SAP-C03 vs SAP-C02: what changes
SAP-C03 replaces SAP-C02 as the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam. AWS lists the last day to take SAP-C02 as November 16, 2026, and SAP-C03 delivery begins on November 17, 2026. The headline format is the same for both (75 questions, 65 scored and 10 unscored, 180 minutes, 300 USD); what changes is the skills covered, the domain structure (four SAP-C02 domains become five SAP-C03 domains) and the passing score, which moves from 750 to 720. AWS’s SAP-C03 exam guide includes a side-by-side comparison, summarised below.
Dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| October 27, 2026 | SAP-C03 registration opens |
| November 16, 2026 | Last day to take SAP-C02 |
| November 17, 2026 | SAP-C03 general-availability delivery begins |
A SAP-C02 pass keeps its credential. AWS states the SAP-C02 credential stays active through its original expiration date, so passing the outgoing exam does not shorten or void anything.
What AWS has announced as new
AWS describes the update through six areas. These are AWS’s own groupings, taken from its announcement, not exam domains:
| Area | Examples AWS names |
|---|---|
| Generative and agentic AI (11 new skills) | Amazon Bedrock integrations, Bedrock AgentCore agent architectures, retrieval-augmented generation, Bedrock Guardrails, human-oversight workflows |
| Resilience engineering | AWS Fault Injection Service, AWS Resilience Hub, AWS Application Recovery Controller, Systems Manager runbooks |
| Cloud-native patterns (7 new skills) | Serverless data pipelines, Step Functions workflows, service mesh with VPC Lattice and ECS Service Connect, container image security, multi-tenant and real-time data architectures |
| DevSecOps and observability (6 new skills) | Pipeline vulnerability scanning, multi-account deployment pipelines, container monitoring, AI/ML metrics, synthetic and real-user monitoring |
| Data and analytics (3 new skills) | Lakehouse architectures with Lake Formation and Apache Iceberg, real-time and batch analytics pipelines, cross-account sharing with AWS Clean Rooms |
| Post-quantum cryptography | AWS KMS with ML-DSA and ML-KEM |
The announcement’s six areas are a different grouping from the exam domains, which are listed next.
Domains and weights side by side
The SAP-C03 exam guide has a comparison table. The rows are listed in order; they are not one-to-one mappings:
| SAP-C02 domain | SAP-C02 | SAP-C03 domain | SAP-C03 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity | 26% | 1. Architecture Design and Implementation Built for the Cloud | 25% |
| 2. Design for New Solutions | 29% | 2. Security, Compliance, and Governance | 25% |
| 3. Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions | 25% | 3. Cost-Optimized Architecture Design | 15% |
| 4. Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization | 20% | 4. Resilience, Migration, and Business Continuity | 15% |
| (none) | n/a | 5. Operational Excellence and Automation | 20% |
The structure moves from four task-oriented domains to five themed around the Well-Architected Framework: cloud-native design, security, cost, resilience and operations. Migration, which was a domain of its own on SAP-C02, is now a task inside domain 4. The weights for the two exams cover scored content only.
What changed in the content
AWS’s comparison page groups the changes into additions, deletions and recategorisations.
- Added. Among others: durable workflows, service mesh, container image management, multi-tenant isolation and WebSocket patterns (task 1.1); the whole AI and ML integration task (1.2); hybrid compute such as EKS Anywhere and Outposts, and IPv6 and dual-stack design; lakehouse, real-time and batch analytics, and cross-account data sharing; Cognito, EKS Pod Identity and IAM Roles Anywhere; post-quantum cryptography; data residency, AWS Artifact evidence and threat modeling; responsible-AI controls (task 2.5); AI/ML cost levers; cost-effective observability; multi-cluster container DR; pipeline security scanning and Bedrock Evaluations; container, AI/ML and user-experience monitoring; controlled remediation and automated runbooks.
- Removed. Three items from SAP-C02: application upgrade path, delegating to AWS, and migration-tool security. AWS notes these may still be implicit in other SAP-C03 skills.
- Recategorised. Many granular SAP-C02 skills are folded into broader SAP-C03 tasks, for example networking and VPC design into task 1.4 and cost skills into domain 3. AWS says this reduces repetition and does not reduce emphasis on those skills.
- Services. The in-scope list adds, among others, Amazon Bedrock, VPC Lattice, AWS CDK, Clean Rooms, Cloud WAN, Fault Injection Service, Resilience Hub, AWS Transform, Verified Access, Security Lake and Verified Permissions. Removed from it are AWS IoT services, WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0, and individual AI services such as Rekognition and Textract (replaced by Bedrock and SageMaker AI as parent entries), plus services such as Service Catalog, App Runner, Batch and License Manager. AWS says sub-features of parent services are implicitly included, so check the guide’s service lists before dropping a topic.
Scoring: what differs
| SAP-C02 | SAP-C03 | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | 75 (65 scored, 10 unscored) | 75 (65 scored, 10 unscored) |
| Scale | 100 to 1,000 | 100 to 1,000 |
| Minimum passing score | 750 | 720 |
| Scoring model | Compensatory | Compensatory |
The SAP-C02 “Emerging Topics” section (Bedrock Guardrails, access controls for agentic applications, human-oversight workflows) was unscored pretest content; on SAP-C03 these are scored skills under task 2.5.
What stays the same
- Professional level, with the same recommended experience of two or more years designing and implementing solutions on AWS.
- The job: choose architectures for complex organisations and justify trade-offs.
- Multiple choice and multiple response questions, scenario-based.
- A three-year validity period, renewed through the latest version of the exam.
Which exam to take
Both lead to the same certification title. The practical choice is about timing and content:
- Ready now and booking on or before November 16: SAP-C02 is available, with a published guide and its own four domains.
- Booking later, or wanting the newer skills validated: SAP-C03. AWS recommends it for candidates who want the certification to validate cloud-native, GenAI/agentic AI and modern resilience engineering skills alongside traditional architecture competencies.
- Mid-preparation: the core of both is the same architecture discipline (multi-account design, networking, resilience, migration, cost). Study that first, then add the new areas from the lists above and work through the SAP-C03 guide’s task statements. The five domain pages (cloud-native, security, cost, resilience and migration, operations) cover the shared core.
Whichever you choose, renewal later is by the latest exam version. See renewal and retakes, and the exam-changes page for how version swaps work generally. The exam format page holds the figures.