Claude Certified Architect Exam: Cost, Domains, Study Plan

Claude Certified Architect exam at a glance

There is no separate Claude Certified Architect program: the exam is one of four in Anthropic's Claude Certification Program, next to Associate, Developer and Architect Professional. Anthropic's pages write the name with a dash before "Foundations"; we use a comma.

Who the Claude Certified Architect certification is for

The guide's ideal candidate builds agentic apps with the Claude Agent SDK, configures Claude Code for a team with CLAUDE.md files, skills, MCP servers and plan mode, designs MCP tools, writes prompts that return reliable JSON, and wires Claude into CI/CD pipelines. The typical candidate has 6 months or more of that work, though nothing is mandatory and the credential depends on the exam alone.

Access is the hard limit. Anthropic's FAQ says certification is open only to organizations in the Claude Partner Network, registration needs an email on a recognized company domain, and you must be 18 or older. Membership in the network is free for organizations that bring Claude to market; our Claude certification guide covers eligibility, all four exams and the free alternatives.

Architect Professional is a separate exam rather than an upgrade of this one: $175, 63 questions, written for people with 3 years or more in systems architecture, with domains such as governance and stakeholder communication. You can take it without Foundations.

The exam blueprint: five domains and their weights

The exam guide publishes the blueprint below; the weights are the approximate share of scored questions from each domain, set through a job task analysis.

• Agentic Architecture & Orchestration27%
• Claude Code Configuration & Workflows20%
• Prompt Engineering & Structured Output20%
• Tool Design & MCP Integration18%
• Context Management & Reliability15%

From the exam guide, version 1.0, July 2026, and the exam page, checked October 27, 2026.

anthropic-partners.skilljar.com

Scrolling Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect Foundations page from the fact box (Architect, Foundations, 120 minutes, 60 questions, English and Japanese, $125 USD, 12 months) down to the domains: 27%, 18%, 20%, 20% and 15%

Each domain breaks into task statements, 30 in all. In plain words, this is what they ask you to judge:

The six exam scenarios

Every question sits inside a production scenario, and you get 4 of these 6 at random, so prepare for all of them:

01Customer support resolution agent

An Agent SDK agent with MCP tools for customers, orders, refunds and escalation, aiming at 80% or more first-contact resolution. Domains 1, 2 and 5.

02Code generation with Claude Code

Slash commands, CLAUDE.md and the choice between plan mode and direct execution on a dev team. Domains 3 and 5.

03Multi-agent research system

A coordinator that sends search, analysis, synthesis and report work to subagents. Domains 1, 2 and 5.

04Developer productivity tools

An agent that explores codebases with Read, Write, Bash, Grep and Glob plus MCP servers. Domains 2, 3 and 1.

05Claude Code in CI

Automated reviews, test generation and pull request feedback with few false positives. Domains 3 and 4.

06Structured data extraction

Pulling fields from messy documents, validating them with JSON schemas and handling edge cases. Domains 4 and 5.

Claude Certified Architect exam cost, retakes and renewal

The Claude Certified Architect exam cost is $125, up from $99 before June 30, 2026, the day the exams moved to Pearson VUE. Your firm's partner tier sets the discount:

$125

list price for the exam

50%

off for Select, Preferred and Global Premier partners

$0

for Global Premier partners through December 31, 2026

4

attempts per 12 months, each at the full fee

From Anthropic's certification FAQ and the exam page, checked October 27, 2026.

If you fail, you wait 14 days, then 30 after a second fail and 90 after a third. Once you pass, you can't retake the exam to raise your score.

The Claude Certified Architect certification lasts 12 months. To renew on time, you review what changed and pass a free, non-proctored, open-book assessment on Anthropic Partner Academy, which you may retry as often as you need; if it lapses, you sit the full exam again at full price. Anthropic may require the full exam instead if the content changes a lot. Three other exams change on December 7, 2026; Architect Foundations is not on that list.

Claude Certified Architect study guide: a plan mapped to the domains

Anthropic has no paid Claude Certified Architect course. Its exam page lists seven free courses instead, and the exam guide adds four hands-on exercises; this Claude Certified Architect study guide puts both in order and adds practice that hits each domain's task statements.

anthropic-partners.skilljar.com/page/claude-certified-architect-foundations-prep-courses

The same seven courses are public on Claude Academy, which gives each one a time estimate:

That is 34 hours as listed. Anthropic's partner academy describes the Bedrock course as the API course's syllabus on Amazon Bedrock and the Google Cloud one as the same syllabus on Google Cloud, so skipping both leaves 17.5 hours. Then practice by domain:

The guide's own exercises make a good final check before you book:

What the exam leaves out

The guide lists topics that will not appear, which saves study time: fine-tuning or training models, API billing and account management, hosting MCP servers, Claude's internal architecture and safety training methods, embeddings and vector databases, computer use, vision, streaming, rate limits and pricing, OAuth and key rotation, cloud provider setup, benchmarks, prompt caching beyond knowing it exists, and tokenization.

Where Architect study guides disagree with Anthropic

• "72% to pass". A prep course provider's page says so. The guide sets a cut score of 720 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000, chosen in a standard-setting study; scaling evens out exam forms of slightly different difficulty, so 720 is not a share of questions answered right.
• "$99". That was the price until June 30, 2026; it is $125 now.
• "CCA-F". The community's short name. Anthropic's code is CCAR-F, and one training company uses CCA-F for a different exam, the Associate.
• Study time. One prep provider's page quotes anything from one to two weeks up to four months. Anthropic publishes no figure; use the course hours and your own practice results.

How to become a Claude Certified Architect: registration

1. Confirm access. Your employer must be in the Claude Partner Network, and your work email domain must be on its partner record.
2. Register and pay on the exam page of Anthropic Partner Academy, after reading the guide, the terms and the exam policy.
3. Schedule with Pearson VUE, online or at a test center, in English or Japanese. Run Pearson's system test before an online exam.
4. Keep 48 hours of slack. Anthropic's policies page and Pearson VUE's page say changes need 48 hours, while the July 2026 guide still says 24. A late change or a no-show costs the fee.

Where our Claude Code course fits

We teach Claude Code to people who don't code; the course is in early access (pre-order). ai school is not affiliated with Anthropic or Pearson VUE, the course is not exam prep, and it gives no Claude certification. It covers some of the setup the exam asks about, such as a CLAUDE.md file, skills and MCP, for someone building their own projects; the Claude Code course page lists the modules.

?Quick check0 of 2 correct

Your support agent sometimes calls the refund tool before verifying the customer. What does the exam guide treat as the most reliable fix?

AAdd "always verify the customer first" to the system promptBA programmatic prerequisite or hook that blocks the refund tool until verification returns an IDCRaise the model's temperature

How many of the six scenarios appear on your exam?

AAll sixBTwoCFour, picked at random

What to do next

Download the exam guide from Anthropic's exam page today and answer its 12 sample questions cold; your misses show which domain to start with. Then take Building with the Claude API and Claude Code in action, and build the four exercises above on a small project of your own. Book the exam once you can explain every sample answer, at least 48 hours ahead of any date you might need to change.