Are AZ-800 and AZ-801 Being Retired? Yes, on September 30, 2026

Yes. Microsoft's certification page states that AZ-800 and AZ-801 will retire on September 30, 2026. The exact wording: "Related exams AZ-800 and AZ-801 will retire on September 30, 2026. During this transition, these exams may continue to appear on this certification page. Once they retire, they will be removed, and AZ-802 will remain as the available path to earn this certification."

The good news is that this is the friendliest change in Microsoft's entire retirement wave. The certification is not going anywhere. Windows Server Administrator Associate survives. What changes is that the two-exam path becomes a one-exam path: AZ-802 covers everything AZ-800 and AZ-801 covered between them. Same credential, half the exams, half the fees.

The catch is that AZ-802 is still in beta, and beta exams do not give you a score on the day. Whether that matters depends entirely on where you are standing right now.

What to do, by situation

The beta catch, spelled out

Microsoft's certification page title still reads "Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Administrator Associate (beta)." That parenthesis has two consequences most prep sites skip past.

You do not get a score when you finish. Microsoft's explanation is that beta exams are not scored immediately because it is still gathering data on the quality of the questions. You sit it, you leave, and you wait until the beta process completes and the exam goes live before you find out whether you passed. That wait can run weeks.

There is no official practice assessment. Microsoft's own line is that practice assessments are "usually available within 8 weeks of the exam being out of beta and generally available." AZ-802 is not out of beta, so that clock has not started. Any site selling "real AZ-802 exam questions" today is selling something it had no way to obtain.

The compensation is that beta exams are typically offered at a reduced fee, and the content is drawn from the same published skills outline the live exam will use. The material is not a secret. Microsoft published all seven domains.

What is on AZ-802

Seven domains. Active Directory is the biggest single block, and monitoring is weighted more heavily than most candidates expect.

The AD DS domain is the meat: domain controllers locally and in Azure, Read-Only Domain Controllers and RODC account security, troubleshooting FSMO roles, domain and forest trust relationships, sites, replication, service accounts, and Group Policy including preferences.

The hybrid domain is where Azure shows up: Windows Admin Center on-premises and in the portal, PowerShell remoting including the double-hop problem and Just Enough Administration, SSH, Azure Arc enabled instances, device configuration through Arc, VM extensions on non-Azure machines, Azure Update Manager, and Automation runbooks.

Virtualization covers Hyper-V properly: Enhanced Session Mode, PowerShell Direct and SSH Direct for Linux guests, nested virtualization, memory settings, integration services, device assignment, GPU partitioning, checkpoints and high availability.

The trap for AZ-800 and AZ-801 candidates

Here is the thing worth planning around. AD DS plus monitoring and troubleshooting together account for 35 to 45 percent of AZ-802. People coming off the old two-exam path tend to have spent their revision heavily on hybrid Azure integration, because that was the flavor of how AZ-800 and AZ-801 were split.

On AZ-802, Active Directory fundamentals and the ability to actually diagnose a broken server carry more weight than Azure Arc does. Monitoring and troubleshooting alone is 15 to 20 percent, the same as storage and more than virtualization, and it is consistently the domain candidates under-prepare because it is the hardest thing to revise from a book. You learn it by having fixed things.

If your day job does not put you in front of enough broken servers to build that instinct, the next best thing is to drill the diagnostic reasoning deliberately. The habits transfer from production monitoring, too: engineers who already run checks against their servers, APIs and ports every 30 seconds tend to walk into the troubleshooting questions with the right mental model, because they have spent real time reading signals and deciding what they mean.

No, this is not an AI exam

AZ-802 was announced alongside SC-500, AI-200, AI-103, AI-300 and AI-901, all part of Microsoft's Cloud and AI rebrand. Every other exam in that wave was rebuilt around Microsoft Foundry, agents and generative AI. It is reasonable to assume AZ-802 got the same treatment. It did not.

The words "agent," "Foundry," "generative AI," "machine learning" and "Copilot" each appear zero times in AZ-802's official skills outline. Five zeros. It is a straight Windows Server administration exam that got swept into the same announcement because the timing lined up. Do not let the surrounding noise convince you that you need to learn Foundry to pass a Windows Server exam. Your revision hours belong on FSMO roles, replication topology, trusts, and reading an event log.

Everything else retiring in the same wave

Windows Server admins get the easiest deal on this table by a distance. Everyone else has to learn a new role. You just have to take one exam instead of two.

How to prepare while it is still in beta

No official assessment exists and none is coming until AZ-802 leaves beta. Microsoft publishes no question count and no pass rate for it, or for any exam, so ignore anyone who quotes you one. The pass mark is 700 out of 1000, stated on the certification page, and because it is a scaled score it may not equal 70 percent of the points.

What you can do is generate practice questions from the published outline and your own environment: Microsoft's Windows Server documentation, your AD design docs, your build and recovery runbooks. Feeding your own runbooks in has a second benefit, which is that it quietly audits them. You can build a question bank from your own server documentation in a couple of minutes.

The AZ-802 practice test generator covers all seven domains with the current weights. Most Windows Server admins pair the certification with cloud administration, which is AZ-104, and if you are working up from scratch, AZ-900 is the fundamentals exam that is not retiring. The other beta exam in this wave is SC-500, which replaces AZ-500 on the security side and has exactly the same not-scored-on-the-day catch.