Are AWS certifications free? Badges, exams and what this page lists
No, if you mean AWS Certification: the Cloud Practitioner, Associate and higher-level credentials are proctored exams that cost money, and no free course on Skill Builder replaces them. Yes, if you mean the credentials in the table above. AWS's badge page says its Knowledge Badges and Cloud Quest badges are free to earn and share with a free Skill Builder account, and each of the 7 listed records ends in an assessment or a set of assignments that issues one through Credly.
Two related products are left out on purpose. The Recertify Cloud Practitioner role in Cloud Quest is for people who already hold the paid certification and is not training toward a first credential. The paid Skill Builder subscription unlocks the rest of the lab catalogue, the other Cloud Quest and SimuLearn roles and the official practice exams; nothing behind it is listed.
How to get an AWS Knowledge Badge
A Knowledge Badge Readiness Path is a Skill Builder learning plan: a bundle of digital courses, knowledge checks, sometimes a pre-assessment, and a knowledge badge assessment at the end. AWS's badge page gives the route as registering for a free Skill Builder account, enrolling in the path, completing the assessment with a score of at least 80 percent, and claiming the badge through Credly; the assessment listings add that Credly issues badges within five to seven business days. You can follow the outline in order or take only the parts you need, since only the assessment counts.
The readiness paths that are free in full
The listed paths are the ones whose pages carry no notice that some trainings require a subscription. Serverless, Object Storage and Networking Core do carry that notice, so they are not free in full and do not appear.
- Cloud Essentials: 21 hours 55 minutes, beginner, the only path with hands-on labs, covering cloud concepts, core services, security, pricing and support; it includes the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course.
- Compute: 16 hours 20 minutes, intermediate, on Amazon EC2, instance types, Graviton, Nitro, Lambda and cost optimisation.
- Amazon EKS: 10 hours 45 minutes, intermediate, on Kubernetes concepts, cluster deployment, microservices, security, networking and GitOps.
- Amazon ECS: 12 hours 40 minutes, intermediate, on task definitions, services, capacity providers, security and autoscaling.
- Amazon Q Developer: 5 hours 25 minutes, no level stated, on using AWS's generative AI assistant for development, transformation and operations tasks.
Is AWS Cloud Quest free, and how does its badge differ?
Cloud Quest is game-based: you create an avatar, take problems from virtual customers and solve them in a live AWS environment. Its badge is earned differently from a Knowledge Badge, by completing every assignment in a role rather than by passing one assessment. Two roles show an access tier of Free. AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner has 12 hands-on assignments over about 12 hours, needs no prior experience, and works with EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, RDS and DynamoDB. AWS Cloud Quest: Generative AI Practitioner has ten assignments over about 10 hours, using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q Developer and SageMaker AI to build a retrieval-augmented knowledge assistant and a secure chat assistant. The other Cloud Quest roles need a subscription.
Is AWS Skill Builder free? Where the free tier ends
The free tier is real but bounded. A free account gives access to what AWS describes as a large library of free self-paced digital courses covering every service and skill level, and a course page shows its access row as Free. What it does not include is most hands-on labs (the free account gets the Cloud Foundations labs only), SimuLearn and Cloud Quest beyond the Cloud Practitioner and Generative AI Practitioner roles, and the official practice exams, which sit behind the paid subscription. Two consequences matter here. First, AWS free training does not always come with a credential: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials and AWS Technical Essentials are free courses whose pages mention no certificate or badge, so they are not listed here even though they are free. Second, the Cloud Essentials path includes labs, and its first lab shows an access tier of Free, which is why it qualifies.
How to verify an AWS badge
Every listed credential is issued through Credly, where anyone with the link can verify it. AWS's own description of the Cloud Quest badge is that you can showcase it to recruiters, potential employers and peers through Credly, and the readiness-path pages describe a badge you can share with your network. Share the Credly link rather than an image. Unlike the certifications from HubSpot or Google, no validity period is stated on the badge or plan pages, so none is claimed here.
Does a free badge count toward an AWS Certification?
Not formally: AWS Certification is a separate exam with its own fee. The free training is aimed at it, though. AWS positions the Cloud Quest Cloud Practitioner role as a step toward the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and the Cloud Essentials path is built for people new to AWS and includes the Cloud Practitioner Essentials course. The intermediate paths name solutions architects, cloud operators and developers as their audience. Students have a further free option in AWS Educate, open from age 13, but its course pages sit behind a login, so it is not listed either.
For other vendor credentials at no cost, see the IT certifications and IBM pages; the generative AI role also appears under AI certifications.