The CCIE exam cost is $400 for the qualifying core exam plus $1,600 or $1,900 for each lab attempt. So the cheapest possible route to the letters after your name is about $2,000.
Almost nobody pays $2,000.
Here’s the deal. Cisco publishes two different lab prices and most guides only quote the lower one. There’s a $500 fee that shows up the moment you move your exam date. There’s a rule that takes your whole payment if you sleep through your alarm. And the money you spend on practice, flights and hotels usually beats the exam fees themselves.
This is every fee Cisco charges in 2026, pulled from Cisco’s own pages on 2026-08-24, plus honest estimates for the parts Cisco doesn’t sell you.
One thing decides which end of that range you land on: how many times you sit the lab.
Pass first time and you’re near $2,400 all in. Three attempts with the travel and the reschedule fees stacked on top and you’re at $14,500. Same certification, same syllabus, six times the money.
So here’s the number that should shape your budget. Our live CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure programme is $1,259, which is less than one failed lab attempt. Sixteen weeks, unlimited lab access, lifetime access to the material, and you can pay in full or by deposit.
How much does the CCIE exam cost?
| What you pay for | Cost per attempt |
|---|---|
| Qualifying core exam | US$400 |
| CCIE lab exam at a Cisco testing facility | US$1,600 |
| CCIE lab exam at a mobile lab, BYOD option | US$1,600 |
| CCIE lab exam at a mobile lab, using the Cisco kit | US$1,900 |
| Rescheduling a booked lab exam | US$500, non-refundable |
Add it up for a first-time pass at a Cisco facility and you’re at $2,000. Pick the wrong lab venue and it’s $2,300 before you’ve booked a flight.
For scale, the CCNA exam costs $300 and that’s one 120-minute sitting with no travel attached. Expert level is a different order of magnitude, and most of the gap isn’t the exam fee.
Both figures come straight from Cisco’s expert certifications exams page. Taxes aren’t included in either.
Realistically, most candidates who pass end up somewhere between $4K and $9K all in. We’ll break down exactly how you get there.
Cisco’s official CCIE exam fees, line by line
The qualifying core exam: $400
Every CCIE track starts with a core exam. It’s 120 minutes, pass/fail, and you get your result online within 48 hours. Cost is US$400, or you can pay with Cisco Learning Credits.
The core can be taken online from home or the office. No travel needed.
Two things about this $400 that most cost guides skip. It’s the same core exam the CCNP uses, so one sitting counts toward both certifications. And passing it earns you a Specialist certification on its own. Pass 350-901 AUTOCOR and you’re a Cisco Certified Automation Specialist that day, whether or not you ever sit the lab.
That’s real value for $400. Worth knowing before you decide the money is wasted if the lab goes badly.
Which core exam you sit depends on your track:
| Track | Core exam | Core cost |
|---|---|---|
| CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure | 350-401 ENCOR | $400 |
| CCIE Security | 350-701 SCOR | $400 |
| CCIE Data Center | 350-601 DCCOR | $400 |
| CCIE Automation | 350-901 AUTOCOR | $400 |
If you’re still deciding between professional and expert level, our breakdown of CCIE against CCNP covers what the shared core actually means for your study plan. Starting further back than that? The network engineer roadmap lays out the 18-month version, and CCNA against CCNP covers the rung below this one.
The CCIE lab exam: $1,600 or $1,900, and which one you’ll pay
Eight hours. In person. Per attempt.
This is where the published advice goes wrong. Search “ccie exam cost” and the AI answer at the top of Google says $1,600. So does the Reddit thread. So does the blog post from 2019 that somehow still ranks. Cisco’s own track pages say $1,600 too.
But Cisco’s expert certifications page lists two prices, and the difference is the venue:
- $1,600 at a Cisco testing facility, or at a mobile lab location where you bring your own device
- $1,900 at a mobile lab location using the Cisco kit option
Same exam. Same eight hours. Three hundred dollars apart.
Mobile labs are how Cisco reaches candidates who aren’t near one of its permanent facilities, which for most of the world is the realistic option. So the $1,900 tier isn’t some edge case. It’s what a lot of people actually pay, and they find out at checkout.
Check the venue type in the Cisco Expert Level Certifications Tracker before you commit. Not after.
The cheapest lever on this whole page is passing the first time.
A second attempt is another $1,600 to $1,900 plus another trip, which costs more than the training would have. Our live CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure course runs with unlimited lab access and one-to-one mentorship, so you rehearse the eight hours before you pay for them. At $1,259 it costs less than the retake it’s built to prevent.
Taxes and currency: why your invoice won’t match this page
Cisco’s fees are quoted in US dollars and exclude local taxes. Cisco says outright that costs may vary due to exchange rates and local taxes, and that any fee your bank charges to process the payment is yours to cover.
Prices can also change without notice. They already did this year.
You can book a lab exam up to six months ahead, and payment has to clear in full before the booking is confirmed. No payment, no seat.
What changed in 2026: lab exam vouchers are gone
If you’ve read an older guide telling you to hunt for a discounted CCIE lab voucher, that route closed.
Cisco stopped selling expert-level lab exam vouchers on 2026-02-04. Vouchers you already hold stay valid until they expire, but they can’t be extended and they can’t be transferred to someone else.
From the same date, Cisco Learning Credits became a valid way to pay for lab exams. Here’s how CLCs work in practice:
- One CLC equals US$100, and your total gets rounded up to the nearest $100
- CLCs and credit cards can’t be combined in a single transaction
- CLC payment has to be completed at least 10 calendar days before your exam
- A three-day approval window with your Team Captain applies, and your appointment sits on hold during it
- No approval in three days means the appointment gets dropped
- Expired CLCs can’t be redeemed or extended
So the discount hunt is over, but a new door opened. If your employer holds a CLC pool, your lab exam can come out of a budget that already exists. That’s a conversation worth having with your manager before you pay $1,900 on a personal credit card.
Honestly, this is the single most out-of-date thing in the published CCIE cost advice right now. Every “how to save money on your CCIE” article still recommends a voucher you can’t buy.
The CCIE costs nobody quotes you
Four rules in Cisco’s exam policy that each carry a real price tag. None of them appear in the top results for this question.
Rescheduling costs $500, and you can’t do it inside three days
Need to move your date or your location? That’s a reschedule, and it costs US$500 plus local taxes. Non-refundable.
You also can’t reschedule within three calendar days of the exam. And you can’t change track at all, ever.
The mechanics differ by how you paid:
| Paid with | What happens when you reschedule |
|---|---|
| Credit card | Original fee and taxes refunded, new fee plus taxes plus the $500 charged immediately. Payment fails, reschedule fails |
| CLCs | Original CLCs return to your pool, new booking held three days for Team Captain approval. No approval means the booking drops and you’re blocked from future bookings until you pay the $500 by card |
| Voucher | Voucher moves to the new exam. The $500 and taxes must be paid with CLCs, subject to approval |
That last row is the nasty one. A blocked account until dues are cleared is not a situation you want three weeks before a lab date.
Every fee on this list disappears if the first booking is the only booking.
That’s the real argument for structured training, and it’s a money argument rather than a comfort one. CCIE Security and CCIE Data Center both run live with a working engineer teaching them, and every class gets its own group with the instructor in it. Ask a question at 2am and a person answers.
Cancel or don’t show up and you lose the whole fee
Cancel your exam and all payments are forfeited. Cisco doesn’t do refunds on lab exams. Invoices can’t even be modified once issued.
Don’t turn up and it’s worse. You forfeit the full payment and you can’t schedule another lab exam for 30 days.
There’s a version of this that catches international candidates specifically. If you need a visa, Cisco recommends applying 10 to 12 weeks before your exam date. If the visa doesn’t come through in time, the cancellation policy still applies. Payment made, invoice generated, money gone, and you reschedule from scratch.
Cisco will give you a visa invitation letter. That’s the extent of the help.
Failing the lab: the 30-day wait and what attempt two really costs
Fail an expert-level lab and you wait 30 calendar days, starting the day after, before you can schedule the same exam again.
Then you pay the full fee again. $1,600 or $1,900, per attempt, every time.
Fail a written exam and the wait is only five calendar days.
You’ll see community figures floating around for repeat failures: 90 days after a second fail, 180 days after five. Treat those as unconfirmed. Cisco’s published policy states the 30-day rule and says there’s no limit on lab attempts inside your three-year window, which brings us to the clock most people forget about.
The three-year clock on your core exam pass
Your core exam pass is good for three years.
Inside that window you can sit the lab as many times as you want. Let the three years run out without passing the lab and you go back to the start: pay the $400 again, sit the core again, then keep going.
So the core exam isn’t a one-time cost for everyone. For anyone whose lab attempts stretch past year three, it’s a recurring one. Our CCIE roadmap from zero to lab maps out how to time the core so you’re not burning that window on study you haven’t finished.
Practice and prep you buy straight from Cisco
Cisco sells practice environments directly, and the prices are public. This is another gap in the ranking results, where nobody lists them at all.
| Cisco prep option | Cost |
|---|---|
| Graded Labs | US$1,000 or 10 CLCs |
| CCIE Practice Labs | US$50 per 4-hour slot |
| Cisco Expert Prep Program | Free |
Graded Labs are advanced virtual environments that mirror the real thing and give you automated grading with feedback. Practice Labs give you a topology similar to your exam, in four-hour blocks.
The depth is the part people underestimate. Our CCIE-level BGP guide is a fair sample of how far a single protocol runs at this level, and the lab expects that on several at once.
Do the maths on that second one. Forty hours of practice lab time is $500. A hundred hours is $1,250. And 100 hours isn’t a lot of practice for an eight-hour expert lab.
The Expert Prep Program costs nothing and includes learning matrixes, training videos and community access. Take it. There’s no reason not to.
The cheaper long-term route is building your own lab. Rack rentals and Cisco kit add up fast, but virtual labs don’t. Our sister site covers how to build a home lab in a weekend and what Cisco Modeling Labs actually costs if you’d rather own your practice environment than rent it by the hour.
Travel, lodging, and why your postcode changes the price
The lab is in person. There’s no remote option.
Cisco runs permanent lab facilities at a handful of locations worldwide, plus mobile lab dates that rotate through other cities. If neither is near you, the exam fee is the smaller half of your bill.
Budget roughly $800 to $1,500 per attempt for flights, a hotel and the day either side. That’s an estimate, not a Cisco figure, and it swings hard depending on where you live. Someone in Toronto flying to a US facility is at the low end. Someone flying across an ocean and needing a visa appointment is well past the high end.
Book the travel after your lab date is confirmed and paid. Not before. Cheap non-refundable flights stop being cheap when Cisco’s three-day reschedule cutoff meets a passport delay.
Is CCIE Security more expensive than CCIE Enterprise?
No. And that surprises people.
Cisco’s fee language is deliberately track-agnostic. The expert page says the fee applies to “any expert-level lab or practical exam.” Every track pays $400 for its core and $1,600 or $1,900 for its lab, whether that’s Enterprise Infrastructure, Security, Data Center, Automation, Service Provider or Collaboration.
What changes between tracks is everything around the exam:
| Track | Core exam | What drives your prep cost | Our training |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise Infrastructure | 350-401 ENCOR | Broadest blueprint, heaviest lab hours | CCIE Enterprise |
| Security | 350-701 SCOR | Multiple product platforms to license and practise on | CCIE Security |
| Data Center | 350-601 DCCOR | Hardest track to lab at home, kit is expensive | CCIE Data Center |
| Automation | 350-901 AUTOCOR | Cheapest to practise, most of it runs in software | CCIE Automation |
Security is the track people ask about most, and what CCIE Security engineers actually earn is usually the reason.
So if you’re choosing a track partly on cost, the exam fees won’t help you decide. The practice environment will. Automation is genuinely the cheapest expert track to prepare for, because your lab is a laptop and some virtual devices rather than a rack of switches.
Picked your track? Enrol and start with the next cohort.
We teach all four: CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure, CCIE Security, CCIE Data Center and CCIE Automation. All four run live, with unlimited lab time and mentorship included rather than sold separately. Classes run to a fixed calendar, so the enrolment date decides when you sit the lab.
What does a CCIE cost end to end? Three honest budgets
Cisco fees are facts. Everything marked as an estimate below is an estimate, and your numbers will differ.
| Line item | Lean | Realistic | Worst case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core exam | $400 | $400 | $400 |
| Lab attempts | 1 x $1,600 | 2 x $1,600 | 3 x $1,900 |
| Reschedule fees | $0 | $500 | $1,000 |
| Cisco practice labs | $250 (5 slots) | $1,000 (20 slots) | $1,000 + $1,000 Graded Labs |
| Books and video | $150 (est.) | $300 (est.) | $400 (est.) |
| Training | $0, self-study | Instructor-led | Bootcamp |
| Travel and lodging | $0, local facility | $1,600 (est., 2 trips) | $4,000 (est., 3 trips) |
| Total, excluding training | $2,400 | $7,000 | $14,500 |
The lean column assumes you live near a Cisco facility, pass first time, and study on your own. Some people do this. Not many.
The realistic column is what a working engineer with a full-time job and a second attempt actually spends. The worst case is what happens when three attempts, two reschedules and long-haul flights stack up.
That top-of-Google AI answer saying $10K to $15K? It’s describing the worst-case column and presenting it as the norm. It isn’t the norm. But it’s not fiction either.
CCIE exam cost outside the US
Cisco bills in US dollars wherever you sit the exam, then local taxes get added on top. So there’s no separate India price or Canada price, just a conversion and a tax line.
At mid-market rates around 2026-08-24, the core exam and one lab attempt at $2,000 works out roughly to:
| Currency | Approximate total for core + one lab |
|---|---|
| Indian rupees | About ₹1.75 lakh |
| Canadian dollars | About CAD $2,750 |
| Pounds sterling | About £1,550 |
| UAE dirhams | About AED 7,350 |
Check the rate on the day you pay, because these move. And remember your card issuer’s foreign transaction fee is on top of all of it.
Does the CCIE pay for itself?
Run your own arithmetic rather than trusting anyone’s headline number.
Take the realistic budget of about $7,000. If the certification moves your salary up by $15K a year, you’re square inside six months and ahead of it after that. If it moves you up by $5K, the payback runs closer to 18 months and the case rests on the roles it unlocks rather than the raise itself.
Our CCIE salary guide for 2026 has the actual earning figures by track and region. Pull your number from there, drop it into the calculation above, and you’ll have a real answer for yourself instead of a generic one.
One thing the maths misses. A CCIE is usually the thing that gets you into the room for principal and architect roles, and those jobs pay on a different scale entirely. That effect doesn’t show up in a payback period.
For the market view rather than the individual one, which certs Canadian employers actually ask for and the five Cisco certifications that move salaries most both show where the demand actually sits.
How to cut your CCIE cost without cutting corners
Nine things that actually save money. No dumps, no shortcuts.
- Pick the BYOD option at a mobile lab and you pay $1,600 instead of $1,900. Same exam, $300 back.
- Bank the CCNP on your way through. The core exam is shared, so one $400 sitting counts toward both certifications plus a Specialist cert.
- Ask about your employer’s CLC pool. Since 2026-02-04, Learning Credits pay for lab exams. That’s a budget that might already exist.
- Take the free Expert Prep Program. Learning matrixes and training videos at no cost.
- Buy practice lab slots close to your attempt date. They’re $50 for four hours. Buying 20 slots six months early is money spent on rust.
- Build a virtual lab instead of renting racks by the hour. The upfront effort pays back within a few weeks of study.
- Don’t book travel until your lab date is paid and confirmed. The three-day reschedule cutoff plus the $500 fee makes early flights a gamble.
- Watch your three-year core window. Letting it lapse costs $400 and a re-sit for nothing.
- Pass the first time. It’s the only discount that’s actually worth anything, and it’s worth $1,600 to $1,900 plus a trip.
That last one is where training earns its keep. A second attempt costs more than most instructor-led programmes, which changes how you should think about the price of preparation.
Our CCIE courses run live, not pre-recorded, and every class gets its own group with the instructor in it. When you’re stuck at 2am on a lab topology, you can ask a person. That’s the difference between a video library and someone who stays with you until you’ve passed.
The training costs less than the retake it prevents. That’s the whole business case.
CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure is $1,259 for 16 weeks of live instruction, unlimited labs and lifetime access to the material. One failed lab attempt is $1,600 to $1,900 before you’ve booked the flight.
Enrol in CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure, or pick another track: CCIE Security, CCIE Data Center, CCIE Automation.
Where to go next
Costing this out is one decision. These are the others.
- Not sure expert level is the right target yet? CCIE against CCNP compares the two on time, money and what employers do with each.
- Want the route mapped? CCIE career path from zero to lab sequences the core, the practice hours and the lab booking.
- Need the earnings side? The CCIE salary guide has figures by track and region, which is what turns this page’s totals into a payback number.
- Pricing the whole Cisco ladder? CCNA exam cost and the CCNA certification guide cover the entry rung.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the CCIE exam cost in total? The CCIE exam costs $400 for the qualifying core exam plus $1,600 or $1,900 for each lab attempt, depending on the venue. Minimum total for a first-time pass is about $2,000, excluding taxes, travel and prep. Most candidates who pass spend $4K to $9K all in.
What happens if you fail the CCIE lab exam? You wait 30 calendar days from the day after your attempt before you can schedule the same lab again, and you pay the full fee for every attempt. There’s no cap on attempts inside the three-year window your core exam pass gives you.
Is there a fee to reschedule a CCIE lab exam? Yes. Rescheduling costs US$500 plus local taxes and it’s non-refundable. You can’t reschedule within three calendar days of the exam, and you can’t change track at all.
Can I still buy a CCIE lab exam voucher? No. Cisco ended sales of expert-level lab exam vouchers on 2026-02-04. Vouchers bought before that date stay valid until they expire but can’t be extended or transferred. Cisco Learning Credits are now the alternative to paying by card.
How much does the CCIE written exam cost? The qualifying core exam costs US$400 per attempt and takes 120 minutes. Your pass is valid for three years, and it’s the same core exam used by the CCNP at the same level.
Is the CCIE worth the cost in 2026? It depends on your salary jump and your target roles. At a realistic total of around $7,000, a $15K raise pays it back in six months. The bigger return is usually access to principal and architect roles rather than the raise itself.
