Guide

Claude Certified Developer — Foundations (CCDV-F)

Facts verified on 2026-07-31

What CCDV-F is, and who it is for

Anthropic organizes the program around three roles — Associate, Developer and Architect. CCDV-F is the foundations-level exam of the second, aimed at people who actually build: writing code against the Claude API, wiring up Claude Code, shipping agents and integrations.

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

• The domains reward building with Claude — API integration, agent and workflow design, model selection, prompt and context engineering, tools and MCPs — not just using a finished Claude product well.
• Unlike Associate, CCDV-F counts toward your company's Partner Network status — the credential moves the organization's tier, not only your own resume.
• If you write code against the API or build with Claude Code as part of your job, this is the exam whose blueprint matches that work; the Associate blueprint leans toward prompting and judging output rather than building.

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.
• 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.
• Anthropic's Partner Academy FAQ does not publish a question count for CCDV-F, or for any of the four certifications.

The eight 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.

What the weights change about studying

Eight domains invites an assumption a lot of developers make without checking it: that day-to-day fluency with Claude Code is most of what CCDV-F tests. By the numbers, it is not. Claude Code is 3.1% of the exam, and Eval, Testing, and Debugging is 2.6% — under 6% combined. The domain that feels like the whole job is a rounding error next to the domains most candidates never open a tab for.

The three heaviest domains are Applications and Integration (33.1%), Model Selection and Optimization (16.8%) and Agents and Workflows (14.7%) — 64.6% of the exam between them, nearly two thirds. Applications and Integration alone is a third of CCDV-F: it is the single largest thing being tested, by a wide margin over every other domain.

On a 720 cut, studying in proportion to these weights is not a nicety — it is the difference between preparing for the exam Anthropic actually wrote and preparing for the parts of the job that happen to be most visible day to day. The two overlap, but they are not the same distribution, and that gap is where CCDV-F attempts go wrong.

• Applications and Integration (33.1%) — a third of the exam on its own: building real applications and wiring Claude into them.
• Model Selection and Optimization (16.8%) and Agents and Workflows (14.7%) — with Applications and Integration, nearly two thirds of CCDV-F between the three of them.
• Claude Code (3.1%) and Eval, Testing, and Debugging (2.6%) — under 6% combined, despite being where a lot of daily developer work actually happens.

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.