CompTIA A+ Pass Rate (2026): What CompTIA Publishes Instead

If you came here looking for an official CompTIA A+ pass rate, the honest answer is that there is not one to find. CompTIA does not publish passing rates for its certification exams, and every A+ pass rate percentage circulating online is either a training provider's internal figure, a survey of self-selected respondents, or someone's estimate repeated until it looked like a statistic. None of them come from the certification body.

That sounds like a dead end, but it is not. CompTIA publishes a great deal about how A+ is scored and structured, and those published numbers tell you more about your odds than a pass rate ever would. A pass rate describes other people. The scoring model and the domain weightings describe the exam in front of you.

What CompTIA actually publishes about A+

CompTIA A+ is an entry-level IT certification and an industry standard for launching an IT support career. Earning it requires passing two separate exams, Core 1 (220-1201) and Core 2 (220-1202), and candidates may take the two exams in any order. Core 1 focuses on hardware and networking; Core 2 focuses on operating systems and security.

The two exams look symmetrical on the surface and are not, in one specific respect that catches people out.

Why the two exams have different passing scores

Core 1 passes at 675 on a 900-point scale. Core 2 passes at 700 on the same scale. That 25-point gap is the single most misread number in A+ preparation, because the intuitive reading is wrong.

The intuitive reading is that Core 2 demands more correct answers and is therefore the harder exam. It does not follow. A scaled score is not a count of correct answers converted into points. It is a calibrated figure that accounts for the difficulty of the specific questions a candidate received, so that two people who sat different question sets are held to the same standard. Two exams calibrated separately can land on different cut scores while asking a comparable level of competence.

What the gap does tell you is that the two exams were standardised independently, which is consistent with their being genuinely different tests rather than two halves of one paper. Treat them as two separate preparations. Do not assume that the study approach that carried you through one will transfer intact to the other.

Why you cannot convert a scaled score into a percentage

People routinely divide 675 by 900, get 75 percent, and plan to answer at least three quarters of the questions correctly. The arithmetic is right and the conclusion is not.

675 of 900 is 75 percent of the scale, not 75 percent of the questions. Because the scale is calibrated to item difficulty, the number of correct answers behind a passing score varies with the question set. Someone who draws a harder set can pass with fewer correct answers than someone who draws an easier one; that is the entire purpose of scaling. There is no published conversion table, and any source that offers one has invented it.

The practical consequence is that the useful target is not a percentage. It is competence spread across every domain, because you cannot know in advance which questions you will be asked.

Core 1: where the questions actually are

CompTIA publishes the weighting of each content domain, which is a far more actionable number than a pass rate. Core 1 is organised into 5 content domains.

The five weightings sum to exactly 100 percent, which is a useful check that you are reading a complete and current objectives list rather than a partial copy. The question counts are approximate for two reasons: the 90 figure is a maximum rather than a guarantee, and rounding the percentages to whole questions does not land neatly on 90.

Read the top of that table carefully. Troubleshooting is the heaviest single domain on Core 1, ahead of hardware itself. Candidates who prepare by memorising component specifications and connector types are studying the second-largest domain while the largest one, which asks them to diagnose a fault rather than name a part, gets whatever attention is left over.

Core 2: a flatter distribution

Core 2 is organised into 4 content domains, and they are distributed differently.

These four also sum to exactly 100 percent, and here the rounded question counts land on 90 exactly.

The shape of the two exams differs in a way worth planning around. Core 1 has a long tail: its two smallest domains together account for 24 percent, so a candidate weak in both is carrying a manageable deficit. Core 2 has no comparable tail. Its lightest domain still carries 21 percent, and its heaviest carries 28 percent. There is nowhere on Core 2 to be weak cheaply.

That is the concrete answer to the question people are really asking when they search for a pass rate. Core 2 punishes an uneven preparation more than Core 1 does, not because its cut score is 25 points higher, but because its weight is spread almost evenly across four areas you cannot avoid.

Operational procedures is not the throwaway domain

Operational procedures carries 21 percent of Core 2, which is roughly 19 questions at the maximum. It covers documentation, safety, environmental controls, communication and professionalism, incident response and change management, and it is the domain candidates most often skim because it is not technical.

Skipping it is arithmetically expensive. Nineteen questions is more than the entire mobile devices domain on Core 1 and nearly twice the virtualization and cloud domain. A candidate who is strong across every technical area of Core 2 and has not read the procedural material has volunteered to fail roughly a fifth of the exam.

Pacing: one minute per question, on both exams

Each A+ exam allows 90 minutes and contains a maximum of 90 questions. That produces the cleanest pacing rule in certification testing: one minute per question, on both exams, with no arithmetic required during the test.

Use it as a checkpoint rather than a stopwatch. At the 30-minute mark you should be near question 30; at 60 minutes, near question 60. Falling ten questions behind that line is a signal to start marking and moving rather than a signal to hurry, because the questions you rush at the end cost the same as the ones you laboured over at the start. The pacing rule transferring identically between the two exams is a small advantage: whichever you sit first, the time discipline you build is directly reusable.

What the pass rate figures online actually are

Once you know CompTIA does not publish the number, the figures in circulation become easy to classify. Most fall into three groups: training providers quoting the pass rate of their own students, which is a self-selected group who paid for preparation; forum polls, which over-represent both the very pleased and the very aggrieved; and articles citing other articles, where the original source has long since vanished.

None of these is dishonest in itself, and none of them describes your probability of passing. Your outcome is determined by your coverage of nine domains across two exams, weighted as published above. That is knowable in advance, which is more than can be said for any percentage.

After you pass: three years, then renewal

CompTIA A+ certification is valid for three years from the certification date. It may be renewed by earning Continuing Education Units, and the Continuing Education renewal cycle is three years from certification.

Plan for that at the point you pass rather than in the final months. The renewal cycle rewards activity you would probably undertake anyway, including higher-level certifications and qualifying training, so candidates who keep moving through the certification path tend to renew as a side effect. Candidates who certify and then stop are the ones who find themselves assembling units under deadline pressure three years later.