The CompTIA Security+ passing score is 750 on a scale of 100 to 900.
That’s the number. Now here’s the part that costs people their exam fee: 750 is not 83% correct. Google’s own AI summary for this question says it “roughly equals getting 83% of the questions right,” and that rounding has probably failed more candidates than any single exam topic.
The scale doesn’t start at zero. It starts at 100. So the arithmetic people do in their heads is wrong before they even sit down.
This article covers what 750 actually measures, how many questions you can realistically miss, why the exam format drains your clock in the first 20 minutes, and what to score on practice tests before you book. If you’re mapping out where Security+ sits in a full career path, our security operations course catalogue lays out the sequence.
What Is the Security+ Passing Score?
The Security+ passing score is 750 out of 900 on the SY0-701 exam. Scores run from 100 to 900. Anything below 750 is a fail, and you’ll see the result on screen before you leave the test centre.
Here’s what the official exam details look like, straight from CompTIA’s Security+ page:
| Detail | SY0-701 |
|---|---|
| Passing score | 750 |
| Score scale | 100 to 900 |
| Questions | Maximum of 90 |
| Time | 90 minutes |
| Question types | Multiple choice and performance-based |
| Exam version | V7 |
| Launched | 2023-11-07 |
Simple enough on paper. The scoring underneath it isn’t.
How Scaled Scoring Actually Works
CompTIA doesn’t publish the exact formula. The principle is public, though, and it’s standard psychometric practice.
Multiple versions of the exam exist at any time. Sit the SY0-701 on a Tuesday and you get one form. Someone sitting the same afternoon gets a different mix of questions drawn from an overlapping pool.
If your form happened to be harder than average, scoring you identically to someone who drew an easier form would be unfair. Scaled scoring corrects for that. Your raw performance gets adjusted against the measured difficulty of the specific questions you saw.
The 100 to 900 scale is the equaliser. It makes a 760 in March mean the same thing as a 760 in November.
What that means for you: 750 is a competency threshold, not a percentage target. It’s the point CompTIA has defined as “this person can do the job.” Think of it like a driving test. The examiner isn’t counting how many of your mirror checks were correct out of 40. They’re deciding whether you’re safe to drive.
One more thing worth knowing. There’s no negative marking. Wrong answers cost you nothing beyond the point you didn’t earn, so leaving a question blank is strictly worse than guessing. Answer everything.
Why 750 Is Not 83%
Do the naive maths and 750 out of 900 looks like 83.3%. Plenty of blogs print exactly that. It’s wrong, for one structural reason.
The scale bottoms out at 100, not 0. If you walked in, answered nothing, and walked out, you wouldn’t score 0. You’d score 100. So the usable range isn’t 900 points wide. It’s 800 points wide, running from 100 to 900.
Measured against that real range, 750 sits at roughly 81% of the way up the scale. But even that number is misleading, because scaled scores don’t map to raw percentages at all.
| The claim | The reality |
|---|---|
| “750 = 83% correct” | The scale starts at 100, so 83% of 900 is meaningless here |
| “Just get 75 of 90 right” | Questions carry different weights; a raw count doesn’t convert |
| “Every exam is scored the same” | Different exam forms get adjusted for difficulty |
| “Practice test % predicts my score” | Practice banks set their own difficulty, with no shared scale |
So how many questions can you miss? Nobody outside CompTIA can tell you precisely, and anyone who gives you an exact number is guessing. CompTIA doesn’t publish the conversion. What we can say from the structure: a raw score somewhere in the mid-70s to low-80s percent is the rough neighbourhood, and it shifts based on which form you sit and which questions you got wrong.
That uncertainty is the whole argument for building a buffer.
The Exam Format That Burns Your Clock
The passing score is only half the problem. The format creates a separate one that most study guides skim past.
You get 90 minutes for a maximum of 90 questions. One minute each, on average. That average lies.
Performance-based questions come first. Open the exam and the first things you see usually aren’t multiple choice. They’re simulations. Drag firewall rules into order. Build an access control list. Read a network diagram and flag the exposure. These run 5 to 15 minutes each.
Five PBQs at the front means 25 to 75 minutes gone before you reach question six.
The countdown clock isn’t visible inside a PBQ. This is the detail that catches people. During the simulation you don’t get a running timer, so the only way to know you’ve spent 18 minutes is to finish and look up. Two of those in a row and you’re sprinting through 80 multiple-choice questions with 40 minutes left.
PBQs award partial credit. CompTIA keeps the scoring scheme confidential, but partial credit on multi-part simulations is well established. If a PBQ asks for six configuration decisions and you get four right, those four count. An abandoned PBQ scores nothing. A half-finished one doesn’t.
So the strategy writes itself. Fill in every field, even the ones you’re unsure about, then move on.
If you’ve never touched a real firewall, this is exactly where you’ll feel it. Reading about ACLs and building one are different skills, and the exam tests the second. Guided lab work closes that gap faster than flashcards; the firewall scenarios in the FortiGate NSE4 lab workbook from SMEnode Labs drill the same muscle memory PBQs reward.
Why Do Candidates Miss the Passing Score?
Start with an honest caveat. CompTIA publishes no official pass rate for Security+. Any site quoting you a precise failure percentage is repeating an estimate, usually one that traces back to a training vendor’s own students. Published estimates from training providers cluster around 50% to 65% first-attempt success for self-study candidates, and higher for people who take structured courses. Treat those as rough signals, not data.
What’s more useful is the pattern in how people fall short. Four keep showing up.
Prepping to the wrong target
Practice tests report percentages. You score 79%, you feel ready, you book.
But a practice bank’s 79% has no fixed relationship to a scaled 750. Question banks set their own difficulty. A forgiving bank might put you at 720 on the real thing. A punishing one might mean you’re already at 780.
The fix is a buffer, not a conversion. Hit a consistent 85% or better across two or more different practice banks before you book. Not once. Consistently.
Perfectionism on PBQs
Candidates go deep on the first simulation. They re-check the diagram. They want the ACL exactly right. Twenty-five minutes disappear.
Partial credit makes that a bad trade. Get it 80% done, fill the rest with your best guess, flag it, move on. Come back after the multiple choice with whatever time is left.
Memorising instead of understanding
SY0-701 leans hard on scenarios. Questions rarely ask what AES stands for. They describe a situation and ask which control fits and why.
You can memorise the definition of a firewall. Configuring rules across three network zones against a stated threat needs something else. That gap shows up most sharply in the PBQs, which is where the marks concentrate.
Never practising under a real clock
At home you pause. You look something up. You take eight relaxed minutes on a hard scenario.
Eight minutes feels different with 82 questions waiting and no visible timer. Run every practice session against a hard stop. Target finishing 90 questions in about 80 minutes so you’ve got slack for the simulations.
What the Exam Actually Covers
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| General Security Concepts | 12% |
| Threats, Vulnerabilities and Mitigations | 22% |
| Security Architecture | 18% |
| Security Operations | 28% |
| Security Programme Management and Oversight | 20% |
Security Operations is the biggest slice at 28%, and it’s where PBQs tend to cluster. Configuration work, incident response, log analysis. Study it as theory and it’ll hurt you, because it’s the domain closest to the actual job. That’s why our live security operations courses spend most of their lab hours here.
Threats, Vulnerabilities and Mitigations at 22% catches people for a different reason. You won’t be asked to define social engineering. You’ll get a scenario where somebody clicked a link, then be asked what happened and what you do in the next hour. Knowing how a security posture assessment runs gives you the mental model those questions reward.
The exam tests what you’d do. Not what you can recite.
How Long Should You Study?
| Background | Typical prep time |
|---|---|
| No IT experience | 10 to 12 weeks (80 to 170 hours) |
| Some IT experience | 6 to 8 weeks |
| CCNA-level networking | 4 to 6 weeks |
| Full-time intensive | 4 to 6 weeks |
Networking knowledge shortens this a lot. If subnets, ports and traffic flow already make sense, then Security Architecture and Security Operations feel like extensions of what you know rather than new territory. Starting from zero, a CCNA course first builds the base Security+ quietly assumes you have.
Whatever your timeline, the trigger to book isn’t the calendar. It’s the score. Readiness is a number, not a feeling.
How to Hit 750 Consistently
Benchmark against hard question banks. Use at least two, from different sources, so one bank’s difficulty bias doesn’t fool you. Aim for 85%+ on both. Scoring 78% to 80% means you’re not there yet. Just being realistic. If you want a feel for CompTIA’s question style first, this CompTIA practice test walkthrough shows how the scenario format works.
Drill PBQs specifically. Most study guides give them a page. Find simulators and work them under a 10-minute hard limit. When the timer goes, stop, whatever state you’re in. That trains the exact instinct the real exam needs.
Decide your skip rule before exam day. Commit in advance: any PBQ past 10 minutes gets a best guess, a flag, and a goodbye. Making that call under pressure in the room never goes well.
Study the scenario, not the definition. For each control, ask how it would show up in a real incident. Practise explaining it as advice to a company, not as a term in a glossary.
Use your score report if it comes to that. It breaks down performance by domain, which turns a vague “I failed” into a specific list of what to fix.
We see the same thing in our live classes. The candidates who clear 750 first time aren’t the ones who read the most. They’re the ones who practised under a clock and got their hands on real configurations. SMEnode Academy’s security engineer programme is built around that, live instruction plus lab time, with free 1-on-1 mentorship to close weak domains before you book.
What Happens If You Don’t Pass?
You’ll get your scaled score immediately, plus a breakdown by domain showing where you lost ground.
Now the part the internet routinely gets wrong. CompTIA does not make you wait before your second attempt. Per CompTIA’s retake policy, you can rebook straight away after a first failure.
| Attempt | Waiting period |
|---|---|
| 1st to 2nd | None |
| 2nd to 3rd | 14 calendar days |
| Each attempt after | 14 calendar days |
Those 14 days include weekends and holidays. There’s no lifetime cap on attempts, but every sitting needs a fresh voucher at full price, so “booking it as a test run” is an expensive way to find out what the questions look like.
The retake rules are forgiving. Your budget won’t be.
Is the Security+ Passing Score Changing?
Not for SY0-701.
CompTIA is working on SY0-801, the next Security+ version. Current expectation puts a preview launch around late 2026, with SY0-701 likely retiring roughly six months after general availability, so somewhere in mid-2027. Worth treating those dates as soft. CompTIA has slipped announced release windows before, often by three to six months.
The 750 threshold has held across previous Security+ versions and there’s no signal it’s moving. Domain content will shift, with more coverage of AI and large language model threats, plus areas like container security showing up in real environments now.
Studying for SY0-701 right now? You’re fine. Your certification stays valid for three years from your test date regardless of which version retires when. Don’t let 801 rumours rush you into an early booking.
Where Security+ Takes You
Security+ is the credential that gets you past the HR filter for SOC analyst, security administrator and junior security engineer roles. In Canada those roles hire steadily, and our breakdown of cybersecurity jobs in Canada covers what they pay and what they ask for.
After that the path usually forks. Offensive security means a hands-on penetration testing cert, and our OSCP preparation guide shows what that step demands. Defensive and vendor-specific means a firewall cert like Fortinet NSE 4; here’s the current Fortinet NSE4 exam cost and what it covers.
For the long game, expert tracks like CCIE Security sit at the top, and the CCIE Security salary numbers explain why people commit years to it.
Not sure which fork is yours? Our career programmes map the route from entry certs through to senior roles.
Bottom Line
The Security+ passing score is 750 out of 900. It’s a scaled competency threshold, not 83% correct, and the scale starting at 100 is the reason that shortcut fails.
Most candidates who miss it prepped to a percentage that doesn’t exist, lost their clock to the first two PBQs, or studied definitions for an exam that asks about decisions.
Build the buffer. Two practice banks, 85%+ on both, every session under a hard timer, and a skip rule you decided before you walked in.
750 doesn’t move. How you get there is entirely up to you.
