SAP-C03: the new AWS Solutions Architect – Professional arrives on 17 November 2026

SAP-C03 is a new version of the exam, not a new certification: it is still AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. It validates that you can design optimized AWS solutions and guide several teams inside a complex organization.

AWS recommends 2 or more years of experience designing solutions on AWS, and now names serverless and AI-integrated architectures in multi-account environments. There are no prerequisites: SAA-C03 is not required either.

The guide draws a clear line. Model training and fine-tuning, data science workflows, security incident forensics, and application code development and debugging are out of scope. You need to know where a model fits in the architecture, how it is protected and what it costs; not how to train it.

Registration opened on 27 October 2026 in all languages, the last day for SAP-C02 is 16 November, and SAP-C03 delivery starts on 17 November. AWS goes straight to the final version; the only beta in this round of changes is MLA-C02. The same blog post also announces DVA-C03, arriving on 1 December.

The format does not change: 75 multiple-choice or multiple-response questions, of which 65 count and 10 are unidentified unscored items; 180 minutes; USD 300; Pearson VUE at a test center or online. The certification lasts 3 years, and if you already hold an active AWS certification you get a 50% discount on your next exam.

The passing score is the one item with two official figures. The SAP-C03 guide says 720, against 750 in the SAP-C02 guide; the AWS policies page still gives 750 for all Professional and Specialty exams. If those 30 points turn out to be spare, good. Your target in practice exams should remain 750.

The SAP-C02 domains were built around the project's situation (complex organization, new solution, continuous improvement, migration); the SAP-C03 ones around the discipline. That is why the weights do not compare row by row. AWS makes clear that merging skills does not reduce the emphasis on essentials: VPC design, federation, SCPs and disaster recovery are all still there, under a different task.

AWS counts 11 new generative and agentic AI skills, 7 cloud-native pattern skills, 6 DevSecOps and observability skills, and 3 data and analytics skills. AI is the most visible change because it shows up in four of the five domains: integrations with Amazon Bedrock, agents with Bedrock AgentCore, RAG with Knowledge Bases and inference with SageMaker AI in domain 1; Guardrails, AgentCore Identity and human approval with Step Functions in domain 2; token cost, batching, caching and cross-Region inference in domain 3; and output evaluation plus agent and model drift metrics in domain 5. If you know the SAP-C02 guide, the three skills in task 2.5 were already there as unscored pretest items. Now they count.

Outside AI, the new material that takes the most study: service mesh with VPC Lattice and ECS Service Connect, multi-tenant architectures, IPv6 and dual stack, lakehouse with Lake Formation and Iceberg, Clean Rooms, IAM Roles Anywhere, post-quantum cryptography with KMS (ML-DSA and ML-KEM), multi-cluster containers, vulnerability scanning in pipelines, and CloudWatch Synthetics and RUM. Fault Injection Service and Resilience Hub also join the in-scope list, with failover tests and chaos engineering in task 4.3.

What you can stop prioritizing: all IoT services; AppStream 2.0 and WorkSpaces; Elastic Transcoder and Kinesis Video Streams; and Comprehend, Kendra, Lex, Rekognition, Textract and the like as separate entries, because Bedrock and SageMaker AI now lead. Lightsail, SES, Amplify, App Runner, Batch, Proton and Service Catalog also leave. AWS warns that removed content may remain implicit in other skills: give it less time without forgetting it entirely. The full detail is in the [official comparison of SAP-C02 and SAP-C03](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-certification/latest/solutions-architect-professional-03/sap-03-comparison.html).

If you are already scoring well in practice exams, book SAP-C02 before 16 November. The certification you earn is the same and stays active until its expiration date. Check today that seats are left, because the calendar decides: AWS makes you wait 14 calendar days between attempts, so if you sit the exam after 2 November and fail, your second attempt will be on SAP-C03.

If you need more than two weeks of study, switch to SAP-C03 now. What you have learned about multi-account design, networking, migration and disaster recovery carries over almost entirely. Add these in order: AI with Bedrock (the newest material and the most repeated), containers and service mesh, data with lakehouse, and finally observability and DevSecOps. The AWS Skill Builder Exam Prep plan linked from the official page already targets SAP-C03.

If your certification expires soon, remember that you recertify by passing the latest version of the exam: from 17 November, that is SAP-C03. If you hold a booking and need to move it, AWS allows two reschedules, and cancelling more than 24 hours ahead refunds the fee.

If you are coming from associate level, secure the foundation first. CertifyDeck's SAA-C03 questions cover that step and you can start free, but they do not replace SAP-C03 preparation: the Professional level asks you to choose between several valid architectures in multi-account organizations under cost and compliance constraints, and SAA-C03 does not go that far.