Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
Issued by Microsoft. Below is what it costs, how long it lasts, and what it actually signals — with the date we checked.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
Microsoft · AZ-104
Free to learn · paid certificate Recognized
| Cost | $165 $165 USD, and Microsoft states the price varies by the country or region in which the exam is proctored. The figure is rendered by JavaScript, so it is invisible to a plain fetch — recovered with a headless browser on 2026-07-28. |
|---|---|
| Validity | 12 months, then renewable indefinitely at no cost. |
| Renewal | Renew every 12 months by passing a free online assessment on Microsoft Learn. No fee, no continuing-education units. |
| Assessment | Proctored exam |
| Proctored | Yes |
| Verify via | Credly |
| Cost per active year | $0$165 once, then $0/yr — renewal is free, so cost per active year tends to zero |
The core Azure operations credential, at the tier employers actually hire for rather than the Fundamentals tier.
Best long-run economics of any paid certificate on this site: you pay once and renew free forever, versus AWS and Google Cloud which both require a paid exam again every three years.
Verified 2026-07-28 · Official page
How we know
Level, product, role and 12-month renewal frequency read from Microsoft's official credential page 2026-07-26 (page last updated 2026-04-17). Free-renewal policy confirmed verbatim on Microsoft's renewal page the same day: "Renewals are free". Price of $165 USD read from Microsoft's own exam page (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications/exams/az-104/) via headless Chrome on 2026-07-28, together with Microsoft's own note that the price depends on the country or region of proctoring. A plain fetch of that page shows no price at all.
Last verified 2026-07-28 · https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications/azure-administrator/
Free preparation
Free resources first. Everything below is free to use; the exam itself is the paid part.
AWS Skill Builder free tier
Free to learn · no certificate
Official free training tier. Paid tiers exist alongside it; only the free tier is counted here.
Verified 2026-07-25
Microsoft Learn: Azure Administrator (AZ-104) learning path
Free to learn · no certificate
Free interactive path plus official practice assessments, straight from the credential's own page.
Verified 2026-07-26
Used by these roles
- Cloud Engineer — You design and run the infrastructure that applications live on, in code rather than by hand.