How hard is A+, without a pass rate to lean on

Every page answering this question wants to give you a percentage. There isn't one. CompTIA does not publish a pass rate for A+ on any page read on 24 September 2026, and the figures circulating elsewhere have no stated methodology and no CompTIA source.

Which leaves the harder job: assessing difficulty from what CompTIA does publish. That turns out to be a surprising amount, and it produces a more useful answer than a percentage would have.

Signal one: what CompTIA expects you to already have

The recommended experience line is the closest thing to a difficulty statement CompTIA makes. For A+ it is 12 months of hands-on experience in an IT support specialist job role. Not a course. Not a qualification. A year of doing the work.

Compare that with its neighbours. Tech+ recommends no prior experience whatsoever. Network+ recommends holding A+ and nine to twelve months in a junior network role. CompTIA is describing a ladder, and it places A+ a full year of practice above its own entry rung.

Signal two: the question formats

CompTIA lists the A+ question types as multiple choice in single and multiple response form, drag-and-drop, and performance-based. The last two are where difficulty lives.

A multiple-choice question can often be answered by recognition. A drag-and-drop item requires you to know the relationships between things, not just their names. A performance-based item puts you in a simulated environment and asks you to carry out a task — there is nothing to recognise and no options to eliminate. Preparation built entirely on question banks prepares you for one of the three formats.

Signal three: breadth, not depth

Nothing in A+ is conceptually difficult in the way that, say, subnetting arithmetic or cryptographic theory is difficult. The challenge is how much ground it covers.

Core 1 spans hardware at 25%, networking at 23%, mobile devices at 13%, virtualization and cloud at 11%, and hardware and network troubleshooting at 28%. Core 2 spans operating systems at 28%, security at 28%, software troubleshooting at 23% and operational procedures at 21%. Nine domains across two exams, each containing a list of specific technologies, tools and procedures.

That breadth is why the difficulty is so uneven between candidates. A hobbyist who builds PCs finds a large slice of Core 1 easy and may find operational procedures entirely foreign. A help-desk worker knows the procedures and the operating systems and may not have opened a machine in years. The exam is hard in the places you have not been.

Signal four: 90 minutes for up to 90 questions

A minute a question, with performance-based items inside that budget. The time pressure is real and it is a specific skill: knowing when to flag a simulation and come back to it rather than spending eight minutes proving a point to yourself.

This is the argument for timed practice over untimed question banks. It is also the one part of preparation where paying for something can genuinely buy you a result the free material does not.

Signal four and a half: it is two exams, not one

Difficulty is usually discussed per exam and A+ should be discussed per certification, because you have to clear both halves to hold anything. Two separate preparations, two separate sittings, two separate pass marks — and if you fail one you have not failed A+, you have failed a component you now have to pay for again while the other pass waits.

The version rule sharpens that. CompTIA requires both exams to come from the same version, with retirement stated as "usually three years after launch" and estimated at 2028 for V15. A long gap between the halves is not just a motivation problem; it is a risk that the first pass no longer has a partner to combine with.

Signal five: the retake rules tell you what CompTIA expects

Read the retake policy as a difficulty signal and it is quietly informative. There is no waiting period at all between a first and second attempt — CompTIA anticipates people failing and coming straight back. Only from the third attempt onward does a fourteen-day cooling-off period apply.

The financial rule is less forgiving: candidates pay the exam price on every attempt, with no free re-tests and no retake discounts. A certification body that expects nobody to fail does not need a retake policy this specific.

What other people's difficulty ratings are worth

Forum consensus about A+ difficulty is worth something, and it is worth less than it appears, for a structural reason: the people who post about an exam are not a random sample of the people who sat it. Candidates who found it straightforward have little to say, and candidates who prepared for months have an investment in the answer.

That is also why this page leans on CompTIA's published signals instead. A recommended-experience line, a list of question formats and a set of domain weightings are dull compared with a confident stranger's verdict. They have the advantage of being checkable, and of describing the exam rather than describing whoever took it.

The part difficulty discussions always skip

Almost every assessment of how hard A+ is treats it as a test of knowledge, and a meaningful slice of Core 2 is not. Operational procedures — 21% of that exam — is documentation practice, change management process, safety procedure, and backup and recovery method. It is the sort of material that is trivially easy to learn and genuinely easy to fail, because candidates skim it on the assumption that it cannot carry many marks.

It carries more than mobile devices and virtualization combined carry in Core 1. Any honest difficulty assessment has to say that a meaningful share of A+ failures are not caused by the exam being hard but by candidates deciding in advance which fifth of it did not deserve their attention.

So: how hard is it?

Hard enough to require months rather than weeks for most people starting from little, and structurally harder than a single-exam certification because it is two sittings with two separate pass marks. Not hard in the sense of requiring unusual aptitude. The failure mode is almost always an unstudied domain rather than an unlearnable one.

If that reads as manageable, the study route starts with the two free documents that define the exam. If it reads as a lot, the four entry routes includes one that expects no prior experience at all. Both exams are laid out on the A+ page.