SAP-C02 vs SAP-C03, the Solutions Architect Professional update

AWS is replacing the Solutions Architect – Professional exam. The current version, SAP-C02, has a last test date of November 16, 2026, and the new version, SAP-C03, starts the next day. If you are partway through preparing, the obvious question is whether the work you have done still counts, and whether you should hurry to sit the old exam or wait for the new one.

Most of it still counts. The new exam is a rewrite of the outline, not a different job: it still tests whether you can design for many accounts, several Regions and an on-premises estate, and choose the best of four plausible designs under a constraint. What changes is the shape of the domains and a set of newer topics, mainly generative AI, resilience engineering and DevSecOps. This guide sets out what AWS has published so far, what it has not, and how to plan around both.

Key dates

These come from the AWS certification page for the exam and the AWS Training and Certification blog post of September 1, 2026.

October 27, 2026: registration for SAP-C03 opens, in all languages. AWS says the full SAP-C03 exam guide, with its detailed task statements, will be published on the same day.
November 16, 2026: the last day to take SAP-C02.
November 17, 2026: SAP-C03 general availability delivery begins.

There is no beta period announced for SAP-C03. The new exam goes straight to general availability, in every language the exam is offered in today.

If you pass SAP-C02 before it retires, AWS says your credential stays active through its original expiration date. Passing the old version does not make the certification worth less or shorter.

What stays the same

The format that AWS has published for SAP-C03 matches SAP-C02 on every point it covers.

Questions: 75 for both.
Time: 180 minutes for both.
Price: 300 USD for both.
Delivery: Pearson VUE, at a test center or online with a remote proctor.
Recommended experience: two or more years using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions, plus the ability to evaluate requirements and make architectural recommendations.

The target candidate is also the same kind of person: an architect who gives guidance across several applications and projects in a complex, multi-account organization. So the reading load and the pace, about two and a half minutes per question, should feel familiar.

What AWS has not published yet

As of October 14, 2026, the SAP-C03 exam guide is not out. That means these details are unknown, and anything you read elsewhere about them is a guess:

Domain weightings. AWS has named the five SAP-C03 domains but not how much of the exam each one carries.
Scoring. For SAP-C02 the guide says 65 questions are scored and 10 are unscored, results are a scaled score from 100 to 1,000, and the pass mark is 750. AWS has not yet said whether any of that carries over.
Question types. SAP-C02 uses multiple choice (one right answer from four) and multiple response (two or more right answers from five or more). The SAP-C03 types will be confirmed in its guide.
Task statements and the service list. The blog lists the new skill areas, but the exact task statements and the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists come with the guide.

Check the exam guide on October 27 before you build a detailed study plan for SAP-C03.

How the domains change

SAP-C02 has four domains, organized around the situation you are designing for:

Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity (26%)
Design for New Solutions (29%)
Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions (25%)
Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization (20%)

SAP-C03 has five, organized around architectural concerns instead:

Cloud-native architecture design and implementation
Security, compliance, and governance
Cost-optimized architecture design
Resilience, migration, and business continuity
Operational excellence and automation

The change is more a reshuffle than a replacement. Multi-account governance, which sat in the first SAP-C02 domain, now has a domain of its own with security and compliance. Cost, which SAP-C02 spread across the design and improvement domains, becomes its own domain. Migration moves in with resilience and business continuity, so expect disaster recovery and migration cutovers to sit side by side. Operational excellence and automation picks up much of what SAP-C02 called continuous improvement.

What is new in SAP-C03

AWS lists these additions in the announcement. The numbers of new skills are the ones AWS gives.

Generative AI and agentic AI (11 new skills): generative AI integrations with Amazon Bedrock, AI agent architectures with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Bedrock Guardrails for content filtering, and human-oversight workflows for AI operations.
Resilience engineering: AWS Fault Injection Service, AWS Resilience Hub, Application Recovery Controller, and automated runbooks with AWS Systems Manager.
Cloud-native patterns (7 new skills): serverless data pipelines, durable workflows with AWS Step Functions, service mesh with Amazon VPC Lattice and Amazon ECS Service Connect, container image security, multi-tenant architectures, and real-time data architectures.
DevSecOps and observability (6 new skills): vulnerability scanning in pipelines, deployment pipelines that span accounts, container monitoring, monitoring of AI and ML metrics, and synthetic and real-user monitoring.
Data and analytics (3 new skills): lakehouse architectures with AWS Lake Formation and Apache Iceberg, real-time and batch analytics pipelines, and cross-account data sharing with AWS Clean Rooms.
Post-quantum cryptography: AWS KMS with the ML-DSA and ML-KEM algorithms.

AWS also says existing task statements were updated to current practice while keeping the core architecture skills. It has not published a list of removed topics, so don't assume anything was dropped until the guide is out.

Some of this is already visible in SAP-C02. Its current exam guide has an "Emerging Topics" section covering security and responsible AI controls: content filtering with Bedrock Guardrails, access control for AI applications with AgentCore Identity, and human approval steps with Step Functions. On SAP-C02 these appear only as unscored pretest questions. On SAP-C03 they become scored skills. Several of the resilience services are also new to the list: Fault Injection Service, Resilience Hub, Application Recovery Controller, VPC Lattice and Clean Rooms do not appear in the SAP-C02 in-scope service list, while Lake Formation, Step Functions and Systems Manager already do.

Should you sit SAP-C02 or wait?

AWS's own advice is short: take SAP-C02 by November 16 if you are already prepared and want the certification now, and wait for SAP-C03 if you want it to cover cloud-native, generative AI and resilience engineering skills. In practice that splits like this.

Sit SAP-C02 if you are scoring well on full-length timed practice and can book a slot before November 16. Book early, because a missed or rescheduled slot after that date puts you on an exam you didn't prepare for.
Sit SAP-C02 if your employer or a partner program needs the certification this year. The credential runs to its normal expiry either way.
Wait for SAP-C03 if you are still early in your preparation. Four or five weeks is not much time for this exam, and a rushed attempt that fails costs the full fee.
Wait for SAP-C03 if you work with Bedrock, containers or resilience tooling and want the certification to show it.

One thing not to do: plan a retake on SAP-C02. If your first attempt is late in October or in November, a failed result leaves little or no room for a second try before it retires.

What carries over

Most SAP-C02 study maps straight onto the new domains, because the underlying skills are the same.

Multi-account governance: AWS Organizations, SCPs, IAM Identity Center, cross-account roles and Control Tower. These belong in the new security, compliance and governance domain. Practice with blocking unused Regions and leaving the organization.
Hybrid networking: Transit Gateway, Direct Connect resiliency, VPN and Route 53 Resolver are no longer a named domain, but they run through every design. See Direct Connect for maximum resiliency.
Migration: strategies per workload, Application Migration Service, DMS and its schema conversion. See assessing an Oracle schema before conversion.
Disaster recovery: RTO and RPO, the four DR strategies, Aurora global databases and Route 53 failover. The disaster recovery guide covers them.

What to add

If you are moving your preparation to SAP-C03, spend the extra time here, roughly in this order.

Resilience engineering. Learn what each service is for: Fault Injection Service runs controlled failure experiments with stop conditions, Resilience Hub assesses an application against RTO and RPO targets, and Application Recovery Controller gives you routing controls and readiness checks for Regional failover. Practice with a fault injection experiment with a stop condition and a Regional failover control plane.
Generative AI architecture. Bedrock, RAG, Guardrails and AgentCore at the level of "which component solves this problem", not model internals. The prompt engineering, RAG and fine-tuning guide is a good start.
Human-in-the-loop workflows. Step Functions task tokens and approval steps are now asked about for AI operations as well as business processes. See a long-running human approval workflow.
Service-to-service networking. VPC Lattice and ECS Service Connect, and how they differ from PrivateLink and Transit Gateway.
DevSecOps and data. Image scanning in pipelines, deployments across accounts, lakehouse tables with Iceberg, and data collaboration with Clean Rooms.
Post-quantum cryptography. Know the two algorithms: ML-DSA is a post-quantum signature algorithm that KMS offers for signing keys, and ML-KEM is used for hybrid post-quantum key agreement in TLS connections to KMS endpoints. Know why an architect would care: data that must stay secret for many years.

The questions on this site follow the SAP-C02 exam guide. They remain good practice for the skills that carry over, but for SAP-C03 use them as a base and add the new topics above.