AZ-900 Exam Guide: What It Covers, Costs, and How to Pass

The AZ-900, Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, is Microsoft's entry-level cloud certification. It covers three areas — cloud concepts, Azure architecture and services, and Azure management and governance — with no prerequisites. You need a score of 700 to pass and get 45 minutes to do it. Most people can prepare in a few weeks. Here is the full picture, checked against Microsoft's own pages.

What AZ-900 covers

Microsoft groups the exam into three skill areas, each with a weighting that tells you how much of the exam it drives:

• Cloud concepts (25–30%) — what the cloud is, the shared responsibility model, the public/private/hybrid models, and the three service types (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS).
• Azure architecture and services (35–40%) — the largest area: regions and availability zones, the resource hierarchy, and the core compute, networking, storage, and identity services.
• Azure management and governance (30–35%) — cost management, governance and compliance tools, ways to deploy and manage resources, and monitoring.

You will not build anything or write code. Every objective starts with the word "describe" — the exam tests whether you can explain these ideas, not operate them.

Exam format: what's official, and where the popular guides disagree

This is where a lot of online guides get sloppy, so here is only what Microsoft actually states.

Microsoft gives you 45 minutes to complete the exam. That number is official.

The number of questions is not. Microsoft does not publish a fixed question count for AZ-900, and it can vary. If you search around, you will see confident claims of "32 to 36 questions," "40 to 60 questions," and several other ranges. They disagree because none of them is quoting an official figure. A safe expectation is roughly 40 to 60 items, but treat any exact number as an estimate. We would rather tell you it is unpublished than invent one.

The questions themselves mix formats: standard multiple choice, plus drag-and-drop and select-from-a-list style items. You can see the real interface in Microsoft's free exam sandbox before you sit the exam.

What score do you need

You need 700, on a scale that runs to 1000, to pass. One thing worth knowing: 700 is not "70% of questions right." The score is scaled — questions carry different weights, and some unscored items may appear — so aim comfortably clear of the line rather than counting questions.

How much does it cost

Microsoft prices AZ-900 by country or region, so there is no single global figure. The exact price for your location shows during scheduling through Pearson VUE. Because pricing is regional, we point you at the scheduling page rather than repeat a US-only number that may not match your country.

Is AZ-900 hard? Who it's for

AZ-900 sits at beginner level with no prerequisites. It is designed for people starting out — including non-technical roles in sales, management, or operations who need to speak Azure, as well as IT professionals early in a cloud career.

In our experience building the question bank for this exam, the difficulty is breadth, not depth. The concepts are individually simple, but there are a lot of them, and the exam rewards recognizing the right term for a described situation. It is very passable with focused study — just do not mistake "entry-level" for "no study required."

How to prepare

Start with Microsoft's own free material: the learning paths on the exam page and the free practice assessment Microsoft provides. Work through the skills outline in the study guide so nothing on the blueprint is unfamiliar.

Then test yourself under exam-like conditions. Practice questions are the most honest signal of whether the material has stuck. That is why we built our AZ-900 practice exams against the exact skills outline above — every question traceable to the official Microsoft page behind it, and no dumps. Practice tests do not replace the learning material; they show you where you are not ready yet.

Does it expire, and is it worth it

Once you pass, the certification is yours to keep — Microsoft's renewal policy states that fundamentals certifications do not expire. There is nothing to renew.

As a credential, AZ-900 will not by itself land a cloud engineering job. Its value is as a starting point. It proves baseline Azure literacy and is a common first step toward role-based certifications like Azure Administrator. For non-engineers, it is a credible way to show they understand the platform their team runs on.