How much does ISC2 CISSP cost?

The largest saving on this exam is not a discount code, it is not failing. A retake is another $749, so two sittings comes to $1,498, which is more than every other cost on this page put together. The CAT engine ends the exam early once it is confident you are below the standard, so an underprepared candidate can fail inside 100 questions and still owe the full fee. Drilling a question bank until your scores sit comfortably above the pass line is the cheapest thing you can do.

After that, the order of savings is: get an employer to pay, because CISSP maps onto senior roles a security budget already funds; use DoD COOL funding if you are an eligible service member; and skip the instructor-led course. A book and a question bank for around $60 cover what most passing candidates use, and the free material for a management-level exam is thinner than it is for an entry-level one, so the paid study guide is the one thing worth buying.

There is one cost you cannot cut. The annual maintenance fee is due every year you hold the credential, whether or not you use it, so factor it in before you sit rather than after. If you pass before you have the required experience you hold Associate of ISC2 at a lower annual maintenance fee, which softens the early years while you accrue the time.

A retake is another $749 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 question every time.

ISC2 enforces a waiting period between attempts and caps how many times you can sit the exam in a year, so an immediate rebook is not an option even if you wanted one. Use the wait. Read whatever your result tells you about your weaker domains before you book again, because rebooking against the same gap is how a $749 fee becomes a $1,498 one.

A CISSP failure is often not a knowledge failure. The exam rewards the risk-based, business-aligned answer over the hands-on technical fix, and candidates who answer as the engineer they are lose marks on questions they understood. If that describes your attempt, the fix between sittings is how you choose between two correct-looking answers, not another pass through the material.

CISSP runs on a three-year cycle. Staying certified means earning 120 continuing professional education credits across the cycle, at least 40 in each year, and paying the annual maintenance fee every year on top of that. The credits and the fee are separate obligations, and missing either one puts the credential at risk.

The CPE credits come from activities many people in senior security roles do anyway: attending training and conferences, teaching, writing, contributing to industry work, and earning further certifications. If you are active in the field you tend to generate them without planning, but the 40-per-year floor means you cannot leave all of it to the final year of the cycle.

The annual maintenance fee is the part that makes CISSP different from a certification you pass once and forget. Where a fundamentals exam has no ongoing cost, CISSP bills you every year you hold it. If you passed without the five years of experience, you hold Associate of ISC2 at a lower annual maintenance fee until you accrue the time, then convert to full CISSP.

Preparation runs $60 to $900 for most candidates.

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.