AI-901 Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate Exists

There is no official pass rate for Exam AI-901: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals. Microsoft does not publish pass rates, fail rates, or score distributions for any of its certification exams, and no such figure appears on the Azure AI Fundamentals certification page, the AI-901 exam page, or Microsoft's exam scoring documentation. Every percentage circulating for this exam was produced by someone without access to the data. What Microsoft does publish is specific and far more useful: a passing score of 700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000, a 45-minute Fundamentals format, and a skills outline that was rewritten on April 15, 2026. Those facts predict your result better than any invented percentage.

How AI-901 is actually scored

Before anything else, check the exam code. Microsoft's AI-900 page now carries a warning: "The certification requirements have changed. The AI-900 exam was retired on June 30, 2026, and has been replaced by AI-901. To earn this certification, candidates must now pass AI-901." The certification name is unchanged, so a great deal of published advice still refers to a code you can no longer sit.

Here is everything Microsoft states about the current exam.

Item	What Microsoft publishes
Current exam code	AI-901 (AI-900 retired June 30, 2026)
Certification earned	Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals
Passing score	700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000
Number of questions	Not published per exam; most Microsoft exams "typically contain between 40-60 questions"
Exam duration	45 minutes (Fundamentals exams)
Seat time	65 minutes
Price	$99 USD; Microsoft notes price varies by the country or region where the exam is proctored
Languages	13, including English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Korean
Skills outline last updated	April 15, 2026 (English version)
Retirement date	None published
Official pass rate	None published

The single most misunderstood number there is 700. A scaled score is not a percentage. Microsoft states it plainly: "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." The scale exists because question sets differ in difficulty between forms of the same exam. In Microsoft's words, "For easier sets of questions, more points are required to pass. For more difficult sets of questions, fewer points are required to pass. (This is why providing a simple percent correct won't help you gauge success.)"

Two more scoring details are worth knowing. Some questions are unscored pilot items, and you are never told which, so answer everything as though it counts. And there is no penalty for guessing: "If you choose an incorrect answer, you simply won't earn the point for that question or part. No points are deducted for incorrect answers." Leaving a question blank on AI-901 is a strictly worse decision than guessing.

Why the pass rates you see online disagree

Search "AI-900 pass rate" or "AI-901 pass rate" and the same results page will hand you numbers in the forties, the sixties, and the high seventies, all attributed to the same year and the same exam. They disagree because none of them are measurements. Not one cites Microsoft, because there is nothing to cite.

The incentives explain the spread. A training provider or bootcamp benefits from a frighteningly low figure, because a hard exam justifies buying a course. A practice-question vendor benefits from a reassuringly high one, because an easy exam justifies buying a question bank at the last minute. Neither party is auditing anything; both are choosing a number that supports the sale.

Three specific errors compound the noise on this exam:

• The 70% conversion. Writers assume 700 out of 1,000 means "answer 70% of the questions correctly," then build guidance around that. Microsoft explicitly rejects the equivalence, and its own scoring FAQ answers the question "The bars on the score chart show that I scored more than 70 percent. Why didn't I pass?"
• Score reports cannot be reverse-engineered. The report you receive shows one overall number, pass/fail, and a bar chart per skill area. Microsoft states the chart "can't be used to calculate the number of questions answered correctly in a section or on the exam as a whole." So even candidates who genuinely sat the exam cannot supply the raw data these articles claim to aggregate.
• They describe a retired exam. Most pass-rate pages still describe AI-900's five-domain outline. That exam was retired on June 30, 2026. Any difficulty estimate built on it is measuring something that no longer exists.

What actually separates passing from failing candidates

The April 2026 rewrite is the real story, and it is published. AI-901 collapsed AI-900's five descriptive domains into two, and shifted the majority of the exam from describing AI to building with it.

Skill area	Weight
Identify AI concepts and capabilities	40–45%
Implement AI solutions by using Microsoft Foundry	55–60%

Read the verbs. The larger block is implement, not describe. Its sub-objectives include deploying a model and interacting with it in the Foundry portal, building a lightweight chat client with the Foundry SDK, creating and testing a single-agent solution, responding to spoken prompts with a deployed multimodal model, and extracting information from documents, images, audio, and video using Azure Content Understanding. Microsoft's audience profile now states outright that "you also need knowledge of Python coding syntax and programming techniques" — unusual language for a fundamentals credential, and the clearest signal of what changed.

The other 40–45% is more forgiving and should be treated as guaranteed points. It covers the six responsible AI considerations Microsoft names by name — fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability — plus matching workloads to the right model and identifying deployment options. These are memorizable, and they are worth close to half the exam.

Two structural facts shape the sitting itself. Microsoft Learn is available inside associate and expert exams but explicitly "NOT available on Fundamentals exams," so nothing can be looked up. And with roughly 40 to 60 questions in 45 minutes, you have well under a minute per question. Candidates who fail this exam usually are not short on AI theory; they are unfamiliar with the Foundry portal and SDK workflow that now carries the majority of the weight, and they run the clock down on it.

The bottom line

No official AI-901 pass rate exists, and any page quoting one is guessing. The numbers that are real are the ones Microsoft prints: 700 on a 1–1,000 scaled score that is not 70%, 45 minutes of exam time in a 65-minute seat, $99 USD in the United States, and a skills split that puts 55–60% of the exam on hands-on implementation in Microsoft Foundry. If you fail, you can retake after 24 hours, then after 14 days for each subsequent attempt, up to five attempts in a 12-month period. Preparation aimed at the published April 2026 objectives will do more for your odds than any pass-rate statistic ever could.

The most reliable way to estimate your own readiness is to work the current objectives under time pressure rather than to chase a rate nobody publishes. Start with our free Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals practice test and use the weak areas it exposes to direct your study.

Official numbers that matter more than an estimated pass rate

The figures below come from the official source documents linked in the table. They are included so you can make study and registration decisions from published requirements rather than an unsupported estimate.

Published detail	Value	Official source
Microsoft associate, expert, and specialty certifications expire annually and can be renewed by passing a free online assessment on Microsoft Learn.	1 years	Microsoft
The passing score is 700.	700	Microsoft