How to Get Claude Certified: Four Exams, and Who Can Sit Them

Anthropic runs four Claude certification exams: Associate ($99), Developer – Foundations ($125), Architect – Foundations ($125) and Architect – Professional ($175). They are proctored by Pearson VUE and scored from 100 to 1,000, with 720 to pass. The certifications are valid for 12 months. Unless you work at an organization in the Claude Partner Network, you cannot register for any of them.

Everyone else has Claude Academy's 27 free courses. Anthropic's own eligibility page says the two "are two different things, and the names are close enough that people mix them up." This guide covers both. It is built from Anthropic's certification FAQ, the exam pages and the official exam guide, all read on October 13, 2026.

The four exams

The Partner Academy certifications page lists them with their fees:

Prices are in USD before partner discounts. According to the certification FAQ, Registered-tier partners pay full price, Select, Preferred and Global Premier partners get 50% off at checkout, and Global Premier partners pay nothing through December 31, 2026. Bulk vouchers are "in progress", not available yet.

The two Architect exams are separate certifications. In the FAQ's words, "Foundations proves an architect can build with Claude. Professional proves they can design and govern Claude solutions at enterprise scale." You can take Professional without Foundations, and passing Foundations does not upgrade to Professional.

Who can take them

The FAQ is unambiguous: "Certification is currently available only to organizations in the Claude Partner Network." Registration needs "a partner email address on a recognized company domain", you must be at least 18, and your age is checked against a government ID at check-in.

The Partner Network is free to join, according to Anthropic's July announcement of the role-based exams, and the eligibility page addresses it to firms: "If your organization delivers Claude for clients, apply to join at claude.com/partners." Other organizations can ask their Anthropic account team to record their interest in certification. For an individual outside those firms, there is no route today. The eligibility page tells administrators at other organizations to "point them to Claude Academy."

What the exam is like

Every exam uses "multiple choice and scenario-based multiple response questions." You get 120 minutes and should plan for about 135 minutes in the seat. It is closed book: no notes, documentation, translation tools or AI assistants. Exams and prep material are available in English and Japanese.

Pearson VUE delivers it, online through OnVUE or at a test center. Your registration stays valid for 5 years. That is the window for booking the exam, not the life of the credential. Before you book:

• Make your Pearson profile name match your government ID exactly.
• Cancel or reschedule at least 48 hours ahead. Late changes and no-shows forfeit the fee.
• Cancelling a booking in Pearson does not refund you. Refunds go through certifications-support@anthropic.com.
• Request accommodations through Pearson at least 10 days ahead.
• Candidates with IDs from Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Syria or restricted regions of Ukraine cannot use online proctoring and must book a test center. Pearson suspended delivery for residents of Iran on September 8, 2026.

Scores are scaled from 100 to 1,000, and 720 passes all four exams. The score report shows the percentage you answered correctly in each section, which tells you what to revise if you fail.

Retakes, validity and renewal

• Retakes: wait 14 days after a first failure, 30 after a second and 90 after a third. You can take each exam up to 4 times in a rolling 12 months, and every retake costs the full fee, minus your tier discount.
• Validity: 12 months from the date you pass.
• Renewal: you "review what's changed since you certified and complete a free, non-proctored assessment" in Anthropic Partner Academy. "On-time renewal is free." Let it lapse and you sit the full exam again at the full fee.
• The badge: issued through Credly. Add a personal email to your Credly profile and the badge stays reachable when you change jobs. Keeping the badge is not the same as keeping the certification current; the 12-month renewal still applies.

Architect – Foundations, in detail

The only exam guide I could download publicly is the one for Architect – Foundations, version 1.0, effective July 2026. It calls itself the authoritative reference for the exam's scope:

The blueprint weights five domains: agentic architecture and orchestration 27%, Claude Code configuration and workflows 20%, prompt engineering and structured output 20%, tool design and MCP integration 18%, and context management and reliability 15%.

The six scenarios are a customer support agent built on the Agent SDK with MCP tools, code generation with Claude Code, a multi-agent research system, developer productivity tools, Claude Code in a CI/CD pipeline, and structured data extraction with JSON schemas.

Its preparation advice is hands-on, not a reading list:

• Build an agent with the Claude Agent SDK: a full agentic loop with tool calling, error handling, session management and subagents.
• Configure Claude Code for a real project: a CLAUDE.md hierarchy, path-specific rules in .claude/rules/, custom skills with frontmatter options such as context: fork, and at least one MCP server.
• Design MCP tools whose descriptions clearly separate similar tools, with structured errors that say whether a retry makes sense.
• Build an extraction pipeline with JSON schemas, validation and retry loops, and the Message Batches API.
• Practice review prompts that reduce false positives, context management for long sessions, and escalation rules for when an agent should hand work to a human.

The guide also includes sample questions, which are the closest thing to a practice exam now that the old one was retired in the move to Pearson.

If you are not at a partner

Claude Academy is public and free. Its catalogue file, generated on October 9, lists 308 resources: 27 courses, 124 tutorials and 157 use cases. I list all 27 courses, with their lessons and durations, in Claude Academy: 308 Resources, 27 Courses, and What Completion Certifies. The certificate it gives you is exactly what the eligibility page says: "A Claude Academy certificate of completion records that you finished a course and passed its quiz."

These sequences are my suggestions, not official prerequisites:

• Starting from scratch: Claude 101 (2.5 hours), then AI Fluency: Framework and foundations (4 hours).
• Working in Claude Code: Claude Code 101 (1.5 hours), Claude Code in action (1 hour), then Introduction to agent skills (1 hour), Introduction to Model Context Protocol (1 hour) and Introduction to subagents (45 minutes). These follow the Architect blueprint's subjects.
• Building API applications: Claude Platform 101 (1.5 hours), then Building with the Claude API (67 lessons, 9 hours) and Introduction to Model Context Protocol.

The course index lists no quiz for the agent skills and subagents courses, so check each course's completion requirements if the certificate is your goal. And do not expect a course title to prove what the exam tests: the guide's exercises above are a better measure of readiness than any list of finished courses.

One more name to keep apart: the Claude Frontier Academy, announced on October 2. Anthropic "aims to train 10,000 Frontier Deployed Engineers (FDEs) by the end of 2027" with a $100 million commitment, and "Participation is by nomination" through an organization's Anthropic account team or Partner Account Manager. It ends in a Claude Frontier Deployed Engineer badge, and it is not open to individual applicants either.

What the numbers say

Anthropic's July 23 announcement reported that "more than 36,000 consultants have received certification across more than 1,300 organizations" since March, and that "More than 400,000 people have completed Claude training this year" through Anthropic Partner Academy. The second figure counts training, not certifications. The announcement also listed firms' commitments, among them Accenture at 50,000 certified professionals, PwC at 30,000, Capgemini at 20,000, Deloitte at 15,000 and KPMG at 15,000. Those are targets, not completed certifications, and all of these figures are from July.

My reading: certification is a partner-channel instrument. Three of the four exams count toward a firm's eligibility in the Claude Partner Network. If you are at one of those firms, retakes are allowed and on-time renewal is free. If you are not, an Academy certificate shows that you finished a course.

The short version

At a partner: read the exam guide, build the things it lists, then book the exam. Not at a partner: take the free Academy courses and earn their completion certificates.