The Short Answer
AWS is replacing the Developer – Associate exam. The last day to sit DVA-C02 is November 30, 2026, and DVA-C03 goes live the next day, December 1. Registration for DVA-C03 opens on October 27, 2026.
The format does not change: 65 questions, 130 minutes, $150, and a passing score of 720. What changes is the content. AWS keeps the same four domains but shifts their weights, renames the deployment domain to Testing and Deployment, adds a new AI security task, and threads AI-assisted development through every domain. Container work with ECR, ECS, EKS and Fargate and services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q and Kiro come into scope.
If you are already well into your DVA-C02 preparation, book DVA-C02 and sit it before November 30. The certification is the same AWS Certified Developer – Associate, and AWS confirms your credential stays active through its original expiration date. If you are just starting, or you want your certification to cover AI-assisted development and securing AI services, plan for DVA-C03.
Key Dates
All dates come from the AWS Training and Certification announcement of September 1, 2026.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| October 27, 2026 | DVA-C03 registration opens (all languages); full DVA-C03 exam guide published |
| November 30, 2026 | Last day to take DVA-C02 |
| December 1, 2026 | DVA-C03 general availability begins |
DVA-C02 vs DVA-C03 at a Glance
Unlike SAP-C03, DVA-C03 launches with its numbers already published: AWS announced the question count, passing score and domain weights up front. The format is identical to DVA-C02, and it is not a beta exam.
| DVA-C02 (current) | DVA-C03 (from Dec 1, 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | 65 (50 scored + 15 unscored) | 65 (50 scored + 15 unscored) |
| Duration | 130 minutes | 130 minutes |
| Price | $150 USD | $150 USD |
| Passing score | 720 / 1000 | 720 / 1000 |
| Domains | 4 | 4 (re-weighted, Domain 3 renamed) |
| Languages | All supported languages | All currently supported languages |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE, test centre or online | Pearson VUE, test centre or online |
| Recommended experience | 1+ year developing and maintaining applications on AWS | 1+ year on AWS, plus experience with AI-assisted development tools and CI/CD |
The Domains: Same Four, New Weights
AWS describes the domains as unchanged, and the four areas are indeed the same. Three things move. Troubleshooting and Optimization grows from 18% to 22%, the biggest shift, so debugging, observability and performance tuning are worth more of your score. Development with AWS Services and the deployment domain each give up two points. And Domain 3 is renamed from Deployment to Testing and Deployment, which matches AWS folding the old testing skills into a single task.
Security stays at 26%, but its contents change more than its weight: AWS has merged the encryption and sensitive-data skills into one task and added a new AI security task alongside it.
| Domain | DVA-C02 weight | DVA-C03 weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Development with AWS Services | 32% | 30% |
| 2. Security | 26% | 26% |
| 3. Deployment → Testing and Deployment | 24% | 22% |
| 4. Troubleshooting and Optimization | 18% | 22% |
What Is New in DVA-C03
AWS lists four areas of new content.
- AI security, a new Task 2.3 with 5 skills: access management for AI services; data privacy controls such as VPC endpoints and making sure your inputs and outputs are not used to train models; content filtering and prompt injection protection; securing AI agent interactions with tool-use authorization, session isolation and human-in-the-loop approvals; and keeping sensitive content out of monitoring logs.
- AI-assisted development in every domain: code generation and automated code review (Domain 1), test automation, regression testing and CI/CD support including automated deployment approvals (Domain 3), and error analysis, troubleshooting suggestions and performance recommendations (Domain 4).
- Containers: building and managing images with Amazon ECR, and deploying containerised applications with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate.
- New in-scope services: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Q, Kiro, Amazon Data Firehose and AWS PrivateLink.
What AWS Consolidated
DVA-C03 is not just DVA-C02 plus AI. AWS also merged a large number of narrow skills into broader ones, which should make the blueprint shorter to read, though not necessarily easier: a broad skill can still be tested from many angles.
| Area | DVA-C02 | DVA-C03 |
|---|---|---|
| DynamoDB | 4 skills | 1 skill |
| Security (encryption and sensitive data) | 13 skills across 2 tasks | 7 skills in 1 task |
| Testing | 11 skills across 2 tasks | 5 skills in 1 task |
| Observability | 8 skills | 5 skills |
| Optimization | 9 skills | 6 skills |
What Is Out of Scope
DVA-C03 brings AI into the exam from a developer's angle, not a data scientist's. AWS explicitly lists prompt engineering, RAG design, AI model selection, Amazon SageMaker AI and AI governance framework design as out of scope. You need to know how to call Bedrock securely from your application, keep data private and lock down an agent's tool access. You do not need to know how to choose or tune a model; that belongs to the AI Practitioner, ML Engineer and Generative AI Developer exams.
DVA-C02 Already Gives You a Preview
The current DVA-C02 exam guide has an "Emerging topics" section. It warns candidates that they may meet unscored pretest questions on using AI-assisted tools to generate, review and optimise code, and on the security risks of integrating AI services into applications: data privacy controls, access management, controlling model inputs and outputs, securing AI agent interactions and keeping sensitive content out of logs.
That is almost word for word the new DVA-C03 AI security task. If you sit DVA-C02 now you may see a few of these questions, but they do not count towards your score.
Should You Take DVA-C02 or Wait for DVA-C03?
AWS's guidance: take DVA-C02 by November 30 if you are already prepared and want the certification now, and wait for DVA-C03 if you want it to validate AI-assisted development and modern security practices for AI services. Here is how that plays out.
Take DVA-C02 before November 30 if you have been studying for a few weeks and your practice scores are already around 75% or higher. Nearly all study material available today, including courses, practice exams and community notes, targets DVA-C02, and that is the main reason to sit the old version. Book soon: test-centre slots fill up in the last weeks before a retirement.
Wait for DVA-C03 if you are starting from scratch and cannot realistically be exam-ready by late November. Studying DVA-C02 now and switching means learning the old blueprint and then relearning the new one. Waiting also suits you if you already work with containers or AI coding assistants every day, because that is exactly what the new version rewards.
Either way, the certification is the same AWS Certified Developer – Associate, valid for three years. When you renew, you will renew against DVA-C03 or whatever follows it.
A Note on the Pearson VUE Retake Offer
Pearson VUE's current Global Retake offer (50% off plus a free retake) does not cover Developer – Associate: DVA is one of the excluded exams. If you already hold an AWS certification, the 50% voucher from your previous pass is the usual way to cut the $150 fee.
How to Prepare Right Now
For DVA-C02: finish a full course, then move to timed, full-length practice exams. The developer exam rewards precise knowledge of service behaviour: DynamoDB capacity and indexes, Lambda concurrency and event sources, API Gateway integrations, SQS and SNS semantics, IAM and KMS for applications, and the CodePipeline and CodeDeploy deployment strategies. Our free Developer Associate practice exam is built on the DVA-C02 blueprint.
For DVA-C03: start with the same fundamentals, because AWS says the core development competencies are retained. Then add the new areas: push an image to ECR and deploy it on ECS with Fargate, call Amazon Bedrock from a Lambda function through a VPC endpoint with least-privilege IAM, put a Bedrock Guardrail in front of user input, and try an AI coding assistant such as Amazon Q Developer or Kiro on a small project. Give troubleshooting extra time: it is now 22% of the exam. When the full exam guide is published on October 27, map its task statements against your notes.
The Udemy course and practice exams below are currently built for DVA-C02. Check each course page for DVA-C03 updates before you buy.