CompTIA A+ practice test, CompTIA A+ practice exam and A+ certification practice questions for Core 1 and Core 2

CompTIA publishes the format openly, and it is worth reading before you buy any study material. Each core exam gives you a maximum of 90 questions and 90 minutes. The word maximum matters: the item count varies slightly between forms, so plan for the full 90 and treat a shorter form as a bonus rather than something to count on. The questions are a mix of standard multiple choice, multiple response, drag and drop, and performance-based simulations that ask you to configure or fix something in a simulated environment rather than pick the right sentence about it. Core 1 is the hardware and infrastructure half: mobile devices, networking, hardware, virtualization and cloud computing, and hardware and network troubleshooting. Core 2 is the software and process half: operating systems, security, software troubleshooting, and operational procedures. You can sit them in either order, and you can pass one and fail the other, in which case only the failed one needs a retake.

Core 1 passes at 675 and Core 2 passes at 700, both on a scale that runs from 100 to 900. Two things follow from that and most study sites get both of them wrong. First, the two exams are not equally forgiving, so a score that comfortably clears Core 1 would fail Core 2. Second, and more important, a scaled score is not a percentage. The scale starts at 100, not at zero, so 675 out of 900 is not 75% of anything. If you insist on treating the scale as linear from its floor, 675 sits at roughly 72% of the range and 700 at roughly 75%, but even that is a rough guide rather than a conversion, because scaled scores are equated across forms so that a slightly harder set of questions needs slightly fewer raw points. CompTIA has never published the raw-to-scaled conversion for A+, and nobody outside their psychometrics team has it. When you see a site state confidently that you need to answer 68 of 90 questions correctly, that number was reverse engineered from an assumption, not from CompTIA.

There is no fixed answer, and the reason is performance-based questions. PBQs are not worth the same as multiple-choice items, and CompTIA does not tell you what any individual item is worth or even how many PBQs your particular form contains. Two candidates can answer the same number of questions correctly and walk out with different scaled scores because one of them got the PBQs right and the other guessed on them. That is why the honest planning target is a margin rather than a threshold. Aim to be consistently correct on roughly 85% of your practice questions before you book, which leaves room for exam-day nerves, unfamiliar phrasing, and the PBQs that always feel harder under a clock than they do at your desk. Chasing an exact miss count is a waste of energy; building enough surplus that the exact count stops mattering is not.

PBQs usually appear first, they are the slowest items on the exam, and they are the single most common reason candidates run out of time. A typical Core 1 PBQ drops you into a simulated console or a network diagram and asks you to configure the right setting; a Core 2 PBQ might hand you a command prompt or a permissions dialog. Most free question banks cannot simulate any of that, so they quietly skip it, and you arrive on exam day having practiced only the part of the exam that is easiest. Two habits close the gap. Flag and skip any PBQ that is not moving after two minutes, finish every multiple-choice item, then come back with whatever time is left, because a PBQ you never reach scores exactly zero and so does one you spend eleven minutes failing. And when you practice a troubleshooting question, force yourself to name the step you would take first and why, rather than jumping to the answer, because ordering the methodology is what Core 1 is really scoring.

The failure mode is memorising a fixed bank. Work through a 90 question set three times and your score climbs beautifully, but what improved is your recall of those specific items, not your ability to reason about a variant you have never seen. The exam will not reuse them. Question banks are copyrighted and CompTIA aggressively pursues sites that reproduce live items, so anything advertising real exam questions is either fabricated or stolen, and in the second case using it can get your certification revoked under the candidate agreement. What actually transfers is volume plus explanation: a large enough supply of fresh questions that you cannot memorise your way through, and a written reason for every option so you learn why the three distractors are wrong rather than just which letter was right. Two more rules worth keeping. Time yourself at 90 minutes from the start rather than at the end, because pacing is a trained skill. And track your accuracy per domain, not overall, since an 82% average can easily hide a 55% in troubleshooting, which is the domain that carries the most points on Core 1.

CompTIA moved A+ to V15 and retired the V14 exams, 220-1101 and 220-1102, on September 25, 2025. The current codes are 220-1201 for Core 1 and 220-1202 for Core 2. This matters more than a version number normally would, because a large amount of the free A+ material still circulating online was written for V14 and has never been revised. If a practice test, a video course or a cheat sheet lists 220-1101 anywhere, it is at minimum a year out of date. Two practical consequences. If you passed one V14 core before the retirement date, check your CompTIA account for how long you have to complete the other one rather than assuming, because pairing rules across a version change are time limited. And if you are buying anything, look for the exam code rather than the marketing copy, since plenty of sellers updated the product page banner without updating the questions underneath it.

Three numbers you will see quoted with total confidence do not come from CompTIA. There is no published A+ pass rate. CompTIA releases pass rates for nothing in its portfolio, so every percentage you have read, whether it is the cheerful 85% or the scary 60%, is a training vendor estimate or an outright guess. There is no published raw-to-scaled conversion, so nobody legitimately knows how many questions equal 675. And there is no published PBQ count per form. What CompTIA does publish, and what is therefore worth building a study plan on, is the objectives document for each core, the domain weightings, the item maximum, the time limit and the cut scores. Anything beyond that list is somebody modelling, and it is worth knowing which is which before you let a number change your study plan.

A single A+ exam voucher is $274 from CompTIA at US list price, and because the certification requires both cores, the minimum realistic exam spend is $548. A voucher bundled with retake assurance is $359 per exam, which is worth arithmetic rather than instinct: it costs $85 more than a bare voucher and saves $274 if you fail, so it pays off if you rate your chance of failing that core at better than about one in three. Retakes are full price every time. CompTIA offers no free retests and no retake discounts, and while there is no waiting period between your first and second attempt, a third attempt and every attempt after it requires a wait of at least 14 calendar days from your last one. There is no cap on the number of attempts. Bundles that add CompTIA study material run from $388 for practice plus exam with retake up to $633 for the Core 1 complete bundle and $688 for Core 2. Those are optional; the voucher is the only part you cannot avoid.

A+ is valid for three years from the date you pass your second core exam, and it renews through CompTIA's continuing education program. A+ needs 20 CEUs across the three-year cycle plus a total CE fee of $75, which is the cheapest renewal in the CompTIA lineup and a quarter of what Network+ or Security+ ask. It is worth knowing the alternative routes before you start collecting CEUs one webinar at a time. Passing a higher-level CompTIA certification renews A+ automatically along with everything below it, at no extra fee, so someone who goes on to Network+ or Security+ never pays the A+ renewal separately. Passing the latest version of the A+ exams also resets the clock. CE tokens cost $25 and $50, do not expire, and can be bought ahead of the deadline if you would rather pay than chase activities in your last month.