Salesforce Admin Exam Changes: New Name, Agentforce Section

Salesforce refreshed this exam effective December 15, 2025, and two things moved at once. The credential is now published as the Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator — it was the Salesforce Certified Administrator — and the exam outline was rebuilt: a new Agentforce section worth 8% was added, the automation section is now named simply Automation, and every section was reweighted. The boundary is your test date, not your registration date. If you sit the exam on or after December 15, 2025 you get the new outline, even if you registered or bought your voucher before that. If you already passed, you keep your certification and there is nothing to retake.

Does this affect you?

• You are testing on or after December 15, 2025 — yes, fully. Every exam delivered from that date forward uses the eight-section outline below.
• You registered, or bought a voucher, before December 15, 2025 but test after — yes. Salesforce keyed the refresh to the exam version, not to when you signed up, and published no carve-out for candidates who registered earlier.
• You already passed — no exam impact. Salesforce announced no retake requirement. Your certification carries forward under the new name, and you keep it exactly as before: one Salesforce Platform Administrator certification maintenance badge on Trailhead per year.
• You are studying from materials published before late 2025 — partially. Six of the eight section names are unchanged, so most of what you own still maps. The Agentforce section is new content with no equivalent in older courses.
• You are taking the Japanese-language exam — same outline, different pass mark. The exam guide lists a passing score of 68% for the English version and 65% for the Japanese version.
• You are working toward the advanced credential — it was renamed too. The guide now describes the program's second certification as the Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator II.

Before and after

Item	Before December 15, 2025	On or after December 15, 2025
Credential name	Salesforce Certified Administrator	Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator
Exam guide	Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam Guide (retired)	Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator Exam Guide
Outline sections	7	8
Automation section	Workflow/Process Automation	Automation — 15%
AI content	No dedicated section	Agentforce — 8%
Section weighting	Reweighted across the board; Salesforce no longer publishes the retired percentages	Configuration and Setup 15%; Object Manager and Lightning App Builder 15%; Sales and Marketing Applications 10%; Service and Support Applications 10%; Productivity and Collaboration 10%; Data and Analytics Management 17%; Automation 15%; Agentforce 8%
Scored questions	60 multiple-choice, plus up to five unscored	No change
Time allotted	105 minutes	No change
Passing score	68% (English version)	No change
Registration / retake fee	US$200 / US$100, plus applicable tax	No change
Prerequisite	None	No change
Delivery	Proctored at a test center or online; no reference materials	No change

One caveat worth stating plainly: Salesforce replaced the old exam guide on its site rather than archiving it, so the retired per-section percentages are no longer published anywhere by Salesforce. Old-versus-new percentage tables you find elsewhere are reconstructions, not current Salesforce sources. The eight weights above are the ones Salesforce publishes today, and they appear identically in both the exam guide and Salesforce's own announcement of the refresh.

What to actually study differently

Add the Agentforce section — 8%, roughly five scored questions

The guide gives it two objectives. First, describe the capabilities and use cases of Agentforce, including scenarios about when it is appropriate to use AI, security, and troubleshooting agent permissions. Second, explain how to maintain, update, or install prompts and instructions in Agent Builder, including light testing and conversation preview. Salesforce's announcement is explicit that this is not a specialist bar — it frames the section as AI awareness and the admin's role in deploying agents responsibly, not Agentforce expertise.

AI is seeded outside the Agentforce section too

Read the objectives closely and AI terms appear in three other sections. The Configuration and Setup security objective now lists agent access among org security controls. The Productivity and Collaboration AppExchange objective mentions prompts on AgentExchange. And the first Automation objective lists AI alongside escalation rules, case assignment rules, lead assignment rules and the default automation user as tools you choose between. Treating Agentforce as one isolated 8% block underprepares you for those.

Data and Analytics Management is now the single heaviest section

At 17% it outweighs everything else — about ten of the 60 scored questions. It covers importing, updating, transferring, mass deleting, exporting and backing up data; duplicate and matching rules and validation rules; report and report-type options including joined reports, buckets and formulas; how the sharing model affects report visibility and folder structure; and dashboard options including dynamic dashboards, "view dashboard as," subscriptions and scheduled refresh.

Automation stays heavy and stays Flow-first

At 15% it is tied with Configuration and Setup and with Object Manager and Lightning App Builder. The objectives center on choosing the right automation tool for a scenario, Flow capabilities and configuration — screen flows, record-triggered flows, autolaunched flows and order of execution — and the approval process, including approver criteria, rejections and approvals.

Official Agentforce-specific prep for this exam does not exist yet

This is worth saying rather than hiding. The recommended resources in Salesforce's guide are the "Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform Administrator Certification" trailmix, the Object Relationships and Flow Administration superbadges, and two courses: CRT101 and ADX201. None of those is Agentforce-specific, and both course titles still use the older "Administrator" naming. For that 8% you are working from Salesforce's general Agentforce resources for admins and hands-on time in a Developer Edition org, not from a purpose-built exam module.

What did not change

The diff is narrower than the rename suggests, and this is the part that tells you what your existing materials are still worth.

• Format and logistics are identical. 60 scored multiple-choice questions plus up to five unscored, 105 minutes, 68% to pass on the English version, US$200 to register and US$100 to retake plus applicable tax, no prerequisite, proctored at a test center or online with no hard-copy or online references allowed.
• Six of the eight section names carried over unchanged: Configuration and Setup; Object Manager and Lightning App Builder; Sales and Marketing Applications; Service and Support Applications; Productivity and Collaboration; Data and Analytics Management. Notes and question banks organized around those headings still map one-to-one.
• The audience bar is the same. Salesforce still recommends six or more months of experience as a Salesforce Platform Administrator.
• Maintenance is unchanged. One maintenance badge on Trailhead per year, and the certification still expires if you miss the due date.
• Release alignment is a separate clock. The guide states that exam questions align to Summer '25; that version pointer moves on its own schedule and is not part of the outline refresh.
• Nothing happened to credentials you already hold. No retake, no re-exam, no lapse triggered by the rename.

For most candidates the practical delta is one new 8% section plus a tilt of emphasis toward data and reporting — the other roughly 92% of your preparation is still good. When you want to find out whether the reweighting has left a hole in your prep, work through a free Salesforce Certified Administrator practice test and read your results section by section rather than looking only at the overall score.

Official dates and format details

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
consists of 60 multiple-choice questions and up to five additional unscored questions	The exam consists of 60 multiple-choice questions and up to five additional unscored questions	Salesforce