Is PL-900 Retired? No, but It Was Rewritten on July 24, 2026

No. PL-900 is not retired. Microsoft's fundamentals retirement announcement named three exams: MS-900 (retired March 31, 2026), MB-910 and MB-920 (both retired December 31, 2025). PL-900, Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals, appears nowhere in that announcement. It is alive, it costs $99 in the United States (confirmed in Microsoft's published pricing feed), and you can book it today. What did happen to PL-900 is a rewrite deep enough that people keep mistaking it for a retirement: on July 24, 2026, Microsoft removed the entire Power Pages domain and added a brand-new Copilot Studio agents domain worth 20 to 25 percent of the exam.

The confusion is understandable. Microsoft retired or replaced a long list of exams across 2025 and 2026, and the fundamentals tier was hit directly. If you searched for this article because a course or a forum post made you nervous, here is the actual status of every fundamentals exam.

Which Microsoft fundamentals exams are retired, and which survived

So the fundamentals tier now has five live exams, and PL-900 is one of them. The full story of the retirements, including why AB-900 is the de facto MS-900 replacement even though Microsoft never printed those words, is in our companion piece Is MS-900 retired?

What actually changed on PL-900 on July 24, 2026

Microsoft publishes a change log on every study guide, and PL-900's July 2026 change log is one of the most drastic we have seen for a surviving exam. Three structural changes, straight from that log:

The weights shifted too: the business-value domain shrank, while environment management and Power Automate both grew. The refreshed outline names the word agent 14 times. Power BI, which older versions of PL-900 covered as a full domain, now appears zero times; that material lives entirely in PL-300, the Power BI Data Analyst exam.

Why the agent obsession? Because Microsoft repositioned the whole low-code stack around Copilot Studio. The pitch used to be that business users could build an app without a developer. The pitch now is that business users can build an agent that handles the work itself, the same shift playing out across business software generally, where chores like routing every ticket, lead and request to the right person are moving from manual queues to automated systems. The exam followed the product strategy.

Does your exam date fall before or after July 24, 2026?

This is the question that decides what you should study, and almost no prep site states it plainly.

If you sit PL-900 before July 24, 2026: you get the old outline. Power Pages is still on your exam. The build objectives are still on your exam. There is no Copilot Studio agents domain. Older prep material actually matches your exam better than the new study guide does.

If you sit PL-900 on July 24, 2026 or later: the new outline applies. Any time you spend on Power Pages is wasted, and roughly a fifth of your paper covers Copilot Studio agents, a topic most question banks, video courses and books have not caught up with. This gap is temporary, but as of mid-2026 it is real: material published before the refresh teaches a deleted domain and misses a new one.

How to prepare for the rewritten PL-900

The rewritten exam is still a genuine fundamentals exam. The word describe appears about 50 times in the outline, so PL-900 tests recognition, use cases and boundaries, not hands-on configuration. That is worth appreciating, because the new AB-900 went the other way: its outline does not contain the word describe at all and reads like an administration exam wearing a fundamentals badge.

Concretely, four study priorities for the current outline:

1. Copilot Studio agents first. It is the one domain your existing materials probably lack, and it is worth up to a quarter of the paper. Know what agents are, how topics, knowledge sources and actions fit together, and how agents are published and monitored.

2. Dataverse and governance vocabulary. The environment-management domain grew in the refresh. Tables, columns, relationships, business rules, environments, security roles and data loss prevention policies are reliable question territory, especially for makers who have never opened an admin center.

3. Product boundaries. Canvas versus model-driven apps, when a flow beats an app, and what now belongs to Copilot Studio. Describe-level exams live on "which product fits this scenario" questions.

4. Drill from current material. If your notes or course have a Power Pages chapter and no Copilot Studio chapter, they predate the rewrite. Upload the current study guide or your own updated notes to the PL-900 practice test generator and it will write unlimited exam-style questions with an answer key, weighted to the five real domains including the new one.

The honest fine print

Microsoft publishes no question count for PL-900 and no pass rate for any of its exams; its general guidance is that most exams contain 40 to 60 questions. The passing score is 700 on a scale of 1 to 1000, and Microsoft notes a scaled score may not equal 70 percent of the points. The $99 US fee is confirmed because PL-900 is listed in Microsoft's per-exam pricing feed, which is not true of every current exam.

If you are choosing between the surviving fundamentals exams rather than committed to PL-900, the split is simple: AZ-900 for cloud infrastructure careers, PL-900 for business apps and automation, AB-900 for Microsoft 365 and Copilot administration. All three can be drilled the same way: upload your notes to the certification exam generator and practice from questions built on what you actually studied.