Is AZ-104 Worth It in 2026? The Price, the Job Data and Who Should Skip It

Microsoft retired three Azure associate certifications in the summer of 2026. AZ-204 went on 31 July, AZ-500 on 31 August, and AI-102 at the end of June, each replaced by a new AI-branded exam. AZ-104 was not touched. Its skills outline was refreshed in April with every change rated “minor”, and it is still the certification Microsoft requires before you can hold the Azure Solutions Architect Expert title.

So the exam is alive. The real question behind “is AZ-104 worth it” is whether £106 and a few weeks of study change anything for your career, and that depends on who you are. This is the answer from the architect’s side of the table, with the UK job-ad data and Microsoft’s own pages as the evidence rather than forum anecdotes.

Last updated 3 October 2026. Prices, renewal policy, skills outline and retirement status checked on Microsoft Learn on 3 October 2026. UK job-market figures read from ITJobsWatch on 3 October 2026, covering the six months to that date.

Short answer

Yes, for most people moving into Azure infrastructure work, and especially if you are a Windows or on-premises sysadmin, work for an MSP, or want the architect or DevOps expert certifications later. It is cheap, it is not going anywhere, it renews for free, and UK employers name Azure certification in more job ads than they did a year ago. No, if you expect it to get you a job on its own, if your next role is developer, security or data shaped (there are better-targeted exams now), or if your employer runs on AWS.

The one number to remember: in the six months to 3 October 2026, ITJobsWatch recorded 1,710 UK permanent ads citing Azure certification and just two ads with the job title “Azure Administrator”. The certificate is asked for. The job it is named after barely exists as a title. AZ-104 is an entry ticket to Azure engineer and cloud engineer roles, not a job description.

AZ-104 in October 2026: the facts

Item	Current position	Source
Price to sit in the UK	£106 (US: $165)	Microsoft Learn exam page, UK selected
Exam time	100 minutes, proctored, may include interactive components	Microsoft Learn exam page
Retake	24 hours after a first fail; longer waits after that	Microsoft Learn exam page
Validity	12 months, then renew	Microsoft Learn exam page
Renewal	Free, online, unproctored, open book, taken in a six-month window before expiry	Microsoft Learn renewal page
Skills outline	As of 17 April 2026; every change rated “minor”	AZ-104 study guide change log
Retirement	Not on Microsoft’s retirement list	Exam and assessment lab retirement page
Required for	Azure Solutions Architect Expert (with AZ-305); one of two listed prerequisites for DevOps Engineer Expert (with AZ-400)	Microsoft Learn certification pages

Take that last line on the screenshot seriously. If you book the exam with your employer’s Entra ID account and later leave, Microsoft says the exam records are lost and cannot be recovered. Book it on a personal Microsoft account even if work is paying.

It survived the 2026 retirements, and that matters

In March 2026 Microsoft announced its biggest certification reshuffle in years. The retirement page on Learn now lists, among others: DP-100 (1 June 2026), AI-102 and the AI-900 exam (30 June), AZ-204 (31 July), AZ-500 (31 August), and AZ-800 and AZ-801 (30 September). Most were replaced by a new or renumbered exam: AI-103 for AI engineers, AI-200 for Azure developers, SC-500 for security engineers, AI-901 for AI fundamentals and AZ-802 for Windows Server.

AZ-104 is not on that list, and the only exam the page shows as scheduled to retire in the next twelve months is MS-102, the Microsoft 365 administrator exam. The April 2026 refresh to AZ-104 was evolutionary: the five domains and their weightings (identity and governance 20 to 25%, storage 15 to 20%, compute 20 to 25%, networking 15 to 20%, monitoring 10 to 15%) did not move, and the change log rates every edit “minor”.

Why that matters: a certification that survives a cull aimed squarely at “make everything AI” is one Microsoft regards as foundational. The admin layer (identity, RBAC, networking, storage, compute, monitoring, backup) is what every one of the new AI exams sits on top of. SC-500’s syllabus, for example, still opens with identity, access and governance, and then secures storage, networking and compute: the same estate AZ-104 teaches you to build.

There is a second, quieter consequence. The DevOps Engineer Expert certification lists two qualifying associates: Azure Administrator or Azure Developer. Azure Developer (AZ-204) can no longer be earned. Until Microsoft updates that page, AZ-104 is the only one of the two a new candidate can still get, which makes it the gateway to both Azure expert-level infrastructure certifications.

What the UK job market actually says

ITJobsWatch does not track AZ-104 by exam code (a search returns no match), but it tracks “Azure Certification” as a qualification and “Azure Administrator” as a job title. Read them together and the picture is clear.

In the six months to 3 October 2026, 1,710 UK permanent job ads cited Azure certification, with a median advertised salary of £62,500 from 420 ads that quoted one. A word of caution on the raw counts: ITJobsWatch’s overall sample was much smaller in the 2025 comparison period (44,495 permanent ads with a recognised job title, against 109,727 this period), so compare the percentages. As a share of all UK permanent IT ads, Azure certification went from 0.83% (2024) to 1.03% (2025) to 1.45% now. On contracts, 472 ads cited it in the same six months, with a median day rate of £525.

Now the job title:

Two ads. Two in the same period of 2025, nineteen in 2024, and too few quoted salaries this year for ITJobsWatch to give a median. The work AZ-104 tests is advertised under other titles:

Job title (UK permanent, 6 months to 3 Oct 2026)	Ads	Median salary
Cloud Engineer	1,377	£70,000
Azure Engineer	937	£70,000
Azure Architect	207	£90,000
Azure DevOps Engineer	192	£75,000
Azure Administrator	2	not enough data

Source: ITJobsWatch job-title pages, read 3 October 2026. These are advertised salaries, not what people are paid, and an ad can mention a certification without requiring it. They are not “AZ-104 salaries”, and no honest source can give you one: nobody publishes pay by exam held. What the data does show is that the certification is a named requirement across a broad, growing set of £60,000 to £90,000 roles, and that “administrator” is not what those roles are called.

For context, the same ITJobsWatch period shows 535 UK permanent ads citing AWS certification, against 1,710 for Azure. In the UK permanent market, Azure certification is the one employers name more often.

What AZ-104 proves to a hiring manager, and what it doesn’t

From the architect’s seat, a certification answers one question: has this person covered the ground? AZ-104 says yes to a specific, useful patch of ground. It does not say anything about the rest.

It does show	It does not show
You have been through the whole admin surface once: Entra users and groups, RBAC scopes, Azure Policy, storage redundancy and SAS, VNets, NSGs, private endpoints, load balancers, backup and Site Recovery	That you have run any of it in production, under change control, with real users on the other end
You can read and modify an ARM template or Bicep file	That you can write and maintain infrastructure as code across environments, with a pipeline and state you trust
You know where settings live and what the services are called	That you can design: choose between options, explain the trade-off, and own the cost
You passed a proctored exam that Microsoft renews yearly against current features	That you can troubleshoot something that is not in the syllabus, which is most of the job

There is also a credibility discount every hiring manager applies to associate exams. The autocomplete for AZ-104 is full of “dumps” and “renewal exam answers”, and interviewers know it. The way round the discount is not a second certificate. It is evidence: a small Azure environment you built, broke and fixed, written up so someone can read it in five minutes. The certificate gets you past the filter; the evidence is what you talk about in the interview.

Who it is worth it for, and who should skip it

You are	Verdict	Why
A Windows or on-prem sysadmin, second or third line, moving towards cloud	Take it	It maps your existing knowledge (identity, networks, storage, backup) onto Azure terms, and Azure is where UK employers in this space are hiring
Working at an MSP or partner	Take it	Microsoft partner programme requirements count certifications, and customer projects need someone who knows the admin layer
Aiming for Azure architect or DevOps expert	Take it first	Solutions Architect Expert requires it; DevOps Engineer Expert’s only other listed associate is retired
Career changer with no IT experience	Not first	The exam assumes you know operating systems, networking, servers and virtualisation. Learn those on a homelab first, or the certificate will be ahead of your answers in interview
A developer	Skip to AI-200	AZ-204 is gone; AI-200 (Azure AI Cloud Developer) is its replacement and is built around containers, data services and event-driven AI apps
Security-focused	Consider SC-500 or SC-300 instead	SC-500 replaced AZ-500 and covers identity, network and compute security plus AI workloads. AZ-104 helps, but it is not required
Already an Azure engineer with years of production work	Only if a prerequisite or partner need forces it	Your track record already says more than an associate exam does; your next credential is AZ-305 or AZ-400, and both need AZ-104 first, so the answer may still be yes
Working in an AWS-only shop	Skip	Certify on the platform you can practise on every day

How to make the £106 worth more

Pair the exam with a build. The cheapest version: an Azure free account, a single subscription with a budget alert, and a hub-and-spoke network with one VM behind Bastion, a storage account on a private endpoint, an Azure Policy that denies public IPs, and a Recovery Services vault backing the VM up. Deploy it from a Bicep file you wrote, tear it down, deploy it again. That one project touches all five AZ-104 domains and is the thing you describe when the interviewer asks “tell me about something you built”.

Our AZ-104 study guide covers the exam itself, domain by domain, and the AZ-104 series hub has the deep dives on identity, networking and storage. For the free-tier side, learning Azure for free lists what costs nothing to run.

Why this matters at work

Every organisation on Microsoft 365 already has an Entra tenant, and Azure subscriptions attach to it with very little ceremony. The person who understands RBAC scopes, management groups, Policy and private networking is the person who stops that estate drifting into the state that ends in an audit finding: owner rights granted at subscription scope “temporarily”, storage accounts open to the internet, no budget alerts. AZ-104 is the minimum common vocabulary for that conversation. It is also the vocabulary architects assume you have when they hand you a design, which is why it sits underneath AZ-305. If you want to move from running the platform to designing it, this is the first step; the habits that get you the rest of the way are in why your homelab makes you a better cloud architect.

Frequently asked questions

Is AZ-104 being retired?

No. As of 3 October 2026, AZ-104 is not on Microsoft’s exam retirement list, and its skills outline was updated on 17 April 2026. The Azure exams retired in 2026 were AZ-204, AZ-500 and AI-102, which were replaced by AI-200, SC-500 and AI-103.

How much does AZ-104 cost in the UK?

£106 when the exam is proctored in the United Kingdom, as shown on Microsoft Learn on 3 October 2026. The US price is $165. Renewing it each year is free.

Is AZ-104 enough to get a job?

Not on its own. UK employers name Azure certification in a growing share of job ads, but those roles are titled Cloud Engineer or Azure Engineer and expect hands-on experience. AZ-104 plus a documented Azure project you built is a much stronger application than the certificate alone.

Does AZ-104 expire?

Yes, after 12 months. You renew it for free by passing an online, open-book assessment on Microsoft Learn during the six months before it expires, and each pass extends it by a year.

Related reading

• AZ-104 Study Guide: Azure Administrator Certification Path
• Azure AZ-104 Study Series
• Why your homelab belongs on your CV, and how to present it
• UK IT Skills and Salary Radar

Sources:

• Microsoft Learn: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) certification page
• Microsoft Learn: AZ-104 study guide and change log
• Microsoft Learn: exam and assessment lab retirement
• Microsoft Learn: renew your Microsoft certification
• Microsoft Tech Community: new certifications and 2026 retirements (3 March 2026)
• ITJobsWatch: Azure Certification, UK permanent and UK contract
• ITJobsWatch: Azure Administrator job title, UK permanent