Snowflake spent 2026 quietly rebuilding its certification program from the ground up. The flagship SnowPro Core exam got rewritten around AI and the modern data platform, two of the three specialty exams received a version bump within the same week, and a brand-new advanced credential aimed squarely at machine learning operations opened for testing for the first time in the company’s history. If the last time you looked at Snowflake’s certification lineup was even a year ago, several of the exam codes you remember no longer exist in their old form.<\/p>\n
Snowflake released COF-C03, the newest version of the SnowPro Core exam, on February 16, 2026, retiring the English-language COF-C02 version on May 14, 2026 (localized COF-C02 translations followed on July 31, 2026). That’s not a routine content refresh. Snowflake’s own fiscal 2026 results<\/a> show why the timing makes sense: product revenue hit $4.47 billion for the year, up 29 percent, and Cortex Code, the platform’s AI coding agent, had already been adopted by more than 4,400 customers. An entry-level exam built for a data warehouse company doesn’t hold up when the company has become an AI platform company in the space of two years.<\/p>\n The new blueprint drops entire sections of the old warehouse-fundamentals content and replaces them with material that didn’t exist in COF-C02 at all:<\/p>\n Anyone who studied for COF-C02 even eighteen months ago would recognize maybe two-thirds of this exam. The rest is new territory built around how people actually use Snowflake in 2026, not how they used it when the certification was first written.<\/p>\n COF-C03 also consolidated the exam from six domains down to five, and the weighting change tells you exactly where Snowflake wants candidates to spend their study time:<\/p>\n Architecture alone jumped from 25 percent under COF-C02 to 31 percent here, and combined with performance it now accounts for more than half the exam. The exam itself is still 100 questions with a 115-minute time limit, costs $175 per attempt through Pearson VUE, and requires a scaled score of 750 out of 1,000 to pass. Snowflake recommends at least six months of hands-on platform experience before attempting it, and a passing result stays valid for two years before recertification.<\/p>\n If you’re already certified under COF-C02, nothing changes for your existing badge. You keep your current SnowPro Core status and follow the normal two-year recertification cycle from whenever you originally passed, not a new clock tied to COF-C03’s release. The only real consequence is for anyone starting fresh: COF-C02 simply isn’t bookable anymore, so the current SnowPro Core exam<\/a> is the only path in for new candidates. Worth noting on DirectCertify’s own catalog specifically: the COF-C02 product listing is still live and selling with no retirement notice on the page itself, even though the exam it prepares you for has been unbookable through Snowflake since mid-May. If you’re shopping for Core prep material, confirm you’re looking at COF-C03 content before buying.<\/p>\n Snowflake runs three specialty-level certifications sitting above Core: Gen AI, Snowpark, and Native Apps. Two of the three moved to new exam versions on July 24, 2026, the same day, which wasn’t a coincidence so much as a cleanup pass tied to how fast the underlying features had changed since the originals launched. Snowpark’s SPS-C01 wasn’t touched in this cycle and remains the current version.<\/p>\n GES-C01 is already flagged “Exam Retired!” on DirectCertify’s own product page, pointing buyers straight to GES-C02 as the replacement. The new version runs 90 questions in 85 minutes and, like the old one, requires an active SnowPro Core certification plus at least a year of hands-on Gen AI experience with Snowflake in a production environment. SnowPro Specialty exams are priced at $225 per attempt, a step up from Core’s $175. Given how much of COF-C03 now leans on Cortex, taking Core first and Gen AI Specialty second is a logical sequence rather than an arbitrary one.<\/p>\n DirectCertify covered the original NAS-C01 exam<\/a> when it was still the live version of the Native Apps specialty. That exam has since been retired on Snowflake’s side and replaced by NAS-C02, released the same day as the Gen AI update. The Native Apps track validates building and monetizing applications inside the Snowflake Marketplace using the Native App Framework, and it’s stayed a smaller, more specialized credential than Gen AI even after the refresh, useful mainly for engineers actually shipping apps through Snowflake rather than general data practitioners.<\/p>\n The bigger structural change this year isn’t a version bump at all. Snowflake opened beta testing for SnowPro Advanced: MLOps Engineer, exam code MLA-B01, running from June 15 through July 13, 2026. As of this writing, Snowflake’s own certification listing still shows the exam under that beta-suffixed code, and it isn’t yet available as a product on DirectCertify’s catalog, so don’t expect a practice-test listing for it here until Snowflake formally moves it to general availability. This is the company’s first credential built specifically around production ML lifecycle work rather than general data engineering or platform administration, and it lands at a moment when Cortex and Snowpark ML have pulled a meaningful share of enterprise machine learning workloads directly onto the platform.<\/p>\n Notice that infrastructure management and pipeline orchestration together make up 46 percent of the exam. This isn’t a certification about knowing what a feature store is in the abstract; it’s built for people who are already running ML pipelines in production and need to prove they can keep them governed, monitored, and reproducible at enterprise scale.<\/p>\n Between Core, Specialty, and Advanced, Snowflake now runs eleven active SnowPro certifications, according to the current lineup on Snowflake’s own certification page<\/a>. Most of the Advanced tier wasn’t touched this year at all, so if you already hold or are studying toward one of these, nothing changed underneath you.<\/p>\nWhat COF-C03 Actually Tests Now<\/h3>\n
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The Domain Weighting Shift, and Why Architecture Jumped to 31 Percent<\/h3>\n
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What Happens If You Already Hold COF-C02<\/h3>\n
The Specialty Track Quietly Got a Version Bump Too<\/h2>\n
Gen AI Specialty Moves from GES-C01 to GES-C02<\/h3>\n
Native Apps Specialty Moves from NAS-C01 to NAS-C02<\/h3>\n
Snowflake Opened Its First MLOps Certification, and It’s Still In Beta<\/h2>\n
Eligibility, Cost, and Exam Format<\/h3>\n
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What the Five Exam Domains Actually Test<\/h3>\n
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Where This Leaves the Rest of the SnowPro Lineup<\/h2>\n