Cisco CCST Networking Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate

There is no official CCST Networking pass rate. Cisco does not publish one, and neither does Certiport, the Pearson VUE division that actually delivers the 100-150 exam. Certiport is unusually direct about why. Its exam scoring policy confirms that it does keep "summary statistics regarding each exam, including pass/fail rates," but adds that "in keeping with our commitment to promote certification rather than exam scores as the relevant point of comparison, that information is not published." The number exists inside Pearson VUE. It has never been released. Every percentage circulating in 2026 as the CCST Networking pass rate was therefore produced by somebody who does not have it, and this page is not going to add another one.

How the CCST Networking exam is actually scored

The Cisco Certified Support Technician (CCST) Networking certification is earned by passing a single entry-level exam, 100-150, which Cisco describes as validating "entry-level networking concepts and topics" and as "a first step toward CCNA certification." There are no formal prerequisites. Cisco publishes the fee and the clock; Certiport, as the delivery partner, publishes the mechanics.

Exam code	100-150 CCST Networking
Time limit	50 minutes (the timed portion only; seat time is longer)
Questions	40-50, and the exact count varies between exam versions
Scoring scale	1 to 1000, with the pass mark always equated to 700
Result	Pass or fail — no grade, no percentile
Price	US$125 from Cisco; $130 as a Certiport voucher
Delivered by	Certiport (Pearson VUE)
Domains	Six, covering 25 published objectives
Valid for	5 years
Languages	English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese

The line that matters most is the scale, because it is the single most misread fact about this exam. 700 is not 70 percent. A scaled score is a transformation, not a raw tally. Certiport's own explanation is explicit: "The actual number of questions that you need to answer correctly in order to pass an exam is determined by the difficulty level of those questions that you get when you sit an exam... We then transform that number into a scaled score of 700." It goes further — "if you see a more difficult set of questions, the number of correct answers needed to pass is less than if you see an easier set of questions." Certiport also states that it "distributes multiple versions of its exams, each with different content and, accordingly, different passing standards and number of questions."

So there is no fixed number of correct answers that guarantees a pass, and no published percentage that maps onto 700. Two people can sit CCST Networking on the same afternoon, answer a different count correctly, and both pass. Two other useful mechanics follow from the same documentation: every item is worth one point unless the item says otherwise, and there is no penalty for a wrong answer — "entering an incorrect response only keeps you from receiving a point on that item." Leave nothing blank.

Why the pass rates you see online disagree

Search for this exam's pass rate and the results page will hand you figures that cannot all be true at once. Not one of them cites Cisco or Certiport, because there is nothing to cite. They are back-formed from a single classroom's results, from forum anecdotes, or from nothing identifiable at all.

The incentive behind the spread is worth naming. A training provider quoting a punishing failure rate has just explained why you need its course. An academy reporting its own cohort passing at a high rate has just explained why you need that academy. Both figures can be honestly measured inside their own population and still tell you nothing, because neither population is a random sample of CCST candidates. That matters more here than for most certifications: Certiport states that CCST learners are expected to reach work-ready skills "through at least 150 hours of instruction," and the exam is heavily taken inside schools and testing centers. A center's own pass rate is a measure of that center's teaching, not of the exam.

The second failure mode is arithmetic rather than incentive. A great many pages assert that you need 70 percent to pass CCST Networking. That is the 700 scaled score misread as a percentage. Certiport warns about the same confusion on the score report itself, noting that the section percentages "will not equal 100%" and "are not a direct indication of whether you will pass or fail the certification examination as a whole." Any page confident enough to publish a required percentage has already shown it did not read the scoring policy — which is a fair signal about the pass rate printed next to it.

What separates passing from failing candidates

Cisco publishes the CCST Networking blueprint as six domains, and — unlike CCNA — assigns no percentage weights to them. The only public signal of scope is the objective list itself.

Domain	Objectives	What it covers
1.0 Standards and Concepts	5	OSI and TCP/IP models, bandwidth vs. throughput, LAN/WAN/MAN/CAN/PAN/WLAN, cloud vs. on-premises, TCP/UDP, DHCP, DNS, ICMP, NTP
2.0 Addressing and Subnet Formats	3	Private vs. public addresses, NAT, IPv4 subnetting and slash notation, IPv6 address and prefix types
3.0 Endpoints and Media Types	4	Copper, fiber and twisted pair, connectors, Wi-Fi vs. cellular vs. wired, endpoint devices, connectivity checks on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS
4.0 Infrastructure	5	Cisco device status lights, cabling from a network diagram, console/fiber/SFP/PoE ports, default gateways, layer 2 vs. layer 3, MAC address tables, VLANs
5.0 Diagnosing Problems	5	Troubleshooting methodology and ticketing, Wireshark captures, ping/ipconfig/traceroute/nslookup, remote access, Cisco show commands
6.0 Security	3	Firewall filtering, CIA, AAA, MFA, encryption and certificates, phishing and malware, WPA/WPA2/WPA3 on a home router

Objective counts are not scoring weights, and nobody should treat them as such. What they do show is shape: Infrastructure and Diagnosing Problems together account for ten of the twenty-five objectives, and both are hands-on rather than conceptual. Cisco reinforces the point on the exam topics page, noting that "Cisco's performance-based testing gives you an experience that best replicates a true lab environment," and that "as a result, the number of questions on your exam may vary."

Three things reliably decide the outcome. The first is speed: 40 to 50 items in 50 minutes is roughly a minute each, which leaves no room to derive a subnet from first principles mid-exam. The second is command recall. Objective 5.5 names specific Cisco commands — show run, show cdp neighbors, show ip interface brief, show ip route, show version, show mac address-table — and 5.3 names ping, ipconfig, tracert and nslookup. You either recognize the output or you do not. The third is the retake, which changes the stakes more than any pass rate would. Certiport's CCST retake policy requires a 24-hour wait after a first failure and 48 hours after a second, with a two-day wait for each attempt after that, and there is no annual limit on attempts. You pay for every attempt, so a first sitting is a cheap diagnostic only if you treat it as one.

The bottom line

Nobody outside Pearson VUE knows the CCST Networking pass rate, including every page publishing a confident figure for it. What is official and checkable is that the exam is 50 minutes, 40 to 50 questions, scaled 1 to 1000 with 700 as the pass mark, six domains and 25 objectives, US$125, valid for five years, with no prerequisites and a 24-hour wait before a retake. Those facts are enough to plan around; a pass rate would not change one decision inside that plan. And if a page tells you the cut is 70 percent, it has confused a scaled score with a percentage — treat the rest of its numbers accordingly.

The useful next step is finding out which of the six domains you actually lose time in, before you pay for a sitting. Work through a free Cisco Certified Support Technician practice test against a clock and see where the minute-per-question budget breaks down.

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
Domain 1, Standards and Concepts, covers the fundamental conceptual building blocks of networks such as the TCP/IP model, OSI model, frames and packets, and the differences between LAN, WAN, MAN, CAN, PAN, and WLAN.	Domain 1, Standards and Concepts, covers the fundamental conceptual building blocks of networks such as the TCP/IP model, OSI model, frames and packets, and LAN/WAN/MAN/CAN/PAN/WLAN	Cisco