CISSP exam cost: $749, and the three-year bill behind it

ISC2 lists the CISSP exam at $749 for the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, at €719.04 for the EMEA region and £606.69 in the UK, read on its own pricing page on 24 September 2026. That is the number people quote. It is also the smaller half of what CISSP costs.

The sitting fee, against the others

Put the exam fees side by side and CISSP is the most expensive vendor-neutral security exam of the group, but not by the margin its reputation suggests. ISC2 charges $599 for CCSP and $199 for Certified in Cybersecurity. ISACA charges $575 for CISM if you are a member and $760 if you are not, plus a $50 application processing fee when you apply for the certification itself.

The gap in the chart is the interesting part: CompTIA does not publish the Security+ voucher price on any page we could read. Its store product URLs redirect to a certifications index, and its own article on what Security+ costs contains no figure at all. The price exists — it appears at checkout in the CompTIA Store — but it is not published where a reader can check it, so we draw an empty bar rather than repeat a reseller's number.

The fees either side of the exam

Two smaller charges are easy to miss until they apply to you. ISC2 lists a rescheduling fee of $50 (£35, €40) and a cancellation fee of $100 (£70, €80). A date booked hopefully, before your study is on track, is a $50 option at best and a $100 mistake at worst — which is a reason to book late rather than early, however good a forcing function a deadline feels like.

ISC2 also notes that pricing and taxes depend on where the exam is taken and that currencies vary by country, with the detail supplied by Pearson at registration. If you are sitting outside the region you live in, check what you are actually charged before you confirm.

Three years of holding it

The exam fee buys an attempt. Keeping the letters costs an annual maintenance fee of $135 for CISSP, CCSP and ISC2's other professional certifications, and $50 for Certified in Cybersecurity and Associates, charged on the anniversary of your certification.

So the real figure for a first cycle is a $749 exam plus $135 a year — $1,154 over three years. CCSP on the same arithmetic comes to $1,004. Neither includes a book, a course, or an hour of anybody's time. CompTIA's shape is different again: Security+ lasts three years, and if you renew by uploading continuing-education units, CompTIA charges $150 for the whole three-year period rather than annually.

There is one real saving built into the ISC2 structure. ISC2 states that members pay a single annual maintenance fee regardless of how many of its certifications they earn, so adding CCSP to an existing CISSP costs the $599 exam and no additional yearly fee at all. If you were ever going to hold two ISC2 credentials, the second one is dramatically cheaper to keep than the first.

What the training costs, which is the part that varies

Everything above is fixed. Preparation is where the spread is, and where most of the money usually goes: a self-study route built on the official body of knowledge and a practice-question bank might cost a couple of hundred dollars, while an instructor-led bootcamp with a voucher included runs into four figures. We do not quote bootcamp prices on this site because the ones we checked do not publish them in the page body — Simplilearn's CISSP course routes to a quote or checkout, and KnowledgeHut's course URL returned a 404 on 24 September 2026.

Treat any price you are quoted by a training provider as a promotion unless the page says otherwise. In this sector, the crossed-out number is usually the fiction and the discounted one is the price.

The CPE bill, in hours rather than dollars

The third cost is time. CISSP requires 120 continuing professional education credits per three-year cycle, at least 90 of them Group A — that is, directly related to the domains. ISC2 recommends around 40 credits a year to stay on track, though for certified members that is guidance rather than an annual requirement; the requirement is the 120 by the end of the cycle.

Conferences, webinars, vendor training and reading all count in various amounts, and a lot of it you would do anyway. But it is forty hours a year of attributable, loggable activity, and people who ignore it for two years spend the third scrambling.

Is it worth it?

If you already have the five years of experience ISC2 requires, the fee is not the deciding factor — $1,154 across three years is less than a week of the salary bands these roles sit in, and the credential is genuinely a gate in a lot of hiring processes. If you do not yet have the experience, the same money spent on hands-on labs and a Security+ sitting will do more for you this year, because a CISSP you cannot claim is an expensive certificate in a drawer.

If you are weighing it against alternatives, compare what each security certification costs to sit and to keep, or read the five-year experience clause in detail before you decide the exam fee is your problem.

Budgeting it as a three-year project

The cleanest way to decide whether the number is acceptable is to write out the whole commitment before the first payment, because every part of it is knowable in advance. The exam is fixed at $749 for most of the world. The maintenance fee is fixed at $135 a year and falls on a date you can put in a calendar — the anniversary of certification. The CPE obligation is fixed at 120 credits across the cycle. The only genuinely variable line is training, and it is variable between roughly nothing and several thousand dollars depending entirely on how you choose to prepare.

Written like that, the decision looks different. A candidate agonising over whether $749 is worth it is usually agonising over the smaller number. The fixed costs of the certification are knowable to the dollar; the training is the line that can run into four figures, and the question that actually matters is whether you need a paid course at all.

It is also worth asking your employer before you assume you are paying. Certification budgets are common and frequently unclaimed, and the annual maintenance fee is the part people forget to ask about — it recurs for as long as you hold the credential, whoever paid for the exam.