How much does ISC2 CCSP cost?

The largest reduction on this exam is not a discount, it is passing at the first attempt. A retake is another $599, so two sittings is $1,198, which is more than every other cost on this page put together. The adaptive engine can end the exam inside 100 items once it is confident you are below the standard, so an underprepared candidate can pay the full fee for a short exam. Drilling until your scores sit clear of the pass line is the cheapest thing you can do.

If you already hold an ISC2 certification, the recurring cost is already paid. ISC2 bills a single maintenance fee per member however many of its certifications you hold, so a CISSP or SSCP holder adding CCSP takes on the exam fee and no new annual cost at all. That is the one place where holding several ISC2 credentials is genuinely cheaper per credential than holding one.

Ask an employer to pay. CCSP maps onto cloud architecture, cloud engineering and cloud audit roles that usually carry a training budget, and ISC2 lists the certification as approved under the U.S. Department of Defense DoDM 8140.03 framework, which is the kind of line that makes a funding request easy to approve.

Register as an ISC2 Candidate before you buy anything. The first year of dues is waived while that offer runs, the status carries a saving on ISC2's own training, and the dues you do pay are credited to your first year of membership. Paying list price for a voucher and a course without checking Candidate benefits is money left behind.

Book a date you can keep. Moving the appointment late costs a fee and cancelling costs more, both listed in the table above, and neither one buys you a single extra hour of preparation.

A retake is another $599 at full price. There is no discount for a second attempt and no partial credit for the domains you were strong in, because the adaptive engine rebuilds its estimate of your ability from the first item every time.

The waiting periods get longer with each attempt. ISC2 lets you retest 30 test-free days after a first attempt, 60 test-free days after a second, and 90 test-free days after a third and every attempt after that. Across all of it you may sit an ISC2 exam at most four times in any 12 month period for a given certification, so booking your way through it is not an option even if you wanted to.

Use the wait, because it is long enough to fix something real. CCSP failures cluster in the domains a candidate's day job never touches. An engineer who lives in Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Security tends to lose marks in Legal, Risk and Compliance, which is 13 percent of the exam and reads nothing like the rest of it. Work out which domains the result points at and study those rather than starting again at the first one.

CCSP runs on a three year certification cycle. Staying certified means 90 CPE credits across the cycle, of which at least 60 must be Group A, plus the annual maintenance fee every year. ISC2 suggests 30 credits a year to keep the pace even and states there is no annual requirement unless you hold associate status, so an uneven year is allowed as long as the cycle total lands.

Group A credits have to relate to the domains of a certification you hold, which for CCSP means cloud security work rather than any training that happens to be running. The other 30 may be Group A or Group B, and Group B is professional development more broadly. Vendor training, conference sessions, teaching, writing and further certifications all count, and someone active in cloud security generates them without planning much.

The fee is what makes CCSP a cost you carry rather than one you clear. It is charged every year you hold the credential, and because ISC2 bills one fee per member rather than one per certification, it does not grow if you add CGRC or CISSP later. Missing either the credits or the fee puts the certification at risk, so both belong in a calendar the week you certify.

If you passed without the experience, the arithmetic is different while you wait. An Associate of ISC2 sits on a one year cycle with 15 CPE credits due annually and the lower associate fee, and converts to the member fee once the endorsement clears.

Preparation for CCSP can genuinely cost nothing. The realistic range people spend is $0 to $500, and the top of that range buys convenience rather than a better chance of passing.

Our questions, explanations, and cheat sheets are free, and the explanation is never paywalled. That is the part of a paid practice set you are actually buying, so it is the part we do not charge for.