Azure AZ-104 Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate Exists

There is no official AZ-104 pass rate. Microsoft does not publish one: the Azure Administrator Associate certification page, the AZ-104 study guide, and Microsoft's own exam scoring documentation all explain in detail how the exam is scored, and none of them state what share of candidates pass. Any percentage you have seen for this exam came from a training company, a forum poll, or a page written to rank for this search, and none of them cite Microsoft, because there is nothing to cite. That is not a dead end. The figures Microsoft does publish — the passing score, the scale it sits on, the time limit, the skills weighting, and the retake rules — are the ones that decide your result.

How the AZ-104 exam is actually scored

Microsoft reports every technical exam on one fixed scale and sets one bar across all of them. From Microsoft's exam scoring page: "All technical exam scores are reported on a scale of 1 to 1,000. A passing score is 700 or greater. As this is a scaled score, it may not equal 70% of the points."

That sentence disposes of most of the advice written about this exam. 700 is not 70%. It is a scaled score, which means the raw points needed to reach it move with the difficulty of the question set you were served. Microsoft states the mechanism plainly: "For easier sets of questions, more points are required to pass. For more difficult sets of questions, fewer points are required to pass." There is no fixed number of correct answers that guarantees a pass, so "you need 42 out of 60" is not a claim anyone can make about AZ-104.

Item	What Microsoft publishes
Passing score	700 or greater
Score scale	1 to 1,000 — a scaled score, not a percentage
Number of questions	Not published for AZ-104. Microsoft says most of its exams "typically contain between 40-60 questions" and that the count varies and is subject to change
Exam duration	100 minutes
Seat time	120 minutes for associate role-based exams without labs
Format	Proctored through Pearson VUE; "You may have interactive components to complete as part of this exam"
Penalty for wrong answers	None — "There's no penalty for guessing"
Exam fee	$165 USD; Microsoft notes price is "based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored"
Languages	10, including English, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil)
Skills measured version	Updated April 17, 2026
Certification validity	12 months; renewed free by passing an online assessment on Microsoft Learn

Two scoring details are rarely mentioned and both matter. Some items on your exam are unscored pilot questions, and Microsoft says "you won't know which questions are unscored, so you should answer every question as if it will be included in your score." Multi-part questions award a point per correctly answered component, so partial credit is real.

Your score report gives one overall number, a pass/fail result, and a bar chart per skill area. Microsoft warns the chart "can't be used to calculate the number of questions answered correctly in a section or on the exam as a whole" — which is exactly why its own FAQ has to answer the question "The bars on the score chart show that I scored more than 70 percent. Why didn't I pass?"

What happens if you fail

This is the concrete policy candidates actually need, and Microsoft publishes it in full:

• Wait 24 hours before retaking after a first failed attempt.
• A 14-day waiting period applies between all subsequent attempts.
• You may not take the exam more than five times in a 12-month period measured from your first attempt. After five failures you are eligible again 12 months from the date of that first attempt.
• You pay for each retake.
• You cannot retake an exam you have passed unless your certification has expired.
• The waiting period is waived only for internet connectivity or equipment failures with a Pearson VUE case number.

Why the pass rates you see online disagree

Search for this exam's pass rate and the first page will hand you several incompatible numbers, sometimes within the same set of results and occasionally within the same article. That is not a data problem. It is a sourcing problem: nobody is measuring anything.

The incentives run in two directions. A provider selling a bootcamp benefits from a low figure, because a frightening rate frames the exam as something you should not attempt unaided. A provider selling a question bank or a "pass guarantee" benefits from a high figure attached to its own students. Both are marketing claims dressed as statistics, and neither is checkable, because the only organization that could count passes and failures is Microsoft, and Microsoft does not release the count.

There is a second reason the numbers are worthless even in principle. Because AZ-104 is scaled and question sets vary in difficulty, "percent correct" is not comparable between two candidates, so a pass rate resting on a claimed percentage threshold is measuring something that does not exist. Any page telling you the pass rate is X% and that you need 70% to pass has made two errors, and the second is contradicted in writing by Microsoft. Before trusting any figure, ask whether the page names a publisher and a period — "Microsoft, calendar 2025" would be a citation; "industry estimates suggest" is not.

What actually separates passing from failing candidates

Microsoft does publish the thing a pass rate is a poor substitute for: exactly what the exam measures and how heavily. These weights took effect on April 17, 2026, and they are ranges, not fixed counts.

Skill area	Weight
Manage Azure identities and governance	20-25%
Deploy and manage Azure compute resources	20-25%
Implement and manage storage	15-20%
Implement and manage virtual networking	15-20%
Monitor and maintain Azure resources	10-15%

Read the ranges, not the midpoints. Identity and governance plus compute can together account for up to half the exam, so weakness in Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Policy, role assignments, virtual machines, containers or App Service is expensive in a way that weakness elsewhere is not. Conversely, monitoring and maintenance can be as little as 10%, and Microsoft notes that skill areas carrying fewer questions are exactly where a candidate can score zero on the bar chart — an alarming line on the report that may not have decided the outcome.

Time is the other discriminator. You get 100 minutes, and if your form sits toward the top of Microsoft's typical 40-60 band, that is under two minutes per item before case studies and interactive components take their share. Microsoft does let you open Microsoft Learn in a split screen during role-based exams, but the terms are strict: no extra time is added, the timer keeps running, and Microsoft says that if you lean on it for every question, "you won't be able to complete the exam in the time allotted, and that is by design." Unscheduled breaks behave the same way — the clock continues, and you cannot return to any question you saw before the break.

Finally, take the audience profile literally. Microsoft expects experience with PowerShell, the Azure CLI, the Azure portal, ARM templates or Bicep files, and Microsoft Entra ID. Candidates who studied the portal alone tend to be caught out by items asking them to interpret or modify a Bicep file. Two free official tools close that gap: the AZ-104 practice assessment on Microsoft Learn, and the exam sandbox, which drops you into the real exam interface before test day.

The bottom line

No official AZ-104 pass rate exists, and in 2026 no page quoting one can tell you where it came from. The real numbers are the ones Microsoft prints: 700 or greater on a 1-to-1,000 scale, which is a scaled score and not 70%; 100 minutes of exam time within a 120-minute seat; a question set most likely falling between 40 and 60 items; and five skill areas whose published weights show you where the marks are. If you fail, you wait 24 hours, then 14 days between each further attempt, with five attempts allowed in any 12-month window from your first sitting. Judge your readiness against the skills-measured list dated April 17, 2026, not against a statistic nobody publishes.

The most reliable readiness signal is your accuracy across all five skill areas under time pressure. Work through a full-length free Microsoft Azure Administrator practice test and let your weakest domain decide what you study next.