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.
We read Microsoft's own certification pages on 2026-07-30 and found three carrying a retirement notice, all three linking the same Microsoft announcement:
Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102) — its page already said this on 2026-07-30:
This certification and the renewal assessment are retired.
Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) — the page says:
This certification, related exam, and renewal assessments will retire on July 31, 2026. You will no longer be able to earn or renew this certification after this date.
That date has now passed. AZ-204 retired on 2026-07-31. The sentence above is Microsoft's own wording, quoted as it read when we checked the page on 2026-07-30 — we do not edit a vendor quote, so it still reads as future tense.
Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500) — same wording, later date:
This certification, related exam, and renewal assessments will retire on August 31, 2026. You will no longer be able to earn or renew this certification after this date.
Read the wording carefully, because it is broader than the usual notice that an exam is being updated. It covers the certification, the exam and the renewal assessment, and it says you will no longer be able to earn or renew.
What this page does not tell you
We are deliberately not publishing a list of Microsoft credentials that are not retiring. We hold dated source records for the three notices above and not for the rest of Microsoft's catalogue, and an absence of a retirement notice in our data is not evidence that Microsoft has published none. If you need to know about a specific credential, read its own Microsoft page.
Why this is hard to find out
Both of the already-retired pages we looked at carry an instruction asking search engines to leave them out of results. The retirement notice is right there on the page — but the page itself stops turning up in searches, so the most obvious way to go looking is the way least likely to work.
What we don't know
We hold dated reads of the three Microsoft certification pages cited below, not of Microsoft's whole catalogue, so a certification we have not cited here could carry a notice we have not seen. The announcement all three link to is a JavaScript page that would not load for us, so we cannot tell you whether it names a longer list than the three we found on the certification pages themselves. And none of the three notices names a replacement credential — we are not going to guess which certification is closest. Everything here describes what those pages said on 2026-07-30.