AZ-900: what the certification is and is not

In shortWhat this article is about

AZ-900 turns up in job adverts, in training plans and on LinkedIn profiles, and almost nobody who writes it down means quite the same thing. One person pictures a two-day course, another a forty-five-minute exam, and a third a qualification that has to be renewed next year. Two of those three are wrong.

This article sets out what AZ-900 actually is, what the exam does and does not ask of you, and which three practical points are usually overlooked in the Netherlands: that the exam does not exist in Dutch, that the certification never expires, and that it is not required for any follow-up exam. Everything below comes from Microsoft's own documentation. The sources are listed at the end, with the date on which they were checked.

01AZ-900 is an exam, not a course

The first misunderstanding is in the name itself. AZ-900 is an exam number. The certification you earn with it is called Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals. Microsoft supplies the exam, the certification and free study material, but no lessons, no classroom and no instructor.

What Microsoft does provide free of charge is more than most people realise. There are learning paths on Microsoft Learn that cover the full set of exam objectives. There is a practice assessment attached to the certification, which you may take as often as you like and which explains, answer by answer, why something is right or wrong. And there is an exam sandbox: an environment in which you work through the question types, the navigation, the timer and the button that marks a question for review, in exactly the interface you will see on exam day, without anything being scored.

The exam itself is booked through Pearson VUE, at a test centre or proctored from home. Students and educators can also schedule through Certiport. Microsoft explicitly advises registering with a personal Microsoft account rather than a work account: if you leave your employer, an exam record tied to the work account is lost and cannot be recovered.

So any course with AZ-900 in its name is preparation for that exam. That includes ours. What happens during those days is set out on the page about the AZ-900 training; we do not administer the Microsoft exam, and no provider does.

02What the exam covers, and in what proportion

The study guide names three skill areas with a range for their share of the exam. This split has applied since 20 July 2026, the date on which Microsoft last updated the skills measured.

Read that list and the pattern may not jump out. It is there all the same: every objective in the study guide begins with the word describe. Describe the shared responsibility model. Describe the purpose of resource locks. Describe Azure Monitor. Nowhere does it say configure, implement or troubleshoot. That is not an accident, and it is the single most important property of this exam. We come back to it in sections 04 and 09, because it determines both how you prepare and whether you need the certification at all.

One more thing from the study guide that should put minds at rest: the change log for 20 July 2026 records minor changes in three sub-areas and no change everywhere else. Nothing disappeared or arrived at the level of the skill areas. Anyone holding material from early 2026 does not have to start over.

03The exam by the numbers

The hard facts, all from Microsoft's own support pages:

• 45 minutes of exam time. That is the time you have to answer the questions. It applies to all fundamentals exams; role-based exams get 100 or 120 minutes.
• 65 minutes of seat time. Block that out in your calendar. Seat time includes the instructions, the candidate agreement you have to read and accept, and the chance to leave comments afterwards.
• Typically forty to sixty questions. Microsoft gives no fixed number and changes it as the objectives change.
• 700 out of 1000 points to pass. That is a scaled score. It is therefore not the same as getting seventy per cent of the questions right, and you cannot work out from your score how many you missed.
• Five minutes of break time are built into the exam time. Microsoft removed questions to make room for it. You may break as long and as often as you like, but the exam clock keeps running, and after a break you cannot return to any question you have already seen, including ones you marked for review.
• The exam is proctored, either at a test centre or remotely from home.

If you do not pass, fixed waiting periods apply. After the first attempt you wait 24 hours. Between every subsequent attempt there is a waiting period of fourteen days. You may sit the same exam a maximum of five times within twelve months, counted from your first attempt; after that you are eligible again twelve months after that first attempt. Every attempt is paid for again. The waiting period is only waived if you had an internet or equipment failure during the exam for which Pearson VUE opened a case.

04What the exam does not ask of you

Four things people expect that are simply not in it.

No work in the Azure portal

Role-based exams may contain hands-on components in which you genuinely have to configure something in a live environment. Fundamentals exams do not. You will not have to create a virtual network or configure a storage account on exam day. It also means you need no Azure subscription in order to sit the exam.

No Microsoft Learn alongside

This is the one that surprises people most. For some time now, candidates sitting a role-based or specialty exam have been able to consult Microsoft Learn in a second pane next to the question. Microsoft states explicitly that this resource is not available on fundamentals exams. AZ-900 is therefore closed book, while the heavier AZ-104 is not. Exactly the opposite of what most people assume.

No required prior knowledge

The certification page describes a candidate who has experience in an area of IT, such as infrastructure management, database management or software development. That is a profile, not an entry requirement. There is no certification, no diploma and no number of years of experience you have to demonstrate before you may schedule.

No depth on any one service

The breadth is what makes this exam hard, not the depth. You are asked a little about dozens of services and a lot about none of them. Anyone used to knowing one product inside out finds that more disorienting than someone used to knowing a bit about everything.

05The exam does not exist in Dutch

The certification page lists the languages in which AZ-900 is delivered. There are thirteen: English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Korean, Spanish, German, French, Indonesian, Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Chinese (Traditional), Italian, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. Dutch is not among them, not even on the Dutch-language version of that same page, and there is no announcement that this is about to change.

That has two consequences worth knowing before you schedule.

The first is substantive. You sit the exam in English, with English terminology. Shared responsibility model, availability zone, management group, resource lock. Preparation that consistently translates those terms into Dutch does a candidate no favours on exam day. In our sessions we therefore explain what something means in the participants' own language and keep the terms themselves in English, exactly as they appear on screen.

The second is practical and comes from the study guide: if the exam is not available in your preferred language, you may request an additional thirty minutes. For AZ-900 that turns 45 minutes into 75. It is not a favour and not an exception for people who read English poorly; it is the standard provision for any candidate whose language is not on the list, and for Dutch-speaking candidates that means everyone.

06What it costs, and what comes free

Here we have to disappoint you, and so does Microsoft. The exam page carries no price. It carries one sentence: the price is based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored. You see the amount only once you schedule with Pearson VUE and enter your country, and it differs per country because Microsoft sets its rates by region.

We deliberately quote no figure here. There are plenty of pages online that do, usually in dollars and usually without a date, and in a training budget a price that does not come from the source is worse than no price at all. If you want the exact amount for the Netherlands, the reliable route is this: on the certification page, select Schedule exam, continue to Pearson VUE, and read the rate there before you pay.

What is certain is the list of things that cost nothing:

• The learning paths on Microsoft Learn that cover the full set of objectives.
• The practice assessment attached to the certification, repeatable without limit, with an explanation per answer.
• The exam sandbox, where you walk through the interface and the question types without anything being counted.
• The study guide with every objective and the change log, so you can check whether your material is still current.

There is also an offer called Exam Replay, which includes a second attempt. Availability and terms vary by region and change over time; Microsoft's own offers page is the only source that keeps up.

07Does AZ-900 expire? No. AZ-104 does.

This is the question most often answered wrongly, and the answer sits in a single sentence on Microsoft's renewal page: fundamentals certifications do not expire. AZ-900, SC-900, AI-900 and the rest of the fundamentals are yours without ever having to do anything again.

So where does the confusion come from? From the other half of the story. Role-based and specialty certifications do expire, and they are renewed every year. It works like this:

• Renewal is free; the assessment costs nothing.
• You have a six-month window before the expiry date in which to take it.
• The assessment is online, unproctored and open book, and shorter than the original exam because it focuses on what has changed since last year.
• You may retake it as often as needed, as long as you pass before the expiry date.
• Pass, and the certification is extended one year from the expiry date, not from the day you took the assessment.

AZ-104 (Azure Administrator) carries a renewal frequency of twelve months on its certification page. A team holding both AZ-900s and AZ-104s therefore sees an annual reminder land for the second group only, and that is where the assumption grows that it applies to everyone.

For a training plan that distinction is useful. AZ-900 is a one-off spend. A role-based certification is not: it carries a couple of hours per person every year, and those hours rarely appear in the following year's budget.

08AZ-900 is not an entry ticket to what follows

No Microsoft exam lists AZ-900 as a prerequisite. The AZ-104 certification page names no required certification at all. What it does describe is experience: with operating systems, networking, servers and virtualisation, and alongside that with PowerShell, the Azure CLI, the Azure portal, ARM templates or Bicep, and Microsoft Entra ID.

You may therefore schedule AZ-104 tomorrow without ever having taken AZ-900. The same holds for SC-900, AI-900 and the rest of the range: none of them needs a predecessor.

That does not make AZ-900 pointless, but it does change what it is. It is a run-up, not a gate. The concepts you pick up there, subscriptions, resource groups, management groups, Entra ID, role-based access control, come back in the heavier exams as assumed knowledge. Anyone who does not know them learns them there instead, at a considerably less forgiving pace.

For anyone wondering how the fundamentals relate to one another in practice: the overview of the certifications we prepare people for is on the page about cybersecurity certifications, with the subject and the limits of each. If your interest is security, compliance and identity within Microsoft, that is SC-900. If it is the administration of Copilot and agents in Microsoft 365, that is AB-900. And if it is configuring and securing Teams, that is MS-700.

09When AZ-900 is worth it, and when it is not

There are three good reasons to sit this exam, and a few commonly heard ones that are not.

Worth doing when

• Somebody asks for it. A tender that requires demonstrable cloud knowledge, a partner status that counts how many certified people you employ, a job requirement. Then the certification is the point, and the debate about its usefulness is over.
• You want to force completeness. An exam walks you through topics you would skip on your own. Cost management, tags, Azure Policy, resource locks and SLAs are precisely where self-study almost always stops, and together they are a third of the exam.
• A mixed team needs a shared vocabulary. Procurement, legal, IT operations and the board sit down afterwards using the same terms. In a migration that is often worth more than the knowledge itself.

Not worth doing when

• You want to be able to do something. The exam tests describing. Anyone who has to configure a virtual network next month, or bring a bill down, gains more from a day in their own environment with their own subscriptions than from a certification.
• You hope it opens a door. It is Microsoft's most widely held entry-level certification, and for that very reason it distinguishes you little. Combined with experience it counts; on its own, rarely.
• It is already settled that AZ-104 is the destination. If someone has the experience AZ-104 describes, AZ-900 is a detour. That person can go straight ahead.

10Two days or one? What "intensive" realistically means

"AZ-900 intensive" is one of the searches that brings people to us, and the honest answer is that the right duration depends on the group rather than on the exam.

The exam itself takes three quarters of an hour. Preparation is not a fixed number of hours, because the three skill areas weigh differently for different people. Someone who works with servers, networking and virtualisation every day recognises much of the middle area straight away, but stumbles regularly over cost management and governance, because those rarely land on an administrator's desk. Someone from procurement, policy or project management has exactly the reverse: the third area reads familiar, and the architecture is new.

From that follows a simple rule of thumb. One compact day works when the group already works with Azure and the day mainly has to close gaps and rehearse the exam style. Two days work when the group is mixed, or when it includes people for whom the cloud is entirely new. Squeezing a mixed group into one day produces a day in which half are bored and the other half drop out.

One thing a shorter day does not solve, and that is the language. The terms have to stick in English, because that is how they appear on the exam. That takes repetition, and repetition takes time.

If you would rather do it yourself, you can: the learning paths on Microsoft Learn plus the practice assessment are between them enough material to pass. What a training adds is pace, the room to ask why something works the way it does, and the translation to your own subscriptions and your own cost picture. How we fill that in is set out on the page about the AZ-900 training, including the choice between one day and two.

Frequently askedFive questions that come in about this

FinallyA sober conclusion

AZ-900 is a well-made, accessible exam that does exactly what it promises: it tests whether you can name and explain the building blocks of Azure. It never expires, so it costs you time and money once, and it turns a mixed group into people who can talk to each other. That is real value, and for an organisation starting a migration it is often worth more than the knowledge of a single specialist.

It is simply not proof of skill. Anyone who has to build something in the portal afterwards needs a different day for that, and anyone hoping to land a job needs experience alongside it. Know that in advance and the choice is straightforward: if you are doing it because somebody asked or because you want a team aligned, it is the right call. If you are doing it because you hope something will follow of its own accord, it is not.

If you would like to do it as a group, we deliver the AZ-900 training in company, in one or two days and matched to what the participants already bring. If the question is broader, such as which certification suits which role in the first place, the guide to the certifications is a better starting point than an exam number.

SourcesVerified on 16 September 2026

• learn.microsoft.com – Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals, the certification page with the exam languages, the three skill areas, the 45 minutes, scheduling through Pearson VUE or Certiport, the advice to use a personal account, and the note that pricing depends on the country
• learn.microsoft.com – Study guide for Exam AZ-900, the objectives with their weightings as of 20 July 2026, the change log, the passing score of 700 and the provision for thirty extra minutes when the exam is not offered in your language
• learn.microsoft.com – Exam duration and exam experience, the table giving 45 minutes of exam time and 65 minutes of seat time for fundamentals, the forty to sixty questions, the five minutes of built-in break time, and the statement that Microsoft Learn is not available during fundamentals exams
• learn.microsoft.com – Exam retake policy, the 24 hours after a first attempt, the fourteen days thereafter, the maximum of five attempts per twelve months and the sole condition under which the waiting period is waived
• learn.microsoft.com – Renew your Microsoft Certification, the sentence stating that fundamentals certifications do not expire, and the terms of the annual renewal for role-based and specialty certifications
• learn.microsoft.com – Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, the twelve-month renewal frequency, the experience described, and the absence of any required prior certification
• learn.microsoft.com – Exam scoring and score reports, the explanation that 700 is a scaled score and not a percentage of correct answers