The AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam has four domains: Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%) and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). Across the 50 scored questions that is about 15, 13, 12 and 10 questions, split into 14 task statements.
Last updated October 2026.
| Domain | Weight | Of 50 scored |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures (3 tasks) | 30% | About 15 |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures (2 tasks) | 26% | About 13 |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures (5 tasks) | 24% | About 12 |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (4 tasks) | 20% | About 10 |
Domain weights and task statements from the official SAA-C03 exam guide. Question counts are the weights applied to the 50 scored questions, so the real split can vary by a question or two.
Two things stand out. Security is the single largest domain, and Domain 2 packs 26% of the exam into only two task statements, so each of those two is worth more than any other task on the paper. Domain 3 spreads 24% across five, so no single performance topic dominates.
The root user and MFA, IAM users, groups, roles and policies, AWS STS and cross-account roles, AWS Organizations with service control policies and AWS Control Tower, resource-based policies, and federation through AWS IAM Identity Center or AWS Directory Service.
VPC design: public and private subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, security groups and network ACLs, VPC endpoints. Then the services around the workload: AWS WAF and AWS Shield, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Cognito, Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie, plus Site-to-Site VPN and AWS Direct Connect.
Encryption at rest with AWS KMS and in transit with AWS Certificate Manager, key policies, key rotation and certificate renewal, backups and replication, and S3 data protection: Block Public Access, versioning and Object Lock.
Multi-tier, microservice and event-driven designs; scaling out vs up; Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and Amazon EventBridge; containers on Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS with AWS Fargate; AWS Lambda; Amazon API Gateway; AWS Step Functions; and purpose-built managed services.
Multi-AZ and multi-Region services, Amazon Route 53 routing and failover, removing single points of failure, immutable infrastructure, monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, and the four disaster recovery strategies measured against RPO and RTO: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active.
Read every DR question for the RPO and RTO first. The cheapest strategy that meets both numbers is almost always the answer. A faster strategy than the scenario needs is wrong because it costs more.
Domain 4 is the lightest by weight but has the most skills listed in the guide. Its questions are often won by spotting one cost line item, such as cross-AZ data transfer or a NAT gateway processing S3 traffic, that the other options leave in place.
Give each domain study time in proportion to its weight, then shift time toward wherever your experience is thinnest. For most developers that is Domain 1 networking and Domain 4 cost; for most operations engineers it is Domain 2 decoupling. The SAA-C03 study plan turns this into weeks.
Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%) and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). They match four of the six AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars.
Design Secure Architectures, at 30%, is about 15 of the 50 scored questions. It covers IAM and multi-account access, VPC security, and data protection with AWS KMS and backups.
Fourteen: three in Domain 1, two in Domain 2, five in Domain 3 and four in Domain 4. Each task statement lists the knowledge and skills it tests.
No. Scoring is compensatory, so you need an overall scaled score of 720 and a weaker domain can be offset by stronger ones. The score report can include a table showing how you performed in each domain.
The Certified SAA-C03 course follows the exam guide's 14 task statements as modules, with one short chapter per skill. Unit 1 is free.
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