An honest, cited answer. We make no ROI, salary, placement, or 'worth it' claim, and we don't track live job demand — where we don't know, we say so.
CompTIA publishes three separate dates for retiring CySA+ V3, not one. When we read their certification page on 2026-07-30:
CySA+ V3 (Retiring Version) remains available, with English learning products retiring November 22, 2026, the English exam retiring December 22, 2026, and translations retiring March 23, 2027.
Those three dates do different things, and the order matters if you are planning:
- 22 November 2026 — the English study materials go first.
- 22 December 2026 — the English exam itself.
- 23 March 2027 — the translated versions.
The gap between the first two is the one to notice: for about a month, the English exam is still sittable while CompTIA's own learning products for it are not being sold.
Which version to study. Your deadline depends on which language you sit. If you are taking the English exam, work backwards from 22 December 2026, the date CompTIA gives for it — if you cannot sit V3 by then, V3 is not the version to prepare. If you are taking one of the translated versions, your date is 23 March 2027 instead, so V3 can still be the right choice well after the English exam has gone. Either way, if you are already deep into V3 material, that is the date to work back from.
Which code these dates apply to. The sentence quoted above uses CompTIA's version labels "V3" and "V4", while the exam codes people search for are CS0-003 and CS0-004. CompTIA publishes a separate page per version, and the pairing of V3 with exam code CS0-003 comes from CompTIA's own V3 page, cited below with the date we last checked it. So the dates above are the V3 dates, and V3 is CS0-003. The certification page quoted above does not print the codes beside the dates, so if you are booking, confirm the code on the version page rather than inferring it from the label.
What we don't know
We have not verified whether these dates differ by country or test provider, and CompTIA does not say. The three retirement dates are quoted from CompTIA's certification page, read 2026-07-30; the V3-to-CS0-003 pairing comes from CompTIA's separate V3 page, cited below with the date we last checked it.