AWS Developer Associate Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate

There is no official pass rate for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam. Amazon Web Services does not publish one: not on the DVA-C02 certification page, not in the official exam guide, and not in the policies that govern scoring and retakes. AWS tells you your own result as a scaled score with a pass or fail designation, and tells you nothing at all about anybody else's. Every percentage circulating in 2026 as "the DVA-C02 pass rate" was produced by someone other than the company that writes, delivers, and scores the exam. This page is not going to add another one. It sets out every number AWS does publish, and shows why the figures elsewhere cannot all be true at once.

How the DVA-C02 exam is actually scored

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam is a fixed-length, multiple-choice and multiple-response test delivered at a Pearson VUE testing center or as an online proctored exam. The official exam guide describes two response types: multiple choice, which "has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)," and multiple response, which "has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options." Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect, and AWS confirms there is no penalty for guessing.

What AWS publishes	DVA-C02
Questions	65 total — 50 of them affect your score
Unscored questions	15, and they are not identified on the exam
Time limit	130 minutes
Passing score	720
Score scale	Scaled, 100–1,000
Per-domain requirement	None — compensatory scoring
Exam fee	$150 USD
Results posted	Within five business days
Retake wait after a fail	14 calendar days
Validity	3 years
Published pass rate	None

Two lines in that table do most of the damage to the "you need X% to pass" claims you will find elsewhere. The first is that a scaled score is not a percentage. AWS reports results "as a scaled score of 100–1,000," and 720 is a point on that scale, not 72% of the questions. The scale does not even begin at zero, so there is no arithmetic that turns 720 into a number of correct answers. AWS gives the reason for scaling in plain language: "correctly answering seven out of 10 easy questions does not indicate the same level of knowledge as correctly answering seven out of 10 difficult questions." Scores are equated across exam forms of differing difficulty, which means the raw number of items you need right is not fixed and is not published. Any page converting 720 into a percentage or a specific count of correct answers is inventing it.

The second is that 15 of the 65 questions you answer do not count. The exam guide states that the exam "includes 50 questions that affect your score" alongside "15 unscored questions that do not affect your score," and that those unscored questions "are not identified on the exam." Even a candidate who tallied every item they felt sure of could not compute their own percentage, because they cannot know which 15 were being trialed for future use.

You do not have to pass each domain

This is the most common false claim written about the DVA-C02, and the exam guide contradicts it in a single sentence: "The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam." Strength in Development with AWS Services genuinely offsets weakness in Deployment. Your score report may contain a table of classifications showing performance by section, but AWS attaches a warning to it — "Use caution when you interpret section-level feedback." It is diagnostic color for your next study cycle, not four separate hurdles you have to clear.

Why the pass rates you see online disagree

Search for the DVA-C02 pass rate and the first page of results will hand you numbers that cannot all be true at once. The same results page routinely carries a figure in the forties, one around 60%, and one in the seventies, each presented as the current rate for the same exam in the same year. The pages quoting them share one trait: not one cites AWS, because there is nothing to cite.

The incentive behind the spread is worth naming. A training company that tells you the Developer – Associate exam has a punishing failure rate has, in the same sentence, explained why you need its course. A bootcamp reporting that its own students pass at a high rate has explained why you need that bootcamp. Both figures can be honestly measured inside their own population and still tell you nothing about your odds, because neither population is a random sample of DVA-C02 candidates. The remainder are back-formed from forum threads, from surveys of self-selected respondents, or from nothing identifiable at all.

A genuine aggregate would be slippery even if AWS chose to release one. DVA-C02 is a versioned exam code, and AWS equates scores across forms precisely because those forms are not equally difficult. One blended percentage covering a rolling population sitting different forms in six languages would tell you less about your own preparation than the domain weightings already do.

What actually separates passing from failing candidates

Since there is no rate to study, the useful question is where the marks sit. AWS publishes exactly that. These are the four content domains and their weightings, from the official exam guide:

Content domain	Weight of scored content
1. Development with AWS Services	32%
2. Security	26%
3. Deployment	24%
4. Troubleshooting and Optimization	18%

Security at 26% is the second-heaviest domain, and it is the one candidates arriving from a general development background most often treat as background reading. Development with AWS Services and Security together account for 58% of the scored exam, and nothing in the weightings rewards breadth across the AWS service catalog for its own sake.

The out-of-scope list is the most underused page in the exam guide. AWS states that the target candidate is not expected to design architectures, design and create CI/CD pipelines, administer IAM users and groups, administer servers and operating systems, or design AWS networking infrastructure such as Amazon VPC and AWS Direct Connect. Candidates who prepare with Solutions Architect material — by far the most abundant AWS study content available — spend real hours on precisely those topics, and the weightings punish that misallocation.

Pace is the other binding constraint. 130 minutes across 65 questions is two minutes per question with no margin, and the multiple-response items asking for "two or more correct responses out of five or more response options" take materially longer to work than a four-option single-answer question. Candidates who have never sat a full-length timed set discover the clock around question 50.

Failing is also less final than the scare-rate pages imply. AWS posts final results to your Certification Account "within five business days after the close of the exam," and its policy states: "If you fail an exam, you must wait 14 calendar days before you are eligible to retake the exam." A two-week wait makes a first attempt a graded diagnostic rather than a single shot.

The bottom line

Nobody knows the AWS Certified Developer – Associate pass rate, including the pages quoting one to a decimal place. What is official and checkable is this: 65 questions with 50 of them scored, 130 minutes, a scaled score of 100–1,000 with 720 to pass, $150, compensatory scoring so no single domain can fail you on its own, results within five business days, a 14-day wait after a fail, and a credential valid for three years. The heaviest domains are Development with AWS Services at 32% and Security at 26%, and the exam guide's out-of-scope list tells you what to stop studying. Those facts are enough to build a study plan, and a pass rate would not change one decision inside it.

The most useful next step is finding out where your own gaps are before you book the seat. Work through a free AWS Certified Developer – Associate practice test against a two-minute-per-question clock and see which of the four domains actually costs you time. That number is real, it is about you, and it is the only one on this topic anybody can measure.