AZ-500 Retires on 31 August 2026 — and Microsoft Names SC-500 as Its Replacement

Microsoft retires the AZ-500 exam and the Azure Security Engineer Associate certification on 31 August 2026. Its own retirement table puts SC-500 — Cloud and AI Security Engineer Associate — under the heading "Replacement Certification". If you already hold AZ-500, nothing is taken from you: Microsoft says retiring a certification does not cancel one that someone already earned.

The date is confirmed on three official pages

Three Microsoft pages carry the same deadline. Each one is free to open, and you can check all three in a couple of minutes.

The first is the credential retirement schedule, which lists the certifications due to go in the next 12 months. It has two columns and nothing else: a certification, and a date. One row names Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate, against August 31, 2026.

The second is the AZ-500 certification page. It now opens with a warning box:

"This certification, related exam, and renewal assessments will retire on August 31, 2026."

The same box goes on to say that once the date passes, this certification can no longer be earned, and no longer renewed.

The third is the AZ-500 study guide, which pins the exact moment:

"This exam will retire on August 31, 2026, at 11:59 PM Central Standard Time."

Read that first quote slowly, because it covers three separate things. The exam goes. The certification goes. The renewal assessment goes. All of them on one day.

What Microsoft says takes its place

We are going to be exact in this section, and use Microsoft's wording rather than our own.

Both warning boxes finish with a "Learn more" link. Both send you to the same place: a post on the Microsoft Community Hub, written by Mark Winters and last modified on 28 May 2026. That link is what makes the post an official notice rather than commentary. Microsoft's own credential pages hand you to it. (The retirement schedule does not link it; the certification page and the study guide both do.)

The post carries a table of retiring certifications, four columns wide, and the last column is headed "Replacement Certification". Taken one field at a time, the AZ-500 row reads:

Microsoft's column heading	The AZ-500 row
Retiring Microsoft Certification	Azure Security Engineer Associate (Exam AZ-500)
Certification retirement date	August 31, 2026
Training retirement date	August 2026
Replacement Certification	Cloud and AI Security Engineer Associate (Exam SC-500)

A second table in the same post tells candidates what to do about it, and Microsoft splits the advice by whether you have already booked a seat.

• You have registered. You may carry on preparing and sit the exam while it is available. Microsoft attaches a caution: once the exam retires, a failed attempt cannot be repeated, and the certification cannot be renewed.
• You have not registered. The post is direct — "we strongly recommend that you prepare for and take the new exam instead". Its table sets Exam AZ-500 against Exam SC-500, and gives July 2026 as the month when training for the new exam was expected to be ready.

That is the sum of what Microsoft has published about the pairing: a replacement column, and a recommendation about which exam to book. We are not going to stretch it further than that. The next section covers the claims other people add on top.

What Microsoft has not said

You will find pages saying that AZ-500 "becomes" SC-500, or that the exam has simply been renamed. Nothing Microsoft has published supports either reading, and the gap between them is practical rather than pedantic.

There is no automatic conversion. An AZ-500 credential does not become an SC-500 credential on 1 September 2026. No official page describes any such step, in either direction.

There is no transition or upgrade path. Microsoft has announced no shortened exam, no bridging assessment, and no reduced fee for people who hold AZ-500. To earn the new credential you book SC-500 and sit it in full, on the same terms as a candidate who has never certified.

It is not the same exam with a new code. The two credentials have different names, and each exam publishes its own skills outline inside its own study guide. What the new exam actually tests belongs in our SC-500 exam guide; this article stays on what is happening to AZ-500.

The distinction is easy to state. A replacement column tells you which credential now carries the role. It does not move anybody's credential across, and Microsoft has never suggested that it does.

If you already hold AZ-500

You keep it, and there is nothing you need to do this month. The FAQ in that same post is blunt about it:

"Retirement does not revoke or invalidate Certifications that were earned."

The same answer adds that a credential you have already earned stays valid, and stays listed on your transcript, until its own expiry date. That condition is the part worth noticing. AZ-500 is a role-based certification, and its certification page gives the renewal frequency as 12 months. The same page says you will not be able to renew it after 31 August 2026.

So the honest reading is this, and we would rather set it out than leave it vague. Your credential is not cancelled, and it stays on your transcript. The renewal route, however, closes on the same day as the exam. Microsoft's FAQ says a retiring certification can still be renewed beforehand, if it is eligible for renewal. If yours becomes eligible before 31 August 2026, that renewal is the last one available to you. Check your own expiry date now rather than in a year.

Whether employers will still value the credential is a different question, and the fair answer is that it will age. It describes an Azure security role as scoped before AI workloads were part of it. Nobody can remove it from your transcript, but it will read as a 2026 qualification soon enough.

If you are studying for AZ-500 right now

Here is our recommendation, and we label it as ours rather than presenting it as guidance from Microsoft.

The deciding factor is your realistic test date, not how much of the syllabus you have covered. AZ-500 can be booked until 31 August 2026. If you are close to ready and can sit it comfortably before that date, the credential is real, and you keep it under the terms quoted above.

If your honest test date lands near the deadline, the position is weaker than it looks. You would get a single attempt with no retake, after months of work. In that case we would move to SC-500 rather than spend that one attempt on an exam that is closing. Microsoft gives the same advice to anyone not yet registered.

One thing not to do is treat AZ-500 study notes as SC-500 preparation. The two exams publish separate skills outlines, and the new one is scoped around cloud and AI security together. Our SC-500 exam guide sets out what it covers, and our SC-500 study plan turns that into a schedule. For an honest read on the step up first, try is SC-500 hard?.

Update log

• 9 August 2026 — First published. Every source listed above was opened and checked on this date. The 31 August 2026 date and Microsoft's replacement wording both stood exactly as quoted here. This article is news and will age by design: once AZ-500 has gone, the standing detail moves to our SC-500 exam guide, and any correction lands here first.

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We built our SC-500 practice exams against Microsoft's published skills outline for the new exam, question by question, and every question links to the official page behind it. None of it was recycled from AZ-500 material, because the two exams do not test the same list. Practice questions are not a substitute for the official study guide. They show you which parts you have not learned yet.