AWS Certification Cost in India, 2026: Every Exam Fee

Full fee table

Every AWS exam fee falls into one of three price bands. The table below covers the certifications most relevant to a cloud or DevOps career in India, with fees taken from the AWS Certification FAQ.

The jump from associate to professional doubles the fee, and the professional exams are longer and harder, so a failed attempt at that level is expensive. Exam codes change when AWS refreshes an exam, but the fee band stays the same. Check the current code on the AWS page before you book.

Why there is no rupee price

AWS does not publish an exam fee in Indian rupees. The AWS Certification FAQ lists exam prices in US dollars and offers local currency pricing only in a short list of countries, and India is not on that list. When you register from India, the USD fee is converted to rupees at the exchange rate applied by AWS's payment processor and your card issuer on the day of payment.

That means the rupee cost moves with the exchange rate. As an estimate only, and not an AWS figure, a USD 100 foundational exam works out to roughly ₹8,500 to ₹9,000 at current rates. On the same basis an associate exam at USD 150 is roughly ₹12,750 to ₹13,500, and a professional or specialty exam at USD 300 is roughly ₹25,500 to ₹27,000. Your card statement may also show a small foreign transaction charge from your bank, which is separate from the AWS fee.

So when someone asks "what is the AWS certification cost in rupees", the honest answer is: there is no fixed rupee price, budget around the USD figure, and expect the final amount to vary by a few hundred rupees depending on when you pay.

Retakes and the 50 percent voucher

If you fail an AWS exam, you must wait 14 days before you can sit it again, and you pay the full fee for every attempt. There is no free retake and no reduced retake price. This is stated in the AWS Certification FAQ.

The good news comes after a pass. Every time you earn an AWS certification, AWS places a 50 percent discount voucher in your AWS Certification Account under the Benefits tab. You can apply it to your next exam or to a recertification exam. Since AWS certifications are valid for three years, most people use the voucher either to step up (say, from SAA-C03 to DOP-C02) or to renew before the three year window closes.

Plan your sequence around this. Passing a USD 150 associate exam first, then using the voucher on a USD 300 professional exam, saves USD 150 on the second exam.

How to pay less

There are four legitimate ways to reduce what you spend on AWS certification. None of them involve exam dumps, which violate the AWS candidate agreement and can void your certification.

1. Discounted exam vouchers. Techcake sells discounted AWS exam vouchers to students and to the public. The voucher covers the exam fee, so you avoid paying AWS in dollars on your own card. The current discount is shown on that page.
2. The 50 percent recertification voucher. As described above, every pass earns a 50 percent voucher through your AWS Certification Account. Use it on your next exam rather than letting it expire.
3. Free preparation on AWS Skill Builder. AWS Skill Builder has a free tier of self-paced digital courses, including exam prep material for each certification. You do not need a paid subscription to prepare for CLF-C02 or SAA-C03.
4. AWS Educate and Cloud Quest. AWS Educate is free for students aged 13 and above and gives you labs and learning paths without a credit card. AWS Cloud Quest is a role-based game with free content that walks you through building real AWS solutions.

Put together, a student in Kerala can prepare for a foundational or associate exam at no cost, sit it on a discounted voucher, then use the 50 percent voucher for the next level.

Which certification first for a DevOps career

For a DevOps career, start with SAA-C03 (Solutions Architect Associate), then move to DOP-C02 (DevOps Engineer Professional). CLF-C02 (Cloud Practitioner) is optional and mainly useful if you have never touched a cloud console and want a gentle first exam.

Here is why. SAA-C03 covers the services a DevOps engineer touches every day: EC2, VPC, load balancers, RDS, S3, IAM and CloudWatch. That is the same list taught in module 04 of the DevOps Engineer course, so the course and the exam reinforce each other. DOP-C02 then tests CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring and incident response, which map to projects 3 to 6 of the DevOps Engineer Career Program.

SCS-C03 (Security Specialty) comes later, once you are working on production systems and need to own IAM policies, encryption and audit logging. Jobin Joseph, Techcake's founder, holds AWS DevOps Engineer Professional, AWS Solutions Architect Professional and AWS Security Specialty, and he took them in roughly that order over several years of production work, not in one sprint.

If you skip CLF-C02, your exam spend for the DevOps path is USD 150 for SAA-C03 plus USD 300 for DOP-C02, less the 50 percent voucher on the second exam.

Is AWS certification worth it without hands-on

An AWS certificate without hands-on experience gets your resume read, but it does not get you through a technical interview. Hiring managers in Kochi, Bengaluru and Chennai routinely ask candidates to explain a VPC they built, a pipeline they broke and fixed, or a cost they reduced. A multiple-choice pass cannot answer those questions.

That is why Techcake does not run a certification-only programme. AWS is taught inside the DevOps Engineer course as module 04, where you build EC2, VPC, ALB, RDS, S3, IAM and CloudWatch resources yourself and then write them as Terraform. The AWS training page explains how the course and the Career Program prepare you for SAA-C03 and DOP-C02 as a by-product of building real infrastructure, rather than the other way round. Linux underpins all of it, which is why the Linux training page and the Linux System Administration course exist as a separate entry point.

If you already know the fundamentals and only need production exposure, the six month DevOps project-based training gives you mentored work on AWS infrastructure, IaC and observability on our Kannur campus. Certification then becomes a formality.

The short answer: get certified, but get hands-on first or alongside.

Total cost of becoming AWS certified in India

The total cost of becoming AWS certified in India is the exam fee plus whatever you spend on training. The exam side is fixed in dollars: USD 100, 150 or 300 per attempt, from the AWS Certification FAQ, with the 50 percent voucher cutting your second exam in half.

The training side ranges from zero to a full programme fee. Free options are Skill Builder's free tier, AWS Educate and Cloud Quest, listed above. They are enough for a motivated self-learner to pass CLF-C02 or SAA-C03, but they do not give you a mentor, a project portfolio or interview practice.

Techcake does not publish programme fees on this page. Fees and EMI options for the DevOps Engineer course, the Career Program and the project-based training are shared on a free counsellor call, and EMI is available. The admissions page explains the steps. Before you decide how much to invest, read the DevOps salary guide for Kerala to see what the role pays at each experience level, and the DevOps roadmap for freshers for the order in which to learn the skills.