Guide

Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCAR-F)

Facts verified on 2026-07-31

What CCAR-F is, and who it is for

Anthropic organizes the program around three roles — Associate, Developer and Architect. CCAR-F is the foundations-level exam of the third, aimed at people who design with Claude rather than only build with it: choosing where an agent belongs, how tools and context are wired, what the loop does when it goes wrong.

As with the other three exams, the FAQ states no formal prerequisite and no target audience beyond the role name. Nothing requires holding Associate or Developer first, and nothing stops an architect from sitting CCAR-F as their first Claude certification.

• The domains reward designing the agentic system — the loop itself, Claude Code configuration and permissions, prompting technique, tools and MCP, and context economics — rather than knowledge of any one product surface.
• CCAR-F counts toward your company's Partner Network status, alongside Developer — Foundations and Architect — Professional. Associate is the one certification of the four that does not.
• If your job is deciding how Claude gets used across a system rather than writing the integration yourself, this is the blueprint that matches — the Developer — Foundations blueprint leans toward building applications and integrations instead.

CCA-F and CCAR-F are the same exam

Architect — Foundations was renamed: the code CCA-F became CCAR-F. It is one exam with two names, not two exams, and nothing about the price, the blueprint, the length or the cut changed with the letters.

This matters for searching more than for sitting it. Material written before the rename says CCA-F, material written after says CCAR-F, and a search for either can miss half of what exists. If you are comparing study resources, check which code they use before concluding one covers something the other does not — including ours: our own API still uses cca-f as the internal exam id while displaying CCAR-F, which is a naming detail, not a different exam.

What it costs, and what sitting it looks like

• $125 per attempt, in USD, before any partner-tier discount. Select, Preferred and Global Premier tiers get 50% off, and Global Premier pays nothing at all through 31 August 2026.
• 60 questions: the official exam guide v1.0 puts Architect — Foundations at that count, the only one of the four certifications to have one published, and it is the figure our own mock exams are built to.
• 120 minutes to answer, with roughly 135 minutes of total seat time once check-in, instructions and the post-exam survey are counted.
• Scored on a scale of 100 to 1,000, with 720 the minimum to pass — the same cut as the other three certifications.
• English only, closed book, delivered by Pearson either online with a proctor or at a test center.
• Question types are multiple choice and scenario-based multiple response.

The five domains and their official weights

These are our own product data — the weights we recorded when we built the question bank against the official blueprint, not a figure the FAQ above publishes. Read them as a study plan rather than a table: the first two domains alone are nearly half the exam.

What the weights change about studying

Five domains invites the most common way to prepare inefficiently: an even split, twenty percent of your hours each. The blueprint is not even. Agents & agentic loop is 27% — roughly 16 of the 60 questions — and with Claude Code config & permissions at 20% the top two are 47% of the exam between them, nearly half.

The tail matters in the other direction. Context & optimization is 15%, about 9 questions, and it is the domain most candidates leave for last because it reads like an efficiency topic rather than an architecture one. On a 720 cut, nine questions is not a rounding error — it is more than the margin most failed attempts miss by.

It also means readiness is not “I finished the material.” It is holding a high enough command in every domain, because a weak 27% domain cannot be rescued by a strong 15% one. That is why we score mastery per domain rather than reporting one percentage.

• Agents & agentic loop (27%) — the largest single domain, and the one the whole certification is organized around.
• Claude Code: config & permissions (20%) and Prompting techniques (20%) — tied, and together another 40%.
• Tools & MCP (18%) and Context & optimization (15%) — a third of the exam between them, and the two most often studied last.

Foundations or Professional?

The Architect track has two exams: CCAR-F at $125 with five domains, and Claude Certified Architect — Professional (CCAR-P) at $175 with seven. Anthropic states no formal prerequisite between them — you may sit Professional without holding Foundations — while calling Foundations the natural place to start.

Both count toward Partner Network status, and both use the same 120 minutes and the same 720 cut. The published difference is scope and price, not difficulty rules: Professional has two more domains and costs $50 more per attempt.

Eligibility, retakes and how long it lasts

• Eligibility: certification is available to people at Claude Partner Network organizations, and registration requires a partner email address on a recognized company domain. Personal email addresses will not work.
• Registration: you register and pay in Anthropic Partner Academy, then receive an email with a link to Pearson, where you log in and schedule the appointment yourself.
• Retakes: up to 4 attempts per rolling 12 months, with waits of 14 days after the first failure, 30 days after the second and 90 days after the third.
• Validity: the certification is valid for 12 months from the date you earn it. On-time renewal is a free, non-proctored assessment rather than a second paid exam.