3 years; AWS requires recertification every three years
Where to register
aws.training/certification, through your AWS Certification Account

What the SAA-C03 is and who takes it

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is AWS's associate-level architecture certification. It is intended for people who perform a solutions architect role and validates the ability to design on the AWS Well-Architected Framework: solutions that meet current business requirements and projected future needs, architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing and cost-optimized, and the ability to review an existing solution and improve it.

AWS says the target candidate has at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions with AWS services. That is a recommendation, not an entry requirement — nothing stops you sitting it earlier — but the questions are scenario-based, and scenarios are much easier to read when you have built the things they describe.

Structure: 65 questions in 130 minutes

The exam is 65 questions in 130 minutes — two minutes each. Only 50 questions count towards your score; the other 15 are unscored questions AWS is trialling for future exam forms, and they are not marked as such, so treat every question as live.

There are two response types and nothing else — no free text, no labs. Multiple choice has one correct answer and three distractors. Multiple response has two or more correct answers out of five or more options; the question tells you how many to select (“Select TWO”) and you need the whole set right. Distractors are written to be plausible to someone with incomplete knowledge, which is the whole game: most questions come down to spotting the one qualifier — least operational overhead, most cost-effective, highly available — that rules the others out.

Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect and there is no penalty for guessing, so answer everything and come back to the ones you were unsure of if time remains.

The four domains and their weights

The exam guide defines four content domains. Their weights are shares of the scored content, so across 50 scored questions Domain 1 is roughly 15 questions and Domain 4 roughly 10.

  • Design Secure Architectures — 30%. Access control with IAM, roles and policies; securing workloads and networks; encryption, key management and data protection.
  • Design Resilient Architectures — 26%. High availability and failover, decoupling with queues and events, backup, disaster recovery and data durability.
  • Design High-Performing Architectures — 24%. Choosing compute, storage, database, networking and data-ingestion services for the performance a workload needs.
  • Design Cost-Optimized Architectures — 20%. Cost-aware choices for storage, compute, databases, networking and data transfer, and the governance to keep them that way.

Scoring: 720 out of 1,000

Your result is a scaled score from 100 to 1,000, and 720 is the minimum passing score. Scaling equates exam forms of slightly different difficulty, so 720 is not a fixed number of correct answers and AWS does not publish a raw cut-off; the 72% you will see in our practice is an approximation of the same line, not the official algorithm.

Scoring is compensatory: you need to pass the exam as a whole, not each domain. The score report may include a table classifying your performance per section, but AWS itself says to use caution when reading it — it is feedback, not a set of separate pass marks.

Most AWS exams do not display a pass or fail result at the end of the test; the detailed result arrives in your certification account within five business days.

Registering, cost and validity

You schedule through your AWS Certification Account at aws.training/certification and choose a Pearson VUE test centre or an online proctored sitting. Associate-level exams cost 150 USD (AWS's price when we checked, October 2026), charged in full for every attempt. The exam is offered in English, French, Italian (AWS retires the Italian version after 31 December 2026), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Latin America and Spain), and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

If you fail, you must wait 14 calendar days before you can retake. A pass is valid for three years, after which you recertify.

How to prepare

Passing the SAA-C03 is less about memorising the service catalogue than about recognising the architecture a scenario describes and the qualifier that decides between two workable answers.

  • Read the official exam guide's task statements and its list of in-scope services before anything else, and let them set your syllabus. The questions come from there and nowhere else.
  • Build it. A day spent creating a VPC, an Auto Scaling group behind a load balancer and an S3 bucket with a lifecycle rule teaches more than a week of reading, and it makes the scenarios readable at exam pace.
  • Learn the comparisons the exam loves: SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge, S3 storage classes, RDS Multi-AZ vs read replicas, EBS vs EFS vs S3. Most distractors are the neighbouring service.
  • Practise elimination. For each question, underline the qualifier — cheapest, most resilient, least operational effort — and strike the options that fail it before you weigh the rest.
  • Sit timed 65-question mocks at the real two minutes a question. You are checking whether you run out of time and which domain you quietly avoid, not measuring your level.
  • Keep every wrong answer in one list and read it daily. Three or four recurring gaps account for most misses, and two weeks is enough to fix four.

How wspell's practice maps to the SAA-C03

Our AWS bank holds more than 600 original practice questions in the exam's two response types — including dedicated choose-two sets per domain — organised by the four official domains and by service depth (IAM, networking, storage, databases, containers and serverless, migration, cost). Every question comes with a worked explanation of why the key is right and each distractor is wrong, plus links to the relevant AWS documentation. Alongside them are more than 300 flashcards in concept decks: service one-liners, the Well-Architected pillars and “pick the service” matching decks.

The timed mock exam draws 65 questions in the official proportions — 20 secure, 17 resilient, 15 high-performing and 13 cost-optimized (30/26/24/20 over 65) — under a 130-minute clock, and there are two hand-built full-length 65-question mocks and two short mixed mocks besides. Every question set and flashcard deck is free and needs no account; the timed mock needs a free account, and during the public beta its sittings are not limited. Our 72% pass line approximates AWS's 720/1,000; it is not the official scaling. The questions are original practice content, not real exam items.

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frequently asked questions

Is the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam multiple choice?

Yes, entirely. Two response types: multiple choice (one correct of four) and multiple response (two or more correct of five or more, with the number to select stated). There are no free-text answers, labs or essays.

What score do I need to pass the SAA-C03?

720 on a scaled range of 100–1,000. Scoring is compensatory, so only the overall score matters, and there is no penalty for guessing. AWS does not publish a raw cut-off; the 72% you see in practice apps, including ours, is an approximation.

How many questions are on the exam and how long is it?

65 questions in 130 minutes. 50 are scored; 15 are unscored trial questions that are not identified, so every question should be answered as if it counts.

How long is the AWS certification valid?

Three years. AWS requires you to recertify every three years.

Can I retake the exam if I fail?

Yes, after a wait of 14 calendar days, and you pay the full fee (150 USD as of 2026) for each attempt.

Do I need hands-on AWS experience?

AWS recommends at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions with AWS services. It is not enforced, but the exam is scenario-based and hands-on time is the most efficient preparation there is.

Can I take the SAA-C03 online?

Yes: at a Pearson VUE test centre or as an online proctored exam, in English and nine other languages.

When do I get the result?

Most AWS exams do not show pass or fail at the end of the test; the detailed score report arrives within five business days.

sources

about this guide

AWS, Amazon Web Services and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. wspell is not sponsored by AWS, and its questions are original practice material, not exam items. The authoritative exam guide, fee and scheduling are at aws.amazon.com/certification.

The information here summarises official sources at the date shown and can change — confirm dates, fees and rules on the provider's official pages before you register.

facts verified on October 11, 2026 against the sources above