IT Certification Pass Rates: What Vendors Actually Publish (Almost Nothing)

Search any certification name plus “pass rate” and you will find confident percentages: Security+ at 83 percent, CISSP at 49 percent, CCNA at 51 percent. Here is the finding from maintaining this site’s registry, where every exam fact is checked against the vendor’s own pages: across all 18 certification bodies we track, not one publishes an exam pass rate. Not CompTIA, not AWS, not Microsoft, not Cisco, not ISC2, not ISACA, not Google, not PMI, not any of the rest. Every specific pass-rate percentage you have read for these exams was made up, extrapolated from forum polls, or copied from another site that did one of those two things.

Why vendors keep pass rates secret

The silence is deliberate and, from the vendors’ side, rational. A published pass rate cuts against a certification body twice: a high one makes the credential look easy and cheapens what holders paid for, and a low one scares off the candidate revenue the program runs on. Pass rates also fluctuate by exam version, by market, and by delivery mode, so a single number would be misleading even if a vendor wanted to share it. Psychometric convention in high-stakes testing is to publish the passing standard, not the passing population. So they publish cut scores and go quiet.

The result is an information vacuum, and content farms fill it because “Security+ pass rate” is typed into Google thousands of times a month. The percentages they publish convert curiosity into pageviews precisely because they sound like data. If a site quotes a pass rate for any exam on this page and does not link a vendor source, you now know it cannot have one, because the vendor never released it.

What vendors actually publish

What is real is the passing score, and most vendors do publish that. CompTIA scores Security+ from 100 to 900 with a 750 cut. AWS scales foundational and associate exams from 100 to 1,000 and publishes each exam’s floor in its exam guide. The Linux Foundation is unusually transparent: CKA and CKAD publish a 66 percent passing threshold outright. Red Hat’s RHCSA reports section scores against a widely known 210-of-300 standard. At the other end, PMI publishes neither a pass rate nor a fixed passing score for PMP, only performance-domain ratings, which makes PMP the least numerically transparent major exam we track, and makes any specific “PMP pass rate” claim doubly invented.

A cut score is genuinely useful in a way a pass rate never was: it tells you the bar you personally have to clear, not how a self-selected population of other people performed against it. Every certification profile on this site lists the real published passing standard in its exam-facts panel, alongside an honest “vendor does not publish pass rates” note where that is the truth.

What to use instead of a pass rate

The question behind “what’s the pass rate” is really “how hard is this for someone like me,” and better signals exist for that. First, the vendor’s exam objectives: they are free, they are the literal blueprint of the test, and skimming them tells you in an hour whether the material reads as familiar or foreign. Second, the prerequisite and experience recommendations on each certification’s profile, which encode who the exam was built for; an “entry” exam with no prerequisites and a 90-minute clock is a categorically different risk than an experience-walled exam like CISSP, whatever anyone’s invented percentages claim. Third, the retake economics: an exam you might fail once is materially cheaper at vendors with inexpensive retakes than at ones where every attempt is full price, and our retake-policy comparison prices that across every vendor.

And if you want to lower your personal pass probability risk for the cost of a lunch, a timed practice exam is the one purchase that measurably helps, because the most common failure mode is feeling ready without ever having sat scored, clocked questions. That is a claim about preparation, not a pass-rate statistic, and unlike the statistics, you can verify it on yourself before exam day.