GitHub Certification Path 2026: All Six Exams and Which to Take First

GitHub's certification path in 2026 has six exams, all hosted on Microsoft Learn: GH-900 GitHub Foundations, GH-200 GitHub Actions, GH-300 GitHub Copilot, GH-100 GitHub Enterprise Administrator, GH-500 GitHub Advanced Security, and the new GH-600 Developing in Agentic AI Systems, which is still in beta. Microsoft's exam pricing feed lists GitHub exams under a single GH family code at $99 in the United States. For most people the right order is Foundations first if you are new to the platform, then the exam that matches your actual job: Actions for CI/CD engineers, Copilot or Agentic AI for developers working with AI tooling, Enterprise Admin or Advanced Security for platform and security owners.

That is the short answer. The rest of this guide covers what each exam actually tests, what changed in the January 2026 rewrites, and how to decide between the two AI exams, because that is the choice most developers get wrong.

GitHub certifications list: the full 2026 lineup

Every GitHub certification is earned by passing one exam, and every study guide is published on Microsoft Learn. Here is the complete list as of July 2026.

Two housekeeping facts that apply across the whole family. First, pricing: Microsoft's published pricing feed carries one GH family code at $99 US rather than per-exam entries, so treat any site quoting different per-exam figures with care and confirm at registration. Second, neither GitHub nor Microsoft publishes question counts or pass rates for these exams, so any specific numbers you see on prep sites are guesses.

Which GitHub certification is best?

Best is the one that matches work you already do or a role you are actively moving toward. A certification confirms skills to someone who cannot watch you work; it lands hardest when the exam content overlaps your daily responsibilities.

• You are new to GitHub or non-technical: GH-900 Foundations. It is the only exam in the family that requires no coding, and it has an official Microsoft practice assessment to calibrate against.
• You own pipelines: GH-200 Actions. It is the most job-shaped exam in the family; the enterprise governance and supply-chain security domains map onto what senior CI/CD work actually involves.
• Your team is adopting Copilot: GH-300. Half of that exam is governance, data flow and content exclusions, which is exactly what the security team will ask about during a rollout.
• You run AI coding agents on real work: GH-600 Agentic AI. It is brand new and still in beta, which is precisely why it is interesting; more on that below.
• You administer the platform or own AppSec: GH-100 or GH-500 respectively; both changed significantly in July 2026 per their official change logs, so use current prep only. Start with the GitHub Administration certification practice test or the GitHub Advanced Security certification practice test. These are narrower audiences, but for those roles they are the most direct signal on the list.

One more angle worth naming: certifications are increasingly parsed by machines before a human ever reads your resume. Recruiters lean on AI screening tools that source and rank candidates by matching skills and credentials against the role, and an exact-match certification is the kind of unambiguous signal those systems reward.

The right order: a practical GitHub certification roadmap

Step 1: GH-900 Foundations, unless you can already pass it. Skim the seven-domain outline; if you can define Enterprise Managed Users, explain github.dev versus Codespaces and describe branch protection rules without looking anything up, skip straight to step 2. Otherwise start here. Fair warning about old prep: the official change log says GH-900 changed significantly in January 2026, adding Copilot agents, Agent Mode and passkeys to the outline, so pre-2026 courses miss real material. The GitHub Foundations practice test generator builds current drills from your own notes.

Step 2: the exam that matches your job. For most engineers that is GH-200 Actions, which also changed significantly in January 2026: the current outline names immutable actions, OIDC federation, SHA pinning and SLSA artifact attestations. Practice against the current blueprint with the GitHub Actions certification practice exam generator rather than a bank written for the old outline.

Step 3: an AI exam, chosen deliberately. GH-300 Copilot examines how to use and govern AI pair programming. GH-600 Agentic AI examines how to operate autonomous agents: MCP servers, memory and context drift, multi-agent orchestration, guardrails. They overlap far less than their names suggest. If you mostly accept suggestions and chat in the IDE, take GH-300; if you assign work to agents that open branches and pull requests on their own, take GH-600.

Is the beta GH-600 worth taking now?

GH-600 is the newest entry on the path and the official certification page still labels it beta as of July 2026, which means delayed scoring and no official practice assessment. The upside of sitting a beta is real, though: the credential lands on your resume before the market saturates, and beta seats for Microsoft-hosted exams are often discounted. The exam's outline is startlingly focused; the word agent appears 71 times in roughly 850 words of skills text. If agentic development is already your work, the vocabulary gap is small and the timing edge is large.

How to prepare for any exam on this path

The January 2026 rewrites made freshness the deciding factor in prep quality. The method that survives outline changes: work from the current study guide itself, plus your own notes, and drill generated questions weighted to the real domains. Upload whatever you are studying to the certification exam generator and it writes exam-style questions with an answer key from your material, so a January rewrite never invalidates your question set the way it invalidates a static bank. Then, for the two exams that have one (GH-900 and GH-200), finish with the official Microsoft practice assessment as your final calibration.

Frequently asked questions

How much do GitHub certifications cost?

Microsoft's published exam pricing feed lists GitHub certification exams under a single GH family code at $99 in the United States, without per-exam entries. Confirm the exact fee at registration, especially for the beta GH-600, since beta seats are often discounted.

Do GitHub certifications expire?

GitHub's certification program does not print a hard expiry on the study guides the way some vendors do, but the exams themselves get rewritten: three of the six changed significantly in January 2026 alone. Treat the credential as current for roughly as long as the outline it tested stays current.

Are GitHub certifications recognized?

They are newer than the big cloud certs and carry less brand weight in generic resume screens. Where they land hard is specificity: a GH-200 on a platform engineer's resume, or a GH-500 on an AppSec resume, is an exact-match signal for the actual job. Recognition is growing fastest for the AI pair: GH-300 and GH-600 are currently the only vendor exams examining AI-assisted and agentic development governance at all.

Which GitHub certification should I get first?

GH-900 Foundations if you are new to the platform; otherwise skip it and take the exam closest to your job. There are no formal prerequisites anywhere on the path, so nothing stops you from going straight to GH-200 or GH-600 if that is where your experience already is.

If your toolchain spans both ecosystems, the Microsoft side has its own ladder that intersects this one: the Azure DevOps certification path runs from AZ-104 up to AZ-400, an exam whose study guide mentions GitHub 23 times and overlaps GH-200 heavily on Actions, runners and OIDC.