If you fail a CompTIA certification exam, the CompTIA retake policy lets you try again — but the rules tighten after your second attempt. CompTIA does not require any waiting period between your first and second attempt, but from the third attempt onward you must wait at least 14 calendar days before testing again. Every retake requires a full-price voucher, and the vendor offers no free retests or discounted fees. Understanding these mechanics before you book changes how much preparation time and budget you assign to a single attempt, because a retake is never free and, after the second miss, never immediate.
How CompTIA Retake Rules Work
The policy applies identically across CompTIA’s certification family, including Security+, Network+, A+, CySA+, PenTest+, and CASP+. After a failed first attempt, a candidate can register immediately for a second sitting with no enforced cooldown. The 14-day waiting period takes effect only from the third attempt forward, so every subsequent retake must be spaced at least two weeks apart. There is no published cap on the total number of attempts, but because each one carries a full voucher cost and a growing wait, repeated failures compound in both time and money. Following a structured 12-week Security+ study plan that targets your weakest domains before the first sitting is far cheaper than leaning on retakes to absorb under-preparation.
What Each Attempt Costs
Across CompTIA’s catalog, exam vouchers range from roughly $274 to $529 depending on the specific certification, and every CompTIA retake is billed at the full voucher price, with no free retest vouchers and no discounted fee for repeat candidates. This stands in contrast to vendors like the Linux Foundation, which bundles a second attempt into its CKA fee, or Salesforce, which halves the retake price. Because CompTIA vouchers are non-refundable and non-transferable, the realistic budgeting baseline for a first-time candidate is the cost of one voucher plus a planned contingency for a single retake — not an open-ended chain of re-sits. Reviewing the exact Security+ question formats and domain weights before you spend that money reduces the likelihood that the contingency is ever used.
CompTIA Compared With Other Vendors
Retake economics vary sharply across certification vendors, and CompTIA sits on the stricter, full-price end of the spectrum. The table below summarizes how major vendors handle a failed attempt.
| Vendor | Retake cost | Waiting period |
|---|---|---|
| CompTIA | Full price | None, then 14 days from 3rd attempt |
| AWS | Full price | 14 days |
| Microsoft | Full price | 24 hours, then 14 days |
| GIAC | $899 (down from $999) | 30 days |
| Linux Foundation (CKA) | $0, bundled | Not stated |
| Salesforce | $100, half price | 1 day, then 14 days |
The pattern matters for cross-vendor planners. A candidate pursuing multiple certifications should weight the retake penalty when deciding which exam to attempt first. CompTIA’s no-free-retake stance makes its practice exams and objective mastery disproportionately important, since the cheapest path through a CompTIA exam is passing it the first time.
Set Your Pass Target Before Booking
The practical goal is to walk into the testing center already above the pass line in practice. For Security+, the Security+ SY0-701 exam requires a passing score of 750 on a scale of 100 to 900, with a maximum of 90 questions delivered in a 90-minute window. Candidates should treat 750 as a floor, not a target, because performance-based questions carry no partial credit and a single time-sink PBQ can drag an otherwise-passing score below the line. A safer benchmark is consistent 80–85% scores on timed, full-length practice exams in the final two weeks before booking.
Security Operations is the heaviest-weighted domain at 28 percent, which means roughly one quarter of the exam covers incident response, monitoring, automation, and vulnerability management. Pair that with the 22 percent Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigations domain and half the exam stems from two operational and threat-focused areas, which is where most retake-bound candidates lose points. Concentrating study time proportionally to domain weight — rather than evenly across all five domains — is the single highest-leverage adjustment a retake candidate can make.
A Retake Readiness Checklist
Before you rebook any CompTIA exam after a failed attempt, run through this checklist to confirm the attempt is justified rather than hopeful:
- Pull your score report and identify the two weakest domains; those become the focus of the next study cycle.
- Confirm you are outside any required waiting window — no restriction for a second attempt, at least 14 days for a third or later.
- Purchase a fresh full-price voucher only after you can score 80% or above on at least two timed practice exams.
- Re-drill performance-based questions until you can complete a typical PBQ in under seven minutes.
- Check whether the current exam version is near retirement; if you are in a transition window, read our 2026 certification retirement guide before committing to a date.
Treat the retake as a closed-loop correction, not a second roll of the dice. Each failed attempt has already cost a full voucher and, after the second, two weeks of enforced delay, so the only rational response is to change the preparation that produced the failure.