How Hard Is the CompTIA Security+ Exam?

What makes Security+ (SY0-701) difficult — PBQs, the 750 passing score, question styles and the mistakes that sink candidates — assessed by experience level.

Liam Anderson10 August 2026 · 7 min read

Ask AIChatGPT Claude Gemini Copilot Perplexity Grok

Stylised mountain climb diagram marking the difficulty stages of the Security+ exam with a summit flag at 750

Short answer: Security+ is moderately hard — a genuine step up from CompTIA A+ and Network+, but firmly within reach of a prepared candidate with basic IT grounding. The difficulty comes less from any single topic than from breadth (five domains spanning cryptography to governance), the scenario-based wording of the questions, the performance-based questions (PBQs) at the start, and a passing bar of 750 on a 100–900 scale that leaves limited room for weak domains.

This article is purely about difficulty: what the exam throws at you, how the scoring works, why capable people fail it, and how hard it will feel from your starting point. If you have already sized it up and want a study method, that lives in how to prepare for CompTIA Security+; if you are still deciding whether the certification justifies its cost at all, see is Security+ worth it in 2026.

What you are up against: the exam at a glance

CompTIA Security+ is the entry point to CompTIA's security track, currently examined as SY0-701 (live since November 2023 and, as of August 2026, still the only current version — CompTIA lists a successor as expected but has announced nothing official). The sitting itself:

Up to 90 questions in 90 minutes — a mix of multiple-choice (single and multiple response) and performance-based questions. "Up to" matters: many candidates receive fewer than 90, because unscored trial questions vary between sittings.
Passing score: 750 out of 900, on a scale that starts at 100. This is a scaled score, not 83% — more on that below.
Five domains: General Security Concepts; Threats, Vulnerabilities and Mitigations; Security Architecture; Security Operations; and Security Program Management and Oversight.
No prerequisites enforced, but CompTIA's recommended profile is Network+ level knowledge plus around two years in a security or systems administrator role. The gap between that profile and your reality is, in one sentence, the best predictor of how hard the exam will feel.

Delivery is through Pearson VUE, at a test centre or online-proctored from home — the difficulty is identical either way, though home candidates should factor in the stricter environmental rules.

Is there an official pass rate?

No. CompTIA does not publish pass rates for Security+ or any of its exams, so every percentage you see quoted online is guesswork or marketing. The honest calibration signals are the ones above — the recommended experience level, the scaled 750 bar, and the exam's position as the third rung of CompTIA's core series (after A+ and Network+). Treat any site claiming "the Security+ pass rate is X%" as a credibility test it just failed.

The four things that actually make Security+ hard

1. Breadth without mercy

None of the five domains is intellectually extreme, but the syllabus is wide: cryptographic concepts, threat actors and attack types, architecture models, operational controls, incident response, plus governance, risk and compliance. Most candidates arrive with real strength in one or two areas and near-zero exposure to at least one other — typically governance for technical people, and the deeper technical material for career-changers from compliance or audit backgrounds. Because 750/900 does not tolerate an abandoned domain, your weakest area sets your difficulty level.

2. Scenario wording, not recall

SY0-701 questions rarely ask "what does TLS stand for". They describe a situation — an administrator notices X after change Y — and ask for the best response, where two or three options are defensible and one is most correct. This "best answer among plausible answers" style is the single most reported source of difficulty, because it punishes flashcard-only preparation. You need to understand why controls exist, not just their names. Rote memorisation collapses precisely here.

3. Performance-based questions

PBQs are interactive items — matching, ordering, configuring simulated interfaces, dragging controls onto a network diagram — and they usually appear at the front of the exam. They are harder than the multiple-choice items in two distinct ways. Cognitively, they require you to do something with knowledge rather than recognise it. Tactically, they eat time: a candidate who gives five PBQs fifteen minutes each has burned most of the clock before question six. The standard countermeasure is boring but effective — flag PBQs, move through the multiple-choice bank, and return with the time you actually have. PBQs are not scored all-or-nothing anxiety traps to be feared; they are a time-management problem to be planned for.

4. The clock

Ninety minutes for up to 90 questions sounds generous until PBQs are subtracted. Multiple-choice pacing needs to land near or under a minute per item to leave a review margin. Candidates who have only ever practised untimed report the time pressure as the exam's nastiest surprise; candidates who rehearsed under a timer generally do not mention it at all. That asymmetry tells you most of what you need to know about how to rehearse.

How hard will it be for you?

Difficulty is relative to your starting point, so place yourself honestly:

Working IT professionals (helpdesk, sysadmin, networking) with security exposure — the most comfortable group. The operational material maps to daily work; the study load concentrates on formal terminology, cryptography specifics and the governance domain.
Holders of Network+ (or equivalent networking knowledge) without security experience — a moderate climb. Networking fundamentals underpin a large share of the scenarios (ports, protocols, segmentation, wireless security), so this group's difficulty concentrates in threat taxonomy and security operations rather than in comprehension.
Complete beginners to IT — hard, and the group for whom "is Security+ hard for beginners?" deserves a straight yes. Nothing stops you sitting it — there are no enforced prerequisites — but you are effectively learning networking and security simultaneously while the exam assumes the former. Beginners succeed, but over longer timelines and with the highest retake rates among people we hear from. If you are choosing your first CompTIA exam rather than committed to this one, the ordering logic in which CompTIA certification to start with is worth ten minutes before you spend anything.
Experienced security practitioners without certifications — usually surprised in the other direction: the technical content feels easy, and the difficulty hides in CompTIA-specific framing and the discipline of picking the intended best answer rather than the answer their environment would choose.

For context within the CompTIA ladder: Security+ questions demand more judgement than the recall-heavy A+ cores and lean less on configuration detail than Network+'s subnetting-style items, sitting a clear notch above both in overall demand — the sibling pieces on A+ exam difficulty and Network+ exam difficulty make those comparisons properly.

Why capable candidates fail Security+

Failure patterns repeat with remarkable consistency:

Memorising answers instead of concepts. Candidates who drill one question set until they score 95% have often memorised that set, not the objectives. The exam's reworded scenarios expose this instantly. The fix is to treat every practice miss as a domain signal — why was the right answer right? — and to rotate question sources.
Skipping the governance domain. Security Program Management and Oversight is the least glamorous domain and the most commonly neglected. On a 750 bar, conceding a whole domain is arithmetic self-harm.
No timed rehearsal. See above — time pressure only defeats the unrehearsed.
Underestimating acronym density. The exam assumes fluent reading of the field's acronym soup. Stumbling over abbreviations mid-scenario costs seconds per question and accuracy across the paper.
Booking the exam as motivation. With retakes at full voucher price (an immediate second attempt is allowed; a 14-day wait applies from the third attempt), a premature booking is an expensive study plan. Evidence of readiness should precede the booking, not follow it.

A readiness self-check before you book

You are probably ready for the real difficulty level when you can say yes to all five:

You have read the official SY0-701 objectives (free to download from CompTIA) and can explain, not just recognise, every bullet in your weakest domain.
Timed, full-length practice tests put you comfortably and repeatedly above passing-level performance — one lucky run is noise, a trend is signal. A timed Security+ practice test simulation will show you both your score trend and which domains keep producing the wrong answers; ExamPractice's free samples let you gauge the question style before subscribing to the fuller sets.
Your per-domain results show no domain dramatically weaker than the rest.
You finish practice runs with at least ten minutes to spare, PBQ-style items included.
Scenario questions feel like reasoning exercises rather than vocabulary tests.

How many weeks it takes to reach that state varies too much by background for one honest number — CompTIA publishes no official study-hours figure, and our separate piece on how long to study for Security+ gives timeline ranges by experience level instead of a fake universal answer.

The difficulty verdict

Security+ has earned its reputation as a fair but unforgiving generalist exam: no single topic is brutal, and yet the combination of breadth, best-answer wording, PBQ time pressure and a 750 scaled bar fails people who prepared narrowly. For an IT professional with networking grounding, it is a challenging-but-standard milestone. For a determined beginner, it is a hard exam that rewards patience with one of the most widely recognised entry credentials in security. Either way, the difficulty is front-loaded into preparation quality — candidates who rehearse under exam conditions and refuse to carry a weak domain into the test centre rarely find the real thing worse than their practice runs.

Exam facts in this guide were checked against official certification-provider pages on 30 August 2026. Fees, exam codes and policies change — confirm on the provider’s own site before you book.

Ask AIChatGPT Claude Gemini Copilot Perplexity Grok

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