How to Maintain CompTIA Certifications

Most CompTIA certifications do not lapse because the holder failed anything — they lapse because nobody looked at the expiry date until it was too close. Every Continuing Education (CE) certification CompTIA issues, including A+, Network+ and Security+, is valid for three years from the day you pass, and staying certified is mostly an administration habit: log qualifying activities as you do them, know your Continuing Education Unit (CEU) target, and settle the CE fee before the cycle ends. This article turns those obligations into a routine you can run in under an hour a quarter.

One boundary note before the routine: if your certification has already expired, or you want to weigh up the different renewal paths against each other, that decision is covered in our guide to CompTIA certification renewal. This article assumes your certification is active and you want to keep it that way with minimum friction.

What "good standing" actually requires

To keep a CompTIA CE certification active you need three things across each three-year cycle: enough CEUs for your certification (or one of the alternative renewal routes), the CE fee for your renewal path settled by your expiration date, and compliance with CompTIA's programme policies. That is the whole list. There is no annual exam, no minimum activity per year, and no requirement to use CompTIA's own training to renew.

The CEU targets differ by certification — CompTIA's renewal pages list 20 CEUs for A+, 30 for Network+, 50 for Security+ and 60 for CySA+ — and the qualifying-activity rules have enough detail that we keep them in a separate reference: CompTIA continuing education requirements. For a maintenance routine, what matters is that you know your number and divide it by three years.

The quarterly maintenance routine

A workable system needs to be boring and repeatable. Here is one that takes four short sessions a year.

1. Anchor your dates once

Log in to your CompTIA certification account and write down two dates somewhere you actually look: your certification date and your expiration date (three years later). Set calendar reminders at 12 months, 6 months and 3 months before expiry. The single most common maintenance failure is discovering the deadline with weeks to spare and no records to hand.

2. Set a per-year CEU pace

Divide your CEU requirement into annual thirds and treat each year's third as a soft deadline. A Security+ holder needs 50 CEUs per cycle, so roughly 17 a year keeps you comfortable; an A+ holder needs only 20 in total, which one decent training course or a stretch of documented work experience can cover. Pacing matters because many qualifying activities — a course, a conference, a project at work — take months to complete, and none of them compress well into a final quarter.

3. Log evidence the week it happens

CompTIA's CE programme accepts CEUs from training, work experience and industry activities, uploaded through your certification account. Whatever the activity, capture the evidence immediately: completion certificates, dates, hours. A simple spreadsheet with four columns — activity, date, expected CEUs, evidence file — is enough. Uploading as you go also surfaces problems early; finding out in month 35 that an activity does not qualify leaves you no room to replace it.

4. Review each quarter

Fifteen minutes: check logged CEUs against your pace line, confirm your contact details are current so CompTIA's reminders reach you, and glance at whether a newer exam version or a higher certification you are pursuing anyway could renew this certification for you (more on that below).

Budgeting the maintenance fee

Renewing by CEU upload carries a CE fee, paid per three-year cycle by your expiration date. As of 2026 CompTIA's CE renewal fee page lists a $75-per-cycle tier that includes A+ and a $150-per-cycle tier covering most other certifications, including Network+, Security+, CySA+ and PenTest+ — fees are paid via CE tokens, and amounts can change, so confirm the current figures on comptia.org before you pay. Two budgeting points follow. First, spread the cost mentally across the cycle — $150 over three years is a small line item, but only if it is planned. Second, if you hold several CompTIA certifications, you pay the CE fee only for your highest one, which leads directly to the biggest efficiency lever in the whole programme.

If you want to model these recurring costs alongside training and membership spend across a career, our long-term certification cost walkthrough gives you a multi-year template.