DVA-C03: the new AWS Certified Developer – Associate arrives on 1 December 2026

According to the official guide, registration for DVA-C03 opens on 1 December 2026 and the last day to take DVA-C02 is 30 November 2026; the September 2026 post on the AWS Training and Certification blog brings registration forward to 27 October, with delivery from 1 December. If you have a DVA-C02 appointment before 30 November, nothing changes for you.

The format stays the same: 65 questions, of which 50 count and 15 are unidentified unscored items; 130 minutes; multiple-choice and multiple-response questions; a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 with a cut at 720; USD 150. The guide stresses that scoring is compensatory: you do not need to pass each domain, only the exam as a whole.

The main addition is Task 2.3 in the security domain, with five skills dedicated to using AI services without opening holes: requesting and managing access to those services; transmitting data with privacy controls, for example VPC endpoints and the guarantee that inputs and outputs are not used to train models; filtering and controlling model inputs and outputs (content filtering, sensitive information detection, PII and PHI redaction, denied topics, protection against prompt injection); securing agent interactions (tool-use authorization, session isolation, human-in-the-loop approval for sensitive actions); and protecting sensitive content in monitoring logs.

AI-assisted development also appears in every domain: generating, reviewing and optimizing code with AI tools (spec-driven generation, automated reviews, code completion, refactoring, security scanning), integrating managed AI services into applications, generating tests and automating their execution, supporting CI/CD workflows (deployment approvals, environment provisioning, post-deployment validation) and analysing errors and optimization opportunities. Building and managing container images with Amazon ECR and deploying on ECS, EKS and Fargate come into scope, as do presigned URLs for S3 and CloudFront.

AI services the guide lists in scope: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Q and Kiro. Explicitly out of scope: selecting foundation models, engineering prompts, designing RAG architectures, designing AI safety frameworks and guardrails, and AI governance. The exam asks you to use AI safely from code, not to design AI systems.

The guide includes a table of relocated content. Unit testing with AWS SAM moves from Domain 1 to testing and deployment; Lambda performance tuning moves to optimization; data serialization changes task within Domain 1; and API Gateway stages and custom domains move within Domain 3. Everything stays on the exam, somewhere else.

Skills are also consolidated: DynamoDB goes from four separate skills (partition keys, consistency models, queries and scans, indexes) to one; encryption and sensitive data merge into a single Task 2.2 with seven skills; testing and test automation merge into Task 3.2; and several observability and optimization skills in Domain 4 are merged. AWS says this does not reduce the emphasis on those topics; it only removes repetition.

If you are already preparing DVA-C02 and can sit it before 30 November, do it: the certification you earn is the same, AWS Certified Developer – Associate, with the same three-year validity, and the outline you know is the one you will be asked. CertifyDeck's DVA-C02 questions follow the guide in force until that date.

If you are starting now and cannot reach November with confidence, prepare DVA-C03. Most of the content is shared (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, IAM, KMS, CI/CD with CodePipeline, SAM and CloudFormation, CloudWatch and X-Ray), so you can study with DVA-C02 material and add Task 2.3, containers with ECR, ECS, EKS and Fargate, and what the guide says about Bedrock, AgentCore, Amazon Q and Kiro. We will update the bank to DVA-C03 once the new version is in use.