Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert
The AZ-305 exam is designed for professionals who implement and configure Azure. It validates your ability to design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions, design data storage solutions, design business continuity solutions, and design infrastructure solutions.
Exam details
- Certification
- Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Exam code
- AZ-305
- Level
- Expert
- Duration
- Approximately 120 minutes
- Questions
- Typically 40–60 questions
- Passing score
- 700 out of 1000
- Cost
- USD $165 — typical price; the exact fee varies by country/region and currency, and local taxes may apply.
- Prerequisites
- None required
- Languages
- English (also available in Japanese, German, French, Spanish and several other languages)
- Delivered by
- Pearson VUE
- Renewal
- Free online assessment, every 12 months
Skills measured
Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions (25–30%)
- Recommend logging, routing, and monitoring solutions.
- Recommend authentication, identity, authorisation, and secrets management.
- Recommend management groups, subscriptions, tagging, compliance, and identity governance.
Design data storage solutions (20–25%)
- Recommend relational storage, service tiers, scalability, and data protection.
- Recommend semi-structured and unstructured storage with the right performance and cost.
- Recommend data integration and analysis solutions.
Design business continuity solutions (15–20%)
- Recommend backup and disaster recovery for Azure and hybrid workloads.
- Recommend high availability for compute, relational data, and unstructured data.
Design infrastructure solutions (30–35%)
- Recommend compute, containers, serverless, messaging, API, caching, and deployment designs.
- Evaluate migration to IaaS and PaaS using Cloud Adoption Framework.
- Recommend connectivity, network security, load balancing, and routing.
Study resources & practice tests
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Frequently asked questions
Who should take AZ-305?
AZ-305 is for Azure solutions architects, cloud architects, and infrastructure architects. Most work at Microsoft partners or in large enterprise architecture teams, in finance, government, and energy.
What is the average salary for an Azure Solutions Architect?
As of 2026, US Azure Solutions Architect mid-level remote ranges are commonly about $135,000 to $170,000, with senior roles higher. In the United Kingdom, IT Jobs Watch shows a median advertised salary of £90,000 for Microsoft Azure Architect and £85,000 for Solutions Architect. Western European cloud and solutions architects often earn about €90,000 to €150,000 in Germany. There is no single published EMEA average.
Where do I find exam questions to practice?
You will find websites selling exam dumps or brain dumps that claim to be real AZ-305 questions. Those materials are not official. Microsoft treats using brain dumps as cheating. It can invalidate your score, revoke certifications you already hold, and ban you from future exams. Microsoft publishes a free Practice Assessment for AZ-305 on Microsoft Learn. Those questions are examples only, not the live exam. MeasureUp also sells the official practice test linked in the study resources on this page. You can try the Microsoft exam sandbox to see the question types and timer, but it does not use real exam questions. Practise the skills measured in a real product environment rather than memorising leaked items.
Does the exam include official labs I can use to practice?
AZ-305 is a design and architecture exam. It is typically assessed with case studies and traditional questions rather than a hands-on lab you can reuse afterwards. Microsoft still expects job-role experience. Practise in a subscription or trial, and official instructor-led AZ-305T00 training delivered by a Microsoft Learning Partner includes labs. Those labs are for the course, not a copy of the exam. The Microsoft exam sandbox shows traditional question types only. It does not give you the lab virtual machine.