Microsoft Power BI Certification in 2026: Which Exam Should You Take?

Microsoft’s Power BI certification is the Power BI Data Analyst Associate, earned by passing Exam PL-300. Most people should start there. Take PL-900 first only if you are new to data work, and move to DP-600 or DP-700 once you build in Microsoft Fabric. Associate exams typically cost US$165 and renew free yearly.

By MSCertQuiz Team · Last verified October 2026 · Facts checked against Microsoft Learn on 2 October 2026

Which Power BI certification should you take? Answer four questions

Skip the feature comparison for a moment. Work down this list and stop at the first line that describes you.

1. 1. You have never built a Power BI report and the vocabulary is unfamiliar. Learn the basics for a few weeks. If you want an exam to anchor that, sit PL-900 (see our PL-900 study guide), then move to PL-300. If you would rather go straight to the role-based exam, that is allowed too.
2. 2. You build or want to build reports, dashboards and data models in Power BI. Take PL-300. This is the credential recruiters mean when they say “Power BI certification”.
3. 3. You already hold PL-300, or work daily with Fabric lakehouses, warehouses and large shared semantic models. Take DP-600 (Fabric Analytics Engineer).
4. 4. Your work is pipelines, Spark notebooks and orchestration, with Power BI only at the end. Take DP-700 (Fabric Data Engineer), not a Power BI exam.

Still undecided between several Microsoft data paths? Our comparison of which Microsoft certification is best for a data analyst looks at the wider field, including non-Power BI options.

What Microsoft credentials involve Power BI right now?

Four exams matter for a Power BI-focused career. Each row below was read from its Microsoft Learn certification page in October 2026.

Microsoft also publishes lab-based Applied Skills credentials for Fabric (lakehouse, data warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, data science). They are separate from the certifications above and are not Power BI exams.

What happened to DA-100?

DA-100 (Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI) was the exam behind the original Data Analyst Associate certification when Microsoft introduced it in 2020. It is gone. Microsoft Learn now names PL-300 as the exam for the Power BI Data Analyst Associate, and the DA-100 instructor-led course appears on Learn’s retired courses list with a 31 March 2022 retirement date. Study material that still says DA-100 is at least four years old.

What does the PL-300 exam involve, and what does it cost?

The certification requires one exam. Verified details from the certification page and study guide:

• Time: 100 minutes, proctored, possibly with interactive components.
• Passing score: 700 on Microsoft’s scaled score.
• Price: associate exams typically cost US$165, varying by country or region (Microsoft’s exam FAQ). Student pricing exists where available.
• Languages: English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Italian.
• Current skills outline: effective 20 April 2026, with minor changes to “Get or connect to data”, “Enhance reports for usability and storytelling” and “Create and manage workspaces and assets”.
• Retakes: 24 hours after the first attempt, 14 days between later attempts, up to five attempts in 12 months, each paid (retake policy).
• Renewal: every 12 months through a free online assessment (Microsoft’s renewal page). We explain the process in our certification renewal guide.

Microsoft does not publish a question count for the exam, so we leave it out. If you are weighing difficulty, our honest take is in how hard PL-300 really is.

How do the PL-300 domains map to real Power BI work?

The exam outline reads like a feature list. In practice each domain is a stage of the same project. Here is one imagined project, a monthly sales report for a regional manager, laid against the four domains.

Notice the weighting: three domains carry roughly equal weight, so you cannot coast on report design. Strong visual design will not offset weak modeling, because the model and DAX domain carries as much weight as report building. Our PL-300 study guide walks through every objective, and the PL-300 cheat sheet condenses the DAX and Power Query points into one reference.

What skills do you need before booking PL-300?

Microsoft’s listings do not name a required prior certification, but the audience profile says candidates should be proficient with Power Query and DAX. A practical readiness check:

• You can load a CSV and an Excel file, then clean both in the Power Query editor without searching for each step.
• You can explain why a relationship is one-to-many and what happens to a filter when its direction is set to both.
• You can write a measure with CALCULATE and say how it differs from a calculated column.
• You have published a report to a workspace and set refresh at least once.

If two or more of those are unfamiliar, spend time in Power BI Desktop before touching practice questions. Microsoft is blunt about it: the exam FAQ says hands-on experience with the technology is required to pass.

How long should you prepare?

Microsoft does not publish prep-time figures. The estimates below are our own planning guidance, based on how much of the outline each starting point already covers, and assume about 6 to 8 study hours a week. Treat them as a starting plan, not a statistic.

Free resources or a practice exam: which do you need?

Use both, for different jobs. Free material teaches the skills; practice questions show whether you can apply them under exam wording.

Our PL-300 practice exam includes 40 free questions; the full 500-question bank is part of the paid tiers described on the pricing page. The same format exists for PL-900, DP-600 and DP-700.

Is the Power BI certification worth it?

It depends on what you are trying to prove. A US$165 exam is cheap next to most training courses, but it only helps if the credential matches the work you want. We deliberately do not quote a salary figure here: pay depends on location, seniority and the employer, and we would rather link to your own local job listings than invent an average.

• Worth it if you are changing roles into analytics, work for a Microsoft partner, or need a verifiable credential for a team that standardizes on Power BI.
• Less useful if you already have years of public Power BI work and your employer never asks for certifications.
• Think twice if you would use it as a shortcut around experience. The exam rewards hands-on skill.

For a fuller cost-and-benefit view, see is PL-300 worth it. If you are still choosing a tool as well as a certification, our Power Apps vs Power Automate vs Power BI comparison explains where each fits.

What is a sensible Power BI certification path?

1. Optional: PL-900 to learn the Power Platform landscape.
2. Core: PL-300 to prove you can prepare, model, visualize and secure data in Power BI.
3. Next step, analytics-leaning: DP-600 for Fabric-scale semantic models, Direct Lake, lakehouses and warehouses.
4. Next step, engineering-leaning: DP-700 for pipelines, notebooks and streaming data.

You do not need all four. Most analysts stop after step 2 or add step 3 when their employer adopts Fabric.

Power BI certification FAQ

Ready to test yourself? Try the PL-300 practice exam, which starts with 40 free questions, and compare your results against the four domains above.