SY0-801 Release Date and SY0-701 Retirement Date
CompTIA Security+ SY0-801 launches on or around November 17, 2026, and SY0-701 retires June 11, 2027 in English and August 13, 2027 in Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai. SY0-801 is Security+ V8, its final objectives are published, and for about seven months both versions can be booked. Every Security+ cohort I teach opens by asking whether to wait for the new exam. The published retirement date settles it.
That makes the decision simpler than it looks: both dates are now published, and the one that governs your study plan is the retirement date.
SY0-701 retirement date and SY0-801 release date: what CompTIA has confirmed
Here is what CompTIA has published, and where it says it.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| SY0-701 is Security+ V7, launched November 7, 2023 | Published on the CompTIA Security+ page |
| Retirement: English June 11, 2027, other languages August 13, 2027 | Published, with no qualifying word attached |
| The successor is Security+ V8, exam code SY0-801 | Published on the Security+ V8 page |
| Final V8 objectives, document version 2.0 | Linked from the V8 page, with no draft label |
| SY0-801 launch on or around November 17, 2026 | Published on the Security+ and V8 pages |
| SY0-801 voucher price, any beta exam | Not published as of October 21, 2026 |
CompTIA marks estimated dates as estimates when it wants to: its SecAI+ product page gives retirement as "Estimated 3 years after launch." Next to June 11, 2027 there is no such word, and that is the strongest signal available. Plan against it, and re-check before you book. If you want the remaining weeks counted for you rather than hardcoded in a blog post, drop June 11, 2027 into our exam countdown and study plan tool.
Where the November 17 date comes from
For months the November 17, 2026 date circulated with no CompTIA source behind it: it traced to a login-gated CompTIA Instructors Network thread whose own author said no firm date existed. CompTIA has since published it on its own Security+ and V8 pages, worded as "expected to launch on or around November 17, 2026." Plan around it, and confirm on the V8 page before you book. Either way, the retirement date still drives the decision.
The arithmetic that survives a slip
The overlap is what protects you. Here is how it works.
When a new version of the exam launches, the old one is still available for at least six months (sometimes longer, depending on other market factors).
Both dates are now published: SY0-801 launches on or around November 17, 2026 and SY0-701 English retires June 11, 2027, an overlap of 206 days, comfortably above the six month floor.
If the launch slips, the policy pushes the SY0-701 retirement out rather than shortening the overlap, and CompTIA has not shortened it in the past two cycles. Your deadline moves later, never earlier. History gives the numbers: SY0-701 launched November 7, 2023 and SY0-601 English retired July 31, 2024, an overlap of 267 days, well above the floor. SY0-601's non-English versions then ran six months past its English retirement, but that is one cycle, not a rule: for SY0-701 the published gap is about two months.
What actually changes between SY0-701 and SY0-801
Start with the reassuring part. The final V8 objectives keep SY0-701's mechanics exactly: 90 questions maximum, multiple choice plus performance-based items, 90 minutes, 750 to pass on a 100 to 900 scale, five domains.
What moves is the weighting, and the final objectives kept the draft's numbers unchanged.
| Domain | SY0-701 | SY0-801 (V8) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 General Security Concepts | 12% | 16% | +4 |
| 2.0 Threats and Vulnerabilities (Attacks in V8) | 22% | 24% | +2 |
| 3.0 Security Architecture | 18% | 19% | +1 |
| 4.0 Security Operations | 28% | 27% | -1 |
| 5.0 Security Program Management and Oversight | 20% | 14% | -6 |
Three structural changes sit behind those numbers. Domain 2 is renamed from Mitigations to Attacks because the mitigation content moves into Domain 4's rewritten objective 4.1; if you want the attack vocabulary that rename leans on, our guide to common attack types covers it. Domain 5, governance and oversight, takes the biggest cut at six points. Domain 1 consolidates from four objectives to three with the substance unchanged: CIA, AAA, non-repudiation, Zero Trust, least privilege, four control categories and six control types. Objective count keeps drifting down, from 35 in SY0-601 to 28 in SY0-701 to 27 in V8.
A six point swing sounds dramatic until you convert it to questions. On a 90 question form, six points is roughly five or six items moving out of governance and into the other four domains. In class that changes pacing, not syllabus: the governance material still has to be taught, because the risk register, the vendor assessment and the incident reporting items do not disappear, they just stop carrying a fifth of the form.
AI is the real headline, and it lands in two places
The first is a brand new objective, 2.6: "Summarize threats and vulnerabilities associated with artificial intelligence (AI) usage." Its thirteen bullets are:
- Model manipulation
- Poisoning
- Prompt injection
- Data loss
- Bias
- Explainability
- Hallucinations
- Jailbreaking
- Evasion
- Privacy
- Ethical considerations
- Session hijacking
- Code execution
The second is easy to miss. Objective 4.6, on automation and orchestration, gains a whole AI parent heading with a capabilities sub-tree: agentic AI, chatbots, predictive analysis and AI-augmented baselines, plus AI-framed intended outcomes. Nothing equivalent exists in SY0-701, where a case-insensitive search finds AI and ML only in the acronym list. AI also appears as an attack surface, large language models under 2.4, and as an indicator of malicious activity, deepfakes under 2.5. LLM joins the acronym list too, which our Security+ acronym list drills.
Verify the objectives against the PDFs yourself
Every objective claim above came out of the two objectives documents, not out of a summary of them. You can reproduce the checks in under a minute. Download the SY0-701 objectives from the Security+ page and the final V8 objectives from the Security+ V8 page, save them as sy0-701.pdf and sy0-801.pdf, then run pdftotext (it ships in poppler-utils, and is already installed on most Linux images and available through Homebrew on macOS):
$ pdftotext sy0-801.pdf - | grep -ciE 'quantum|PQC|lattice|kyber|dilithium'
0
$ pdftotext sy0-701.pdf - | grep -ciE 'quantum|PQC|lattice|kyber|dilithium'
0
$ pdftotext sy0-701.pdf - | grep -ci 'prompt injection'
0Three zeroes, and each one answers a question the forums argue about. The first says post-quantum cryptography is not in V8. The second says it was not in SY0-701 either, so nothing was removed. The third says prompt injection genuinely is new in V8 rather than a rename of something SY0-701 already tested.
Zero is the most useful result a search can return here, because absence is exactly what nobody can confirm by skimming. I run this in front of the cohort on the projector rather than telling them, for the same reason I make CCNA students run show ip route instead of trusting my diagram: a claim you watched a tool produce is a claim you can defend in an interview. Swap the pattern for anything else you have been told is on the exam and the same command settles it.
What is not changing, and what the internet gets wrong
Post-quantum cryptography is not in SY0-801. The grep above returns zero in both documents. The cryptography objective is a near-verbatim carry-over: PKI, certificates, revocation checking, key exchange, key length, digital signatures, salting and hashing. V8 drops key stretching and blockchain, and renumbers the objective from 1.4 to 1.3. Our guide to symmetric versus asymmetric encryption covers what both versions test.
AI is not a sixth domain. V8 still has five domains with the same names apart from Domain 2's rename. The AI content sits in two blocks inside existing domains.
The exam does not get longer or harder. Same 90 questions, same 90 minutes, same 750 pass mark.
Your certification does not expire when the exam retires. CompTIA is blunt on its certification renewal guidance: certification status is not affected in any way by exam retirement, and someone certified the day before an exam retires still holds a valid certification.
Should you sit SY0-701 now or wait?
The deadlines are June 11, 2027 for English and August 13, 2027 for the other four languages. That is a deadline, not a cliff, and it is far enough out that either choice is survivable. Three profiles:
Sit SY0-701 now if you need Security+ before the English exam retires, if a job posting or a DoD 8140 work role drives the timeline, or if you are already mid-study. You also get the mature version: three years of question banks and a well-understood performance-based pool. New versions typically launch with thinner practice material, and in my experience the first cohort through any new CompTIA version spends more time arguing with practice questions than studying, because the third-party banks have not caught up to the objectives yet.
Wait for SY0-801 only if you are starting from zero, have no deadline, and your target role is explicitly AI security adjacent. Fail any one of those and waiting costs you a credential you could already hold. The candidates I see regret waiting are the ones who paused for a version still months away, then had a hiring manager ask for the certification in the same quarter.
Do neither if you already hold Security+ and want AI security. CompTIA shipped that exam: SecAI+, code CY0-001, launched February 17, 2026, with 40% of its content on securing AI systems. Our cybersecurity career path guide maps where each sits.
The renewal rule that makes this a false dilemma
Security+ is valid for three years and takes 50 CEUs to renew. CompTIA's continuing education pages list passing the latest release of the same exam as a renewal route with the CE fee waived. Confirm it on comptia.org before budgeting around it: the general how-to-renew page words that waiver more narrowly than the dedicated fees page.
So sitting SY0-701 now does not lock you out of SY0-801. Pass the newer version later and it renews you with the CE fee waived, though you still pay for the SY0-801 voucher itself. Pass SY0-701 on its final English day and you are certified through June 11, 2030.
How we teach this at CISNET
Our Security+ bootcamp is 30 hours of live instructor-led training at $699 CAD, taught by me, with weekend sessions and exam prep built on the current SY0-701 objectives. Its first module is already called Threats, Vulnerabilities and Attacks, matching V8's renamed Domain 2 better than SY0-701's own wording does.
Twenty years of enterprise network architecture taught me which of these changes is cosmetic and which is not. The Domain 2 rename is cosmetic: attacks and mitigations were always taught together, and the exam always asked about both. The AI block is not cosmetic. Objective 2.6 is the first time the exam asks candidates to reason about a system whose output is probabilistic, and that is a genuinely different habit of mind from the deterministic controls the rest of the syllabus tests. Cohorts who have never worked with a model find the vocabulary easy and the threat modelling hard.
The honest gap: there is no AI module today, because there is no AI objective in SY0-701, the exam you can sit today. CompTIA has now finalised the V8 objectives, so objectives 2.6 and 4.6 are stable, and they are what a candidate sitting SY0-801 needs on top of the current syllabus. To plan the live exam, start with our Security+ SY0-701 study guide.
Sources and last verified
Verified October 21, 2026 against the CompTIA Security+ page, the Security+ V7 page for the SY0-701 launch and retirement dates, and the Security+ V8 page and the final SY0-801 objectives linked from it, document version 2.0, for the launch date, exam details, domain weightings, objective 2.6, the 4.6 AI capabilities sub-tree, the 27 objective count and the 1.4 to 1.3 renumbering. Verified September 22, 2026, all on comptia.org: the exam development lifecycle post for the six month overlap policy; the CE renewal fees page for the waived CE fee; CompTIA's SecAI+ product page for the CY0-001 code, the February 17, 2026 launch, the 40% AI content figure and the "Estimated 3 years after launch" wording; and CompTIA's certification renewal and exam retirement guidance for the statement that certification status is not affected by exam retirement. The SY0-801 voucher price was not published on October 21, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 retire?
CompTIA Security+ SY0-701, also called V7, retires June 11, 2027 in English and August 13, 2027 in Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai. Both dates appear on CompTIA's Security+ page with no estimated or provisional qualifier attached.
Has CompTIA confirmed the SY0-801 release date?
Yes. CompTIA's Security+ V8 page says SY0-801 is expected to launch on or around November 17, 2026, and the final exam objectives, document version 2.0, are published. The SY0-801 voucher price had not been published as of October 21, 2026.
How long will SY0-701 and SY0-801 both be available?
About 206 days in English on current dates: SY0-801 launches on or around November 17, 2026 and SY0-701 English retires June 11, 2027. CompTIA's published policy is at least six months of overlap. The last cycle ran longer: SY0-701 and SY0-601 overlapped by 267 days. Because the SY0-701 retirement is already fixed at June 11, 2027, a delayed SY0-801 pushes that retirement later rather than shortening your booking window.
Is my Security+ certification still valid after SY0-701 retires?
Yes. CompTIA states that certification status is not affected in any way by exam retirement, and someone who certifies the day before an exam retires still holds a valid certification. Security+ lasts three years, so passing SY0-701 on its final English day leaves you certified through June 11, 2030.
What is the biggest difference between SY0-701 and SY0-801?
AI, in two places. V8 adds objective 2.6 on threats and vulnerabilities associated with artificial intelligence usage, covering prompt injection, model poisoning, jailbreaking and ten more topics, plus an AI capabilities block in objective 4.6 on automation and orchestration. Neither exists in SY0-701. The rest is weighting: governance drops from 20% to 14%.
Does SY0-801 add post-quantum cryptography?
No. Convert both objectives PDFs to text and search them case-insensitively for quantum, PQC, lattice, Kyber and Dilithium and you get zero hits in the final SY0-801 objectives and zero in SY0-701. The cryptography objective carries over almost verbatim, minus key stretching and blockchain, renumbered from 1.4 to 1.3.
Should I wait for SY0-801 or take SY0-701 now?
Take SY0-701 now if you need the certification before the English exam retires on June 11, 2027, if a job or DoD 8140 work role requires it, or if you are already studying. Waiting only makes sense with no deadline and an AI security focused target role, and CompTIA's SecAI+ exam already covers that ground. Passing SY0-801 later renews you with the CE fee waived, but you still pay for that voucher.
