Q4 index is live. A US figure for every cert, $70,000 to $221,069. Here’s where you sit and what to add next.
October 03, 2026
Your certifications have a price now. Here’s how to use it.
The Q4 CertBueno Top 100 IT Certifications went live on Thursday. A US figure for each of the 100 highest-paying IT certifications in the world, a verdict on each, every line re-checked, and the whole thing sorted by pay for the first time. Twenty-six of the figures are new. The findings are further down. I want to start with what you can actually do with it, because that’s the bit people skip.
Think about the last time pay came up at work. You had a rough idea what your certifications were worth, probably from a recruiter or a colleague who’d just moved. Your manager had a different idea, mostly shaped by what the team already costs. HR had a band. None of those were the same number and none of them came with a source. So the conversation ran on whoever sounded most confident.
What the index gives you is a reference price. One figure per certification, US data only, with the basis stated and a date on it, from $70,000 for the CompTIA A+ at #100 up to $221,069 for the AWS Solutions Architect—Professional at #1. Walk into that same conversation with the figure for what you hold and you’re usually the only one in the room who has it.
Two examples from this quarter. PMP holders now sit at $135,000. People in the same survey without the PMP sit at $109,157. So the certification is worth $25,843 a year on its own, and that gap got wider this year. The other one is security. Security+ pays $91,350 and CISSP pays $168,060. That’s $76,710 a year between the cert that gets you the interview and the one hiring managers write into the job ad by name. If you hold the first and not the second, you now know what the second one is worth before you spend a year studying for it.
The verdicts are the forward-looking part. Most people read them as grades, and they aren’t. INVEST means the premium is holding or rising, so build on it. STABLE means it pays and the premium isn’t moving. DIVERSIFY and UPGRADE both mean your next certification matters more than the one you’ve got. Ten of them changed this quarter. Four entry-level certs went down a notch, not because employers stopped asking for them (they haven’t) but because they stopped paying extra for them. Two governance certs went up, because owning the plan and the budget is the work nobody has handed to a tool yet. The AI certifications are mid-table on today’s pay and ahead of everything on direction. Check the verdict on what you hold each quarter and you’ll see it wearing out, or appreciating, well before the job ads reflect it.
This is also why I’d ask you to be a member rather than just a reader. The checker is free and shows you where you sit before you give us anything. This note comes every Saturday. The quarterly rebalance reaches you the day it’s published. In return, every member who adds their own certifications and pay makes next quarter’s figures better, and gets us closer to the numbers no public source has: what a combination of certs pays, and how fast a credential loses value in the years after you earn it. We can’t get there without the panel.
Three things to do with it this week.
Get your number. Run the free checker on the Q4 figures. Two minutes. If you ran it last week, run it again, because 26 of the 100 figures changed and yours might be one of them.
Take it into the room. If you’re below the figure for what you hold, that’s a market adjustment conversation, not a review conversation, and most employers are still setting 2027 pay this month. Last week’s issue has the script if you need it.
Decide what’s next. If your verdict is DIVERSIFY or UPGRADE, or you’re mid-table, the question is which AI certification to add to what you already hold, and in what order. The AI Cert Stack report takes your certifications, your pay and the Q4 data and gives you that list with the expected uplift at each step. One analyst, your numbers, back within 24 hours. $179.
THIS WEEK IN THE INDEX
What moved, line by line
A note on rank first. Q4 is the first list sorted strictly by pay, so a lot of lines moved several places without their figure changing at all. We’ve tagged every move as re-sort or market so you can tell which is which.
The top didn’t get cheaper. All ten of the highest-paying certifications clear $181,316 and AWS Solutions Architect—Professional is still #1 at $221,069. That’s $151,069 a year between #1 and #100, and both of them are on a list of the 100 highest-paying IT certifications in the world.
Three figures moved on new survey data. PMP goes from $122,000 to $135,000 and climbs to #48. Salesforce Certified Technical Architect goes from $182,000 to $192,500 and takes #7. ISSMP goes the other way, $188,291 down to $173,820, and I want to be straight that this one is a correction rather than a market move. The old figure was a worldwide average. This is a US index, so it takes the US figure.
Six lines left. Five of them weren’t a certification you could actually name and hold, so they shouldn’t have been there, and the sixth was the AWS Machine Learning—Specialty, retired in March. Six came in: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Developer (#35, $152,438), PgMP (#43, $145,000), GIAC GCIH (#69, $114,000), CompTIA SecurityX (#77, $102,000), Salesforce Agentforce Specialist (#88, $90,000) and AWS Cloud Practitioner (#90, $85,866).
Ten verdicts changed. Security+, CySA+, CEH and Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer each lost somewhere between 30% and 55% of their pay premium over the two years to April. Job ads kept naming them the whole time. Each moves down one notch. CGEIT moves up to INVEST and PfMP up to STABLE on premiums that sit in the top band and are still rising. Two AI-adjacent Microsoft lines, Power BI Data Analyst Associate and the Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer line, go from INVEST to STABLE on the same premium loss, which is a useful reminder that AI in the title doesn’t mean the pay has kept up. UiPath Automation Developer goes to UPGRADE because the vendor is retiring the tier; the legacy RPA developer certifications expire October 15. AWS Advanced Networking—Specialty also moves to UPGRADE. It’s retired with no replacement, it still pays $187,630 to the people who hold it, and no one new can earn it, so holders need a next credential.
Two AWS dates to put in the calendar. Solutions Architect—Professional becomes SAP-C03 on November 17 and Developer—Associate becomes DVA-C03 on December 1, both with generative and agentic AI added. If you’re close on either one, sit the current version.
One thing to do
Run the checker on the Q4 numbers today and write the figure down somewhere you’ll find it. If you land mid-table, or your verdict is DIVERSIFY or UPGRADE, get the order of what to add next before you spend money on the wrong exam.
See you next Saturday.
@MrCertBueno
US market data. All figures USD.
The CertBueno Top 100 IT Certifications tracks the 100 highest-paying IT certifications in the world, on US data. Figures are the Q4 2026 index, published October 1, 2026. Verdicts (INVEST / UPGRADE / DIVERSIFY / STABLE) are index labels, not financial advice.
US market data. All figures USD.