F5 spent nearly two decades funneling every new BIG-IP administrator through the same two exams: 101 Application Delivery Fundamentals, then 201 TMOS Administration. That path is gone now. Since May 1, 2025, earning the F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP (F5-CA, BIG-IP) credential means passing five separate, much shorter exams, each built around one slice of the job instead of one long cumulative test. A lot of prep content online still describes the old two-exam sequence, so if you last looked at F5 certification before the switch, or you’re staring at five unfamiliar exam codes with no idea where to start, here’s what actually changed, what each exam covers, and what it costs to get through all five.
Why F5 Blew Up Its Old Two-Exam Certification Path
The old route was rigid. Candidates sat 101 first, a broad conceptual exam on application delivery networking, then moved on to 201, a longer administration exam covering day-to-day TMOS operation. Miss a question on either one and you retook the whole thing, even the parts you’d already proven you knew.
F5’s Education Services team retired 101 on April 30, 2025, and restricted 201 to candidates who had already passed 101 before that date. In its place, F5 rolled out five modular exams, F5CAB1 through F5CAB5, that can be taken in any order with no sequencing requirement between them. Each one is narrow enough to prep for in a focused sprint rather than a multi-week cram, and a bad day on one exam only costs you a retake of that single 30-minute session instead of the entire certification.
F5 isn’t the only networking vendor rethinking how it slices up certification. Cisco took a similar path in 2026 when it split its wireless specialization into a core exam plus two concentration tests instead of one combined exam.
The Five New F5CAB Exams, One Job Function Each
Every F5CAB exam runs 30 minutes and uses a scaled passing score, and all five need to be cleared to earn the full F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP credential, exactly as F5 laid out in its own DevCentral announcement when the exams went live. What separates them is the specific slice of BIG-IP administration each one is built to test.
F5CAB1: Install, Initial Configuration, and Upgrade
This is the entry point for anyone who has never stood up a BIG-IP system from a blank state. It covers first-boot licensing and provisioning, initial network configuration, and the actual mechanics of upgrading a device between TMOS versions. It’s the exam that matters most if your job involves standing up new appliances or owning the patch cycle on existing ones.
F5CAB2: Data Plane Concepts
Where CAB1 is about setup, CAB2 is pure traffic theory. It tests whether you understand how requests actually move through a BIG-IP system before you’re trusted to touch a live configuration: virtual server types (Standard, Forwarding, Stateless, Reject, Performance Layer 4, and Performance HTTP), pools and pool members, Self IPs and VLANs, pool-level and node-level health monitoring, and how persistence and load balancing decisions get made. DirectCertify’s F5CAB2 practice questions are built around these same six virtual server types if you want to test your recall before exam day.
F5CAB3: Data Plane Configuration
CAB3 is the hands-on counterpart to CAB2’s theory. Instead of asking you to describe how virtual servers and pools behave, it asks you to actually build and modify them, turning the traffic model from CAB2 into a working configuration on the box.
F5CAB4: Control Plane Administration
This exam moves off the traffic path entirely and into keeping the device itself healthy and recoverable: managing a high-availability pair, creating and restoring UCS archives, configuring authentication methods for administrative access, running config-sync between HA units, and checking upgrade eligibility before you touch a production pair.
F5CAB5: Support and Troubleshooting
The last exam is the one most tied to on-call work. It covers diagnosing resource utilization problems, tracking down network-level performance issues, and isolating where in the load-balancing chain a fault is actually occurring, the skills that get used at 2 a.m. when something’s already broken rather than during a planned change window.
What It Actually Costs to Get F5 Certified in 2026
Here’s the part most competitor content leaves vague. Each F5CAB exam is priced individually, and the delivery method changes the price:
| Exam | Domain | Online (Certiverse) | Test Center (Pearson VUE) |
|---|---|---|---|
| F5CAB1 | Install, Initial Configuration, Upgrade | $50 | $65 |
| F5CAB2 | Data Plane Concepts | $50 | $65 |
| F5CAB3 | Data Plane Configuration | $50 | $65 |
| F5CAB4 | Control Plane Administration | $50 | $65 |
| F5CAB5 | Support and Troubleshooting | $50 | $65 |
Add it up and passing all five costs $250 if you test online, or $325 if you sit every exam at a physical test center. That’s a genuinely useful number to sit next to the old path: F5’s two legacy exams, 101 and 201, priced at $180 apiece before retirement, meaning the full old certification ran $360. The new five-exam structure, despite requiring more individual test sessions, actually comes out $35 to $110 cheaper overall than the path it replaced. That’s a different kind of restructuring than Fortinet’s move back to a full NSE 1-8 tier system, which added exams rather than trading exam count for lower per-exam cost.
A few practical notes on getting through the five exams:
- Online exams run through Certiverse and require camera access for remote proctoring, while test-center exams are proctored in person through Pearson VUE.
- The five exams have no prerequisite order. Some candidates start with CAB2’s traffic concepts before CAB1’s installation content because it builds the mental model the other four exams assume you already have.
- Each exam is scored independently, so a failed attempt only requires a retake of that one 30-minute exam, not the full five-exam set.
How the Certification Holds Up Over Time
F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP credentials stay active for two years from the date you complete certification. F5 sends a reminder roughly three months before the inactive date, and if that date passes without action, there’s a 30-day grace period to reactivate before the credential is formally treated as lapsed.
Renewal has two real paths:
- Retake all five F5CAB exams from scratch, the same route a brand-new candidate would take.
- Sit the single F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP Recertification exam (F5CABR), a consolidated renewal exam built specifically so existing holders don’t have to redo all five modules just to stay current.
For most working administrators, F5CABR is the faster option since it’s a single scheduled session instead of five separate ones, though it still assumes you’ve kept your hands-on skills current across all five original domains.
What Happens If You Already Hold the Old F5-CA Credential
If you passed 101 before its April 30, 2025 retirement date, F5 still lets you complete the legacy path by sitting 201, rather than forcing you into the new five-exam structure retroactively. That grandfathering only applies to people who cleared 101 while it was still active. Anyone starting from zero today has no path back to the old two-exam sequence at all, it’s five exams or nothing. That’s notably gentler than how Palo Alto Networks handled its own PCNSE and PCNSA retirement, where the vendor cut over to a new role-based framework with no equivalent bridge for candidates mid-path.
Before assuming you know your own status, check a few things directly with F5 Education Services:
- Confirm whether your existing F5-CA credential (earned via 101/201) is still inside its own two-year validity window, independent of the exam restructuring.
- Confirm which renewal path applies to a legacy-earned credential specifically, since F5’s own documentation on this has changed more than once during the transition.
- Don’t assume a credential earned under the old exams needs to be re-earned under the new structure. F5 has not indicated that retroactively, only that new candidates must use the five-exam path going forward.
How to Approach the Five Exams If You’re Starting From Zero
Most candidates default to taking F5CAB1 first simply because it’s numbered first, but that’s not necessarily the smartest order. If you already administer BIG-IP in production, start with whichever exam matches what you touch most often day to day. Passing that one first builds confidence and tells you quickly whether your hands-on experience actually translates into exam-ready knowledge, before you invest study time in the domains you know less well.
In practice, CAB2’s traffic theory is the one most likely to trip up an experienced administrator rather than a newer one. Day-to-day BIG-IP work usually means configuring what already works, not explaining why six different virtual server types behave differently under the hood. If you’ve been running the same production configuration for years without ever touching a Forwarding or Stateless virtual server, CAB2 is worth extra study time even if the other four feel routine.
The other practical wrinkle is scheduling. Since all five exams are booked and taken separately through Certiverse or Pearson VUE, spacing them too close together leaves no room to learn from a near-miss on one exam before sitting the next. Spacing them a week or two apart, rather than trying to knock all five out in a single week, gives you time to actually review what tripped you up on CAB3 before walking into CAB4.
Who the F5 Certified Administrator Path Is Actually For
This isn’t a certification aimed at people breaking into IT with no networking background. It’s built for people already touching load balancers, application delivery controllers, or BIG-IP specifically as part of their job, and who need a vendor-recognized credential to prove it.
Real numbers help frame who benefits most:
- ZipRecruiter lists F5 Administrator roles in the United States paying between roughly $64,000 and $113,000 annually as of mid-2026, with F5 BIG-IP Administrator postings specifically ranging up to $186,000 for senior and architect-level positions.
- Demand skews toward organizations running large-scale application delivery infrastructure: financial services, government, and enterprises mid-migration to cloud, where BIG-IP still sits in front of critical traffic.
- The five-exam structure is arguably a better fit for people already working with BIG-IP day to day, since you can knock out the domain matching your current role first (CAB5 for someone already doing troubleshooting, for example) rather than studying unfamiliar material cold.
If your job has never touched a load balancer or an application delivery controller, this is not the certification to start with. It assumes real hands-on exposure to BIG-IP already, not just general networking knowledge. If you’re mapping out which exam to tackle first based on your current role, DirectCertify’s full F5 certification lineup breaks out practice material by exam code so you can start with the domain closest to what you already do.
DirectCertify is an independent certification prep provider and isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by F5, Inc. Exam pricing, retirement dates, and recertification policy are set entirely by F5 and do change, so confirm the current specifics on F5’s own Education Services site before you register for anything.