What does a tech certification cost to hold for ten years?
What does a tech certification cost to hold for ten years?
Between $165 and $2,225, for credentials that are marketed as broadly equivalent. The exam fee you are quoted is not the price. What decides the price is the renewal rule, and the renewal rule is almost never on the page that shows you the fee.
The clearest case is Kubernetes. The CNCF advertises the CKA exam at $445. It expires after two years and there is no cheaper renewal path — you re-sit the full exam. Held continuously for ten years, that is $2,225.
Microsoft’s role-based certificates renew free, once a year, in a browser. Ten years costs what the first exam cost: $165.
What it costs to hold one certificate for ten years
United States list prices, computed from each issuer’s own published exam fee and its own published renewal terms.
| Certificate | Ten years | How it renews |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft role-based | $165 | Free annual renewal, online |
| Salesforce Administrator | $200 | Free maintenance module |
| Scrum.org PSM I | $200 | Does not expire |
| IIBA ECBA | $250 | Does not expire |
| DAMA CDMP Associate | $311 | Annual fee |
| AWS Cloud Practitioner | $400 | $100, then three re-sits |
| Google Cloud Professional | $600 | $200, then four half-price renewals on a two-year cycle |
| PMI PMP (member rate) | $605 | $425, then $60 every three years |
| CompTIA Security+ | $889 | $439 exam, plus about $150 of continuing education every three years |
| ISACA CISM (member rate) | $1,075 | Annual maintenance fee |
| Cisco CCNA | $1,200 | Re-sit — or $300 using free continuing-education credits |
| IAPP CIPP | $1,550 | $550, then $250 every two years |
| OffSec OSCP | $1,749 | Does not expire |
| GIAC (taken standalone) | ~$1,977 | ~$979, then a $499 renewal, then $249 |
| EC-Council CEH | $1,999 | $1,199, then $80 a year |
| Red Hat RHCSA | $2,000 | $500, then three re-sits |
| ISC2 CISSP | $2,099 | $749, plus $135 every year |
| CNCF CKA | $2,225 | $445 every two years — full re-sit |
There are only three renewal mechanisms
This is the part worth carrying away, because it survives every price change on the table above.
Every certificate here renews in one of three ways: an annual fee, a forced re-sit, or nothing. That is the whole space. Once you know which of the three you are looking at, you can price any certificate on the market — including ones not on this table — without being told what it costs.
The order of the table is almost entirely explained by that one column. The cheap end is credentials that either never expire or renew free. The expensive end is credentials that make you sit the exam again. A forced re-sit is the most expensive rule an issuer can choose, and it is chosen most often at the top of the market.
Cisco CCNA is the row to look at twice. Re-sitting costs $1,200 over ten years. Using the free continuing-education credits Cisco itself publishes costs $300. Same certificate, same ten years, four times the price, and the difference is entirely whether you knew about the second route.
How this was measured
Each issuer’s own published exam price and recertification policy, read directly. Ten-year totals are computed from the issuer’s stated fee and its stated renewal terms, assuming one certificate held continuously with no stacking.
Third-party training providers and best-certificate listicles were excluded by rule, and are not used anywhere in this record. That exclusion is the reason this table exists. Almost everything published about certification cost is written by somebody who sells training, exam preparation, or the certificate itself, and the figure they quote is the exam fee — the number that makes the purchase look smallest.
The record is graded 1 on the scale this project
uses: the issuer publishing its own prices is the body with the power to
set them, and it is not selling you a comparison. It is
cert-ten-year-costs-2026 in the free source bibliography, with its full caveats, and the
underlying data is downloadable under CC BY.
What this does not tell you
The table is a price list. It is not advice, and it cannot tell you whether any of these is worth buying.
These are list prices in US dollars, before tax. They exclude training, travel, practice exams and membership dues except where stated. The real cost to a person is higher than every number above, and how much higher depends on things no issuer publishes.
Stacking changes several of these materially. A higher Cisco or CompTIA certificate renews the ones below it, so somebody holding three CompTIA certificates is not paying three times the CompTIA row. The table prices one certificate held alone, because that is the only assumption that can be applied consistently.
Prices move, and one moved during the research. CompTIA Security+ went from $425 to $439 on 1 June 2026. Every figure here is a 2026 reading and each one will drift. The three renewal mechanisms will not.
Nothing here measures what a certificate is worth. You will find claims that a given exam produces a salary increase of a stated size. This project grades almost all of those 4 — aggregator data, or a vendor surveying its own customers — and the rule it applies to a grade 4 number is that it gives you a direction and never an amount. Whether a certificate pays for itself is a question the published evidence cannot currently answer, which is a different and more uncomfortable statement than “yes” or “no”.
Some certifications have no price at all
Four enterprise platforms certify only the people who already work on them, so there is no exam fee to compare — Duck Creek, Workday, Guidewire and Epic. Which computing certifications an individual cannot buy sets out what each of them publishes, and what Epic does not.
Where this came from
This is one record out of a larger project that scores computing careers against the same ten dimensions, with a source, a date and a reliability grade printed beside every figure. The method is free to read, all six chapters, and so is everything the project could not find out.
If a row here is wrong, the address is here, and the correction will be printed on this page.