SAA-C03 is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam: 65 questions in 130 minutes, a passing score of 720 out of 1000, and a $150 fee. Every question is a short design scenario: you’re given a requirement and a constraint, and you choose the AWS architecture that meets both.
Facts verified November 2026 against the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam page and exam guide.
Table of Contents
SAA-C03 quick facts
| Item | SAA-C03 |
|---|---|
| Full name | AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate |
| Level | Associate |
| Questions | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored) |
| Question types | Multiple choice and multiple response |
| Time | 130 minutes |
| Passing score | 720 on a scaled score of 100–1000 |
| Fee | $150 USD (before tax) |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored |
| Recommended experience | At least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS |
| Results | Within 5 business days |
| Valid for | 3 years |
How is SAA-C03 scored?
You need a scaled score of 720 or more overall. There’s no separate pass mark per domain. AWS uses compensatory scoring, so strength in one domain can offset weakness in another. The 15 unscored questions look exactly like the others. Answer every question: there’s no penalty for guessing.
You get two minutes per question on average. The scenarios are longer than on CLF-C02, so reading speed matters.
What are the four SAA-C03 domains?
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
The domains mirror four of the Well-Architected pillars. In practice, most questions mix them: a “secure and cost-effective” design, or a “highly available with the least operational overhead” design.
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures (30%)
- Access: IAM users, roles and policies, cross-account roles, AWS IAM Identity Center, AWS Organizations and service control policies (SCPs).
- Network security: VPC design, security groups vs network ACLs, private subnets, VPC endpoints, AWS WAF, AWS Shield.
- Data protection: encryption at rest with AWS KMS, encryption in transit with ACM certificates, S3 bucket policies and Block Public Access, AWS Secrets Manager.
How to reason about it: prefer roles over long-term access keys, private access over public internet paths, and managed encryption over custom code. If an option stores credentials in application code or opens a resource to 0.0.0.0/0 without need, it’s almost always wrong.
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures (26%)
- Loose coupling: Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Step Functions to separate components.
- Scaling: EC2 Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, serverless compute with AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.
- High availability and disaster recovery: Multi-AZ deployments, read replicas, Amazon Aurora Global Database, Route 53 routing and health checks, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and multi-site active-active.
How to reason about it: “survive the loss of an Availability Zone” means Multi-AZ. “Survive the loss of a Region” means a cross-Region design. Then read the RTO and RPO: the tighter they are, the more expensive the strategy you need.
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)
- Storage: choosing between Amazon S3, Amazon EBS volume types, Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx.
- Compute: EC2 instance families, containers on Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS, Lambda.
- Databases: Amazon RDS vs Amazon Aurora vs Amazon DynamoDB, read replicas, caching with Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
- Network: Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, load balancer types, VPC connectivity.
- Data ingestion and analytics: Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena.
How to reason about it: find the bottleneck the question describes. Read-heavy database? Add read replicas or a cache. Shared file system for many instances? EFS. Global users with slow downloads? CloudFront.
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)
- Storage cost: S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules, EBS volume types.
- Compute cost: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Spot Instances. Right-sizing and Auto Scaling.
- Database cost: serverless or provisioned capacity, and when DynamoDB on-demand fits.
- Network cost: data transfer charges, NAT gateways vs VPC gateway endpoints, CloudFront to reduce origin traffic.
- Tools: AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Compute Optimizer.
How to reason about it: “most cost-effective” never means “cheapest at any risk”. The answer still has to meet every requirement in the question. Spot is only correct when the workload can be interrupted.
What can you skip for SAA-C03?
The exam guide’s out-of-scope list includes tasks such as coding applications, deep troubleshooting and full implementations. You also don’t need every service: focus on core compute, storage, database, networking, security and integration. Rarely used or niche services matter far less than knowing the core ones well.
Is SAA-C03 hard?
SAA-C03 is a big step up from CLF-C02: the questions are scenarios where two or three options would technically work, and you must pick the one that best fits the stated constraint. Hands-on AWS experience helps, because the questions reward judgement rather than memorised definitions. The time pressure and the “best answer” wording are what make it hard.
A 6-week SAA-C03 study plan
About 1–1.5 hours a day. Add two weeks if you have no hands-on AWS experience.
| Week | Focus | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | IAM, Organizations, VPC basics, security groups vs NACLs | Build a VPC with public and private subnets in a free-tier account |
| 2 | EC2, Auto Scaling, load balancers, Route 53 routing | Put two instances behind a load balancer across two AZs |
| 3 | Storage: S3 classes and lifecycle, EBS, EFS, FSx. Backup | A one-page table of “which storage when” |
| 4 | Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache. DR strategies | Match each DR strategy to an RTO/RPO range |
| 5 | Decoupling and serverless: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Lambda, containers. Cost optimisation | List the cue words that point to each service |
| 6 | Full timed practice exams and answer review | Two timed mocks with a stable score, comfortably above 720 |
Delete what you build each week so you don’t pay for idle resources.
Common SAA-C03 traps
- “Least operational overhead”. This phrase favours managed and serverless services, even when a self-managed EC2 design would also work.
- Multi-AZ vs read replicas. Multi-AZ is for availability. Read replicas are for read scaling (and some DR). The question tells you which problem it’s solving.
- SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge. Queue one consumer, fan out to many subscribers, or route events by rules.
- Gateway endpoint vs NAT gateway. Private instances reaching S3 or DynamoDB can use a gateway endpoint and avoid NAT data processing charges.
- Spot for critical work. Spot fits interruptible jobs only.
- Encryption keywords. “Customer-managed keys”, “key rotation” and “audit key usage” point to AWS KMS.
SAA-C03 readiness checklist
You’re likely ready to book when you can:
- Design a three-tier web app across two AZs from memory.
- Choose a DR strategy from an RTO and RPO.
- Explain when to pick SQS, SNS, EventBridge or Kinesis.
- Pick the right storage service and S3 class for a described access pattern.
- Tell which IAM, SCP or resource policy applies in a cross-account scenario.
- Score consistently above the pass mark on full, timed 130-minute practice exams.
How does SAA-C03 compare with other AWS certifications?
- CLF-C02 exam guide: the foundational exam. It’s a good first step if you’re new to AWS, but it’s not a prerequisite for SAA-C03.
- SOA-C03 exam guide: the operations-focused associate exam (CloudOps Engineer). It has the same length and pass mark, and overlaps with SAA-C03 on networking, reliability and monitoring.
Passing SAA-C03 earns a 50% discount voucher for your next AWS exam or recertification.
Practice for SAA-C03
Our SAA-C03 practice exams follow the real format: 65 scenario questions in 130 minutes, with every option explained.
Free mock exam
Take SAA-C03 Mock Exam 1, free
A full-length, timed mock in the real exam format, with every answer explained so you know exactly where you stand.
65
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130
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720
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If you complete every mock exam in the course, sit the real exam within 90 days of buying and don’t pass, we’ll refund the course in full. Terms apply.
SAA-C03 FAQ
What is the SAA-C03 passing score?
720 on a scaled score from 100 to 1000.
How much does SAA-C03 cost?
$150 USD before tax. A 50% voucher from a previous AWS certification brings it to $75.
Do I need CLF-C02 before SAA-C03?
No. AWS has no prerequisites. CLF-C02 can help if you’re new to the cloud.
How long should I study for SAA-C03?
Our study plan above takes 6 weeks of part-time study if you already have some AWS experience. Without hands-on experience, allow longer and build things as you learn.
Is there a lab or hands-on section?
No. The exam has multiple-choice and multiple-response questions only.
How long is SAA-C03 valid?
3 years.
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Sources (checked November 2026): AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam page and exam guide · AWS Certification benefits
