Two Microsoft exam codes closed this month. CKA held.
August 29, 2026
The retirement calendar is repricing certifications faster than the salary surveys are
| ● CertBueno Weekly | Week ending 29 Aug 2026 |
| The Certification Index |
What moved
Microsoft retired PL-200 this month, the exam behind the Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate (≈$161,087, rank 30, carried-forward holder-survey basis). The INVEST rating rests on Copilot Studio demand, not on the exam code — but holders now sit between a closed exam and a successor employers have not yet learned to read.
Microsoft Security Administrator Associate (≈$100,053) moved the same way, AZ-500 giving way to SC-500 in August, in the middle of the strongest security demand story on the index.
The same retirement reaches further down the index. Our Low-Code Developer line (≈$103,567) is proxied largely by Power Platform credentials, so PL-200 closing forces a successor mapping on a category whose underlying demand is still rising. The line moves for reasons that have nothing to do with what low-code developers are paid.
AWS Certified ML Engineer Associate (≈$148,000, low-confidence estimate) meets an MLA-C02 beta in September — a revision arriving while the credential is still inheriting the retired ML Specialty’s premium.
Against that, CKA held: ≈1,600 active US postings naming the certification (Adzuna via certdemand.com, August 2026), the highest cert-named posting count anywhere in the index, at ≈$147,466. Its exam has not been restructured, and employers keep writing it into job descriptions by name.
RPA Developer (≈$97,631) has a date on it. UiPath’s UiRPA and UiARD expire in October, and the vendor has repositioned the whole category around agentic automation — a certifying body declaring its own credential tier superseded, which is rarer than it sounds and more informative than any salary print.
| INVEST | UPGRADE | DIVERSIFY | STABLE |
What it means
A salary survey reprices a credential once a year. A vendor reprices it whenever it chooses to. The market treats the survey as the signal and the exam calendar as administration, and that is the wrong way round.
Retirements are the only certification event disclosed in advance. Nobody publishes next year’s median. But Microsoft, AWS and UiPath all told the market months ago exactly which codes were closing and when. That makes the retirement calendar the cheapest leading indicator in this asset class, and almost nobody prices off it.
What a retirement destroys is not demand, it is legibility. Power Platform work is not shrinking. Security operations work is not shrinking. What shrinks is the recruiter’s ability to match the string on a résumé to the string in a job description, and that gap runs 12 to 24 months. It is a discount applied to holders for something the vendor did.
The timing is what makes it expensive. Certification pay premiums rose at their fastest rate in a decade in early 2026 (Foote Partners ITSCPI), and formal AI credentials carry an average premium of ≈8.5% of base (Foote Partners, April 2026 release). A credential losing legibility during a repricing loses the repricing, not just the recognition.
Which is the case for the credentials whose exams cannot be quietly rewritten. CKA is proctored and hands-on, and it is the certification employers name most often by name. A vendor can rename an exam. It cannot rename a four-hour practical without admitting the new one is easier. Format is a moat, and the exam maps moving this quarter are the demonstration.
One thing to do
If you hold a credential whose exam code retired this year, put both codes on your résumé — the one you passed and the one that replaced it. Screening runs on strings, and the string just changed underneath you.
| See what you’re really worth |
US market data. All figures USD.
Figures are research-sourced from the CertBueno Top 100, 2026 Q3. ≈ marks an estimate. Verdicts are index labels, not financial advice.
The CertBueno Top 100 — live index
US market data. All figures USD.