Three Azure certifications died this year. The fourth goes Monday.

If you're mid-way through AZ-500, sit it before Monday — but know exactly what you're buying: it stays active on your transcript for one year and then can't be renewed. If you haven't started, don't. Microsoft has named no replacement, and the four Azure certifications that aren't going anywhere are AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305 and AZ-400.

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Or read on for what's actually going ↓

Usually I spend this email on one product and whether its price makes sense. This week the useful thing isn't a price — it's a date. Microsoft retires the Azure Security Engineer Associate certification (AZ-500) on 31 August, which is six days after you get this. After that you can't earn it and you can't renew it, and that second part catches people who already hold it.

So let me be precise about what sitting it before Monday actually gets you, because "get it while you can" is doing a lot of work in most of the coverage I've read. Microsoft's renewal rules are plain: a certification you earn stays in the Active section of your transcript until it expires, and passing the free annual renewal assessment extends it by one year. The AZ-500 renewal assessment retires on the same day the certification does. So an AZ-500 passed next week is active for about a year, and then it moves to the Historical section of your transcript permanently — there is no renewal path after 31 August.

That's still worth $165 if you're a week from exam-ready and want the line on your CV while it's current. It is emphatically not worth starting from scratch for.

1. This isn't a one-off — it's the fourth this year

I pulled Microsoft's own credential-retirement table this week. Three Azure certifications have already gone in 2026, and AZ-500 is the fourth:

Two of those — the AI Engineer and Data Scientist tracks — were among the most-recommended Azure certifications going, right up until they weren't. That's the part worth internalising: a credential being popular tells you nothing about whether it will exist next year.

2. What Microsoft doesn't say

Here's what I expected to find and didn't: a replacement. Microsoft's retirement notice gives the date and nothing else. There is no "take this instead" on the AZ-500 page, none on the retirement table, and none on the AZ-204 page either.

Two newer credentials do exist in adjacent territory — AI-200 (Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate) and AI-103 (Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate). Both are real; I checked. But Microsoft doesn't label either one a successor to anything, so I'm not going to either. If you see a course page telling you AI-200 "replaces" AZ-204, that's the seller's inference, not Microsoft's statement. It may well turn out to be right. It just isn't sourced.

For security specifically — the ground AZ-500 covered — Microsoft has published no Azure-branded replacement at all. That's an odd gap, and I'd rather tell you it's a gap than paper over it.

3. So what should you actually study?

I checked all five of the main Azure certifications against Microsoft's retirement list. Four of them aren't on it: AZ-900 (Fundamentals), AZ-104 (Administrator), AZ-305 (Solutions Architect Expert) and AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert). The AZ-400 page states its retirement date as "none" outright.

If you're new to Azure, AZ-900 remains the sane starting point — it's the entry tier, it's cheap, and it has survived every cull so far. If you're already working in Azure, AZ-104 is the one that moves salaries, and it's also the prerequisite that still works for AZ-400 — worth knowing, because Microsoft still lists the retired AZ-204 as an alternative prerequisite on that page, which is no longer a route you can take.

And the habit I'd genuinely like you to steal from this email: before you buy any exam-prep course, open Microsoft's retirement page and search for the exam code. It takes ten seconds. Training providers are consistently slower to pull retired tracks than Microsoft is to retire them — I found prep courses still being sold for AZ-204 three weeks after it died, and I had to fix a few of our own pages that were still recommending it. Ours are corrected now. Plenty aren't.

The exam you're studying for should still exist when you're ready to sit it. That's a lower bar than it sounds, and this year a lot of people have tripped over it.