Retake Policies Compared: What a Failed Exam Actually Costs at Every Vendor

Exam pages advertise the price of passing. Nobody advertises the price of failing, and that second number is where vendors quietly diverge. Fail a $445 Kubernetes exam and your next attempt is already paid for. Fail a $200 Salesforce exam and the retake costs $100. Fail a $999 GIAC attempt and the retake is $899. Fail a $125 Google Cloud exam three times and you are locked out for a full year. Same-looking transaction, wildly different downside, which means the retake policy is part of the real price, and it should change how much you spend on practice material before you ever book a seat.

Every figure below either mirrors the vendor’s profile in this site’s certification registry, each verified against the vendor’s own pages, or was checked against the vendor’s published retake policy on the date at the top.

The whole registry in one table

Vendor	First attempt	A fail costs you	Wait to retest
Linux Foundation (CKA, CKAD)	$445	$0; a second attempt is bundled	n/s
PeopleCert (ITIL 4)	$690 bundle	A full re-sit, unless Take2 was bought before the session	n/s
Salesforce	$200	$100, half price	1 day, then 14 days, then the next release cycle
PMI (PMP)	$405 member	A reduced re-exam fee, attempts 2 and 3 in the 1-year window	n/s
OffSec (OSCP)	$1,749 bundle	$249 once bundled attempts are used	4 weeks, then 8, then 12
GIAC	$999	$899	30 days, waivable to 14
EC-Council (CEH)	$950 to $1,199	A discounted retake voucher; amount unpublished	None, then 14 days
AWS	$100 to $300	Full price	14 days
CompTIA	$274 to $529	Full price	None, then 14 days from the 3rd attempt
Cisco	$300	Full price	5 calendar days
Databricks	$200	Full price	14 days
Google Cloud	$125 to $200	Full price	14, then 60, then 365 days
HashiCorp	$70.50	Full price	7 days; 4 attempts per rolling year
ISACA	$575 to $760	Full price; fees nonrefundable	30 days, then 90; 4 attempts per rolling year
ISC2	$199 to $749	Full price	30, then 60, then 90 days
Microsoft	$99 to $165	Full price	24 hours, then 14 days
Red Hat (EX200)	$500	First fail on an individual exam earns a free retake (policy since February 2023); second fail is full price	n/s
Snowflake	$175	Full price	7 days

n/s: no waiting period is stated in the sources this guide was checked against; confirm the vendor’s current policy when you book.

The three vendors that price the fail into the ticket

The Linux Foundation is the clean outlier. The $445 fee for CKA and CKAD includes a second exam attempt plus two sessions of the Killer.sh simulator, which is deliberately harder than the real exam. On a hands-on, performance-based test with a real failure rate, that changes the risk math completely: your worst realistic case is already in the sticker price. The rational response is to actually use what you paid for, and candidates who skip the included simulator walk into the exam’s time pressure blind for no reason.

Salesforce runs the friendliest paid model. The Platform Administrator exam is $200 and a retake is $100, half the original, so a single bad day costs $300 total instead of $400. PMI does something structurally similar with PMP: your application buys a one-year eligibility window with up to three attempts inside it, and attempts two and three carry a reduced re-examination fee rather than the full price again. In both cases the vendor has decided a near-miss candidate is worth keeping, and priced accordingly.

OffSec’s version is a $249 exam retake for OSCP candidates who have used up the attempt included in the $1,749 PEN-200 bundle or the two attempts in a Learn One subscription. The trap is the separate $1,699 standalone exam purchase, which looks like a retake product and is not; it targets first-timers who prepared entirely outside OffSec’s materials. Anyone re-attempting should be paying $249, not $1,699.

Take2: the cushion you can only buy before you need it

PeopleCert, which runs ITIL 4 Foundation, sells its safety net as an add-on called Take2: a discounted re-sit you attach to your exam order. The rule that catches people is the direction of time. Take2 can be added up to 15 minutes before your scheduled session and never after a failed attempt, and it expires roughly six months after the original sitting. PeopleCert Plus subscribers get it included. So the Take2 decision is a checkout decision, not a recovery decision: if there is any real chance you miss the 26-of-40 pass mark, the moment to buy insurance is before you find out you needed it. Fail without it and you are back to buying a full exam.

GIAC sits halfway between insurance and rack rate. A GSEC attempt is $999 and the retake is $899, a discount in name but still the second-largest fail cost in the registry. Two clocks run against you: a 30-day waiting period after any failure (waivable on appeal, but a mandatory 14 days applies no matter what), and a 30-day window after your attempt deadline in which the retake can be purchased at all. Miss that purchase window and you start over with a fresh $999 certification attempt.

EC-Council discounts the CEH retake through its own exam-center voucher without publishing the amount, allows the first retake immediately, then imposes 14-day waits and a cap of five attempts per twelve months. Given that a first attempt already runs $950 to $1,199 depending on channel, plus a $100 non-refundable eligibility application for self-study candidates, the unpublished discount is doing a lot of quiet work in any budget you build.

Full price, every time: the majority policy

Most of the registry offers no cushion at all, and the differences that matter are in the waiting rooms.

CompTIA states its policy plainly: candidates pay the exam price for every attempt, with no free re-tests or discounts. There is no wait before a second attempt, then 14 calendar days from the third onward. On Security+ that is $439 per sitting; on A+ a fail costs $274 per exam, and the credential needs two exams; at the top, SecurityX re-bills $529 a try. Cisco is the same shape at $300 for CCNA or CyberOps Associate, with a short 5-calendar-day wait. Microsoft charges full price with a 24-hour wait before the second attempt and 14 days between later ones, which stings least at AZ-900’s $99 and most on a $165 associate exam like AZ-104.

AWS charges full price after a 14-day wait, from $100 for Cloud Practitioner to $300 for Solutions Architect Professional. The one softener: holding any active AWS certification earns a 50 percent discount voucher toward your next exam, so a candidate who keeps a lower cert active can cut a $300 retry to $150. That voucher is the closest thing AWS offers to retake relief, and it only exists for people who climbed the ladder in order.

ISC2 and Google punish repeat failures hardest. ISC2 charges the full fee each time, $749 in CISSP’s case, behind an escalating ladder of 30, then 60, then 90 test-free days, capped at four attempts per twelve months. Google Cloud’s ladder for Associate Cloud Engineer is steeper still: 14 days after the first fail, 60 after the second, 365 after the third, with four attempts allowed per two-year period. A casual first attempt at a $125 exam can push a serious attempt most of a year into the future, which makes Google’s cheap sticker the most misleading number in the table.

The rest of the full-price group: ISACA re-bills $575 (member) or $760 (nonmember) per CISA or CISM sitting, and its fees are nonrefundable and nontransferable once paid. Snowflake charges the full $175 for SnowPro Core after a 7-day wait, four retakes per twelve months. Databricks re-bills the full $200 for its Data Engineer Associate with a compulsory 14-day interval and explicitly no free retake vouchers. Red Hat is the pleasant surprise in this group: since February 2023, a first unsuccessful attempt on a standalone EX200 purchase earns a free retake per Red Hat’s training FAQ, and only a second fail costs another $500. And HashiCorp’s Terraform Associate also offers nothing, but at $70.50 the policy barely matters; it is the one exam in the registry where a fail costs less than most practice-question banks.

What the policy should change about your prep budget

Read the table as an insurance schedule and the spending decisions fall out on their own.

Where the downside is large or slow, buy readiness. A GIAC fail costs $899 plus a month of waiting; a third Google fail costs a year; an ISACA fail costs up to $760 that cannot be refunded. In that column, a $30 to $60 practice bank and the discipline to delay booking until you pass timed sets comfortably is the cheapest money in certification. The same logic applies to CISSP: at $749 a sitting, skipping practice exams is the most expensive shortcut available.

Where the downside is pre-paid, use the included tools instead. CKA and CKAD candidates already own a second attempt and a simulator harder than the exam; the correct spend there is hours, not more products.

Where the cushion is conditional, decide at checkout. PeopleCert’s Take2 only exists before the fail. Both are cheap relative to a full re-sit, and both are unavailable at the exact moment you learn you needed them.

And everywhere, budget the attempt distribution rather than the sticker. A realistic plan for a full-price vendor is roughly one and a half vouchers; for Salesforce it is $300; for the Linux Foundation it is exactly the sticker. The sticker prices across the registry are compared on the ROI Index, and what happens after you pass, the renewal clock, is its own four-model story covered in certification renewal costs explained. The fail price belongs in the same math, because the vendors have already put it there.