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How hard is the CompTIA A+? Pass rates and why people fail

By the founder of CertOwl • July 2026 • 3 min read

Let's clear up the biggest myth first: there is no official CompTIA A+ pass rate. CompTIA doesn't publish one, for the A+ or any of its exams. Any site showing you an exact percentage is estimating, and now you know more than most people googling this.

What we do have is a lot of indirect evidence: community polls, training providers' student data, and thousands of exam experience posts. Those consistently suggest that a clear majority of prepared candidates pass on the first try, with common estimates in the 70 to 80 percent range, and that the people who fail usually fail for very predictable reasons.

So the honest answer to "how hard is it": very passable, but genuinely easy to underestimate.

Why the A+ trips people up

It's wide, not deep. No single topic on the A+ is hard. Ports, cable types, Windows tools, printer parts, cloud vocabulary: each piece is simple. The difficulty is that there are two exams' worth of pieces, and the exam can ask about any of them. People who studied "most of it" meet the exam form that hits their weak 20%.

The wording is tricky on purpose. A+ questions love qualifiers: what should the technician do FIRST, which is the BEST option, what is the MOST LIKELY cause. Often two answers are technically correct and you're being tested on prioritization, not knowledge. If you've only memorized facts, these questions feel unfair. If you've understood the troubleshooting logic, they feel obvious.

PBQs under time pressure. Performance-based questions are simulations that can eat five minutes each, and they're placed right at the start where nerves are worst. Plenty of failing attempts died in the first twenty minutes, not because the candidate didn't know the material but because panic plus PBQs wrecked their pacing. There's a whole strategy for this in our exam format guide.

Passive studying. The single biggest predictor of failure I've seen: people who watched a full video course, felt like they understood everything, and booked the exam without doing hundreds of practice questions. Watching is recognition. The exam is retrieval. They're different skills, and the gap between them is exactly where a $265 voucher goes to die.

How it compares to other certs

Among CompTIA's lineup, the A+ is the entry point, and it's easier than the CompTIA Network+ or CompTIA Security+ in terms of depth. But many people who hold all three say the A+ was the most annoying to study for, purely because of the breadth and the memorization load. Don't confuse "entry level" with "effortless."

Compared to something like Cisco's CCNA, the A+ is clearly gentler. The CCNA goes deep on networking; the A+ touches everything lightly.

What predicts a pass

From watching what works, the pattern is boring and reliable:

1. Study from the official objectives. They're a free download and they are literally the list of everything that can be asked.
2. Do hundreds of practice questions with explanations. Not to memorize the questions, but to train retrieval and learn why wrong answers are wrong. When you consistently clear 80% on fresh questions, you're in the passing zone.
3. Run at least two full timed simulations. Pacing is a trainable skill and exam day is a terrible place for the first rehearsal.
4. Study daily, even briefly. Twenty minutes every day beats three hours every Sunday. The memorization-heavy parts (ports, connectors, acronyms) only stick with repetition spaced over weeks.

And one warning, because you'll meet this on your journey: stay away from braindumps, the sites claiming to have "real exam questions." Using them violates CompTIA's policies and can get your certification revoked and you banned from testing for a year or more. Besides the ethics, they teach you nothing, and the interview after the job application will expose that instantly.

The A+ is a fair exam. Respect the breadth, train with real practice, and you'll walk out with a pass screen like most prepared people do.