September 14, 2026 · IT Practice Exams
How to Pass AZ-900 on the First Try: A Study Plan for Beginners
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A first-try AZ-900 pass comes down to three habits: study in order of exam weight rather than page order, switch from reading to answering questions early, and wait to book until your practice scores are consistent across all three domains. This post turns those habits into a plan you can follow with no prior Azure experience.
If you are still deciding whether to take the exam at all, start with Is AZ-900 worth it?. If you want the detail on difficulty, timing, and scoring mechanics, we covered that in How hard is the AZ-900?. This post is about the preparation itself.
Facts below were checked against Microsoft Learn on September 14, 2026: the Azure Fundamentals certification page and the AZ-900 study guide, with skills measured as of July 20, 2026.
The exam
| AZ-900 | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals |
| Level | Beginner |
| Time | 45 minutes |
| Passing score | 700 or greater, on a 1 to 1,000 scale |
| Question count | Not published for AZ-900. Microsoft states most of its exams contain 40 to 60 questions |
| Delivery | Proctored, through Pearson VUE; students and educators can schedule through Certiport |
| Retake | 24 hours after a first failure |
| Price | Set by the country where the exam is proctored ($99 in the United States) |
| Expiration | Does not expire |
The US price comes from Pearson VUE’s official Microsoft exam price list. Confirm the price for your country when you schedule.
Scoring
The passing score is 700, and it is not 70%. Microsoft reports scores on a scale, and the number of correct answers needed to reach 700 depends on the difficulty of the question set you receive. Some questions on the exam are unscored, and you cannot tell which ones.
Two practical rules follow from that:
- Answer every question. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank is always worse than a guess.
- Do not aim for 70% in practice. A study target set right at the pass line leaves no margin for a harder question set on the day. The readiness section below gives a better target.
The domains
The study guide splits the exam into three domains:
| Domain | Weight | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Describe Azure architecture and services | 35 to 40% | Regions and availability zones, subscriptions and management groups, compute, networking, storage, identity and security |
| Describe Azure management and governance | 30 to 35% | Cost management, tags, Microsoft Purview, Azure Policy, resource locks, deployment tools, monitoring |
| Describe cloud concepts | 25 to 30% | Cloud computing, shared responsibility, cloud models, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS |
The study guide presents cloud concepts first, and most courses follow that order. Cloud concepts is also the smallest domain and the most intuitive one. The two larger domains together make up roughly 70% of the exam, so the plan below gives them most of the time.
Study plan
This plan assumes about an hour on weekdays and two hours on weekend days, and no prior Azure experience. If you already work in IT, you can compress it to two weeks by combining weeks 1 and 2 and weeks 3 and 4.
Week 1: cloud concepts and core architecture. Start with cloud concepts to learn the vocabulary: the shared responsibility model, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and public, private, and hybrid cloud. Then move straight into the core architectural components: regions, region pairs, and sovereign regions, availability zones, and the hierarchy of resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups. At the end of the week, answer a short set of practice questions on this material, even if it feels early.
Week 2: Azure services. This is the largest block of names to learn. Cover compute (virtual machines, scale sets, App Service, Functions, and containers), networking (virtual networks, subnets, and DNS, and VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, and private endpoints), storage (access tiers and redundancy options), and identity (Microsoft Entra ID and external identities, plus RBAC compared with Conditional Access). Use flashcards for the service names. Recognition is not enough here: the exam gives you a scenario and expects you to name the service.
Week 3: management and governance. This domain is heavily weighted and often skimped. Cover cost factors, the pricing calculator, cost management and tags, Azure Policy, resource locks, Microsoft Purview, Azure Arc, ARM templates and infrastructure as code, and the monitoring tools: Azure Advisor, Service Health, and Azure Monitor. By the end of this week, practice questions should take up at least half of each study session.
Week 4: practice and weak areas. Stop reading new material. Work through mixed practice sets under a timer, sort every miss by domain, and go back to the explanation and the relevant article for each one. Take Microsoft’s free practice assessment once this week as a checkpoint. Book the exam once you meet the readiness target below.
The AZ-900 study guide in our Study Library follows the full objective list, and the complete Azure Fundamentals library covers every domain in the plan.
Free Microsoft resources
Microsoft provides several free resources for AZ-900, and each has a specific use.
- The official study guide. The list of skills measured is the syllabus. Keep it open and check off each bullet as you cover it. Microsoft updated it on July 20, 2026, so older courses may be missing recent changes.
- Microsoft Learn training. The certification page links to free self-paced learning paths and modules, plus an instructor-led course option. The self-paced paths are a good first pass through the material in week 1 and week 2.
- The free practice assessment. Microsoft describes it as an overview of the style, wording, and difficulty of the questions you are likely to see. Use it as a checkpoint rather than your main question source, because repeating the same assessment measures memory of those questions more than readiness.
- The exam sandbox. A demo of the exam interface, where you can try the question types before exam day. Spend ten minutes in it so the interface is not new when the clock is running.
- Exam Readiness Zone. Microsoft’s video series linked from the study guide, useful as a review in week 4.
Exam day
A few rules from Microsoft’s certification page are easy to miss:
- Register with a personal Microsoft account. Microsoft strongly recommends it. If you register with a work or school account and later leave that organization, your exam records can be lost and cannot be recovered.
- Plan for 45 minutes. Pace yourself at roughly a minute per question, flag anything you are unsure about, and come back to it if time allows.
- The exam is proctored, at a test center or online. For an online exam, test your computer and room setup well before the appointment.
- If the exam is not available in your preferred language, the study guide says you can request an additional 30 minutes.
Readiness
Book the exam when you consistently score 80% or higher on practice questions you have not seen before, in every domain, across several sessions. That is our recommended target, not a Microsoft figure. It leaves a margin above the pass line for a harder question set, and requiring every domain stops a strong score in one area from hiding a weak one in another.
Microsoft does not publish pass rates for AZ-900, and we do not quote unofficial ones. Your practice results on unseen questions are a more useful guide to your chances than any published average.
If you miss the target, the fix is almost always the same: go back to the domain with the lowest score, reread the explanations for every question you missed there, and test again a few days later.
Verdict
AZ-900 is a beginner exam, and a beginner can pass it on the first try with a month of steady preparation. The order of study decides most of the result: learn the vocabulary, spend most of your time on the two largest domains, start answering questions by the end of week 1, and book only when your scores are consistent.
The part of that plan most people skip is practice volume. Our AZ-900 practice bank carries 1,300 original questions mapped to the current objectives, every answer explained in plain English for people new to cloud, plus a 500-card spaced-repetition flashcard deck for the service names. $59 once, lifetime access for the life of the exam version, no subscription.
Not sure where you stand yet? Start with the free 15-question test and see which domain needs the most work before you start week 1.