- The Exam on One Screen
- Seven Domains, One Weighting Table
- Case Management: The 30% Domain
- Application Development: The 25% Domain
- Data and Integration Essentials
- Pega GenAI and User Experience
- Security and Insights: Small Weights, Easy Marks
- Policy and Logistics Facts to Memorize
- Look-Alike Concepts That Cause Wrong Answers
- A Domain-Ordered Review Plan
- Frequently Asked Questions
- PEGACPBA25V1 has 50 questions, 90 minutes, a 65% passing score, and costs USD 190 per attempt plus applicable taxes.
- Case Management (30%) and Application Development (25%) together make up 55% of the exam.
- Mission badges and mission assessments are not the proctored certification; Pearson VUE delivers the real exam.
- Retake waits are three calendar days after a first failure and 14 days after a second, with a maximum of three attempts in 12 months.
The Exam on One Screen
This page condenses what a Certified Pega Business Architect candidate needs to recall quickly: the exam facts, the weighted topics, and the concepts that most often blur together under time pressure. It covers exactly one credential: Certified Pega Business Architect, version '25 for Pega Platform '25, exam code PEGACPBA25V1, issued by Pegasystems through Pega Academy. Other certifications share the "CPBA" abbreviation, so if you want orientation first, start with What Is CPBA Certification? before relying on any fact from outside Pega's own materials.
| Item | Fact for PEGACPBA25V1 |
|---|---|
| Issuer | Pegasystems, via Pega Academy |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE test centers or OnVUE online proctoring |
| Questions | 50 |
| Time allocation | 90 minutes, including the nondisclosure agreement |
| Passing score | 65% |
| Fee | USD 190 per attempt plus applicable taxes |
| Open or closed book | Closed-book |
| Extra time | 30 additional minutes for eligible candidates taking an English exam in designated non-native-English-speaking countries |
| Preparation path | Business Architect mission (version 8 for Platform '25) |
Because the 90 minutes include the nondisclosure agreement, your effective question time is slightly less than the headline figure. For a deeper treatment of the threshold itself, see CPBA Passing Score 2026, and for cost mechanics beyond the base fee, see CPBA Certification Cost 2026.
Question Formats
Pega's general format guidance allows single-response and multiple-response questions, matching or drag-and-drop items, and reading or scenario questions. That guidance does not promise that every exam form uses every item type, so avoid building your preparation around one format. Practice reading a business scenario and deciding which Pega feature solves it, because that skill transfers to every item type.
Seven Domains, One Weighting Table
The seven domain headings below reproduce the official weighted exam topics. They are exam objectives, not a suggested study-hour split, though the weights are a sensible guide for prioritizing. For a full walkthrough of each area, read CPBA Exam Domains 2026: Complete Guide to All 7 Content Areas.
| Domain | Weight | Rough share of 50 questions* |
|---|---|---|
| Case Management | 30% | about 15 |
| Application Development | 25% | about 12 to 13 |
| Data and Integration | 15% | about 7 to 8 |
| Pega GenAI | 10% | about 5 |
| User Experience | 10% | about 5 |
| Security | 5% | about 2 to 3 |
| Insights | 5% | about 2 to 3 |
*Simple arithmetic applied to the published weights; actual forms may distribute items differently.
Case Management and Application Development together account for 55% of the exam, which means a candidate who is strong in only those two domains still has a real path to 65%. A candidate who ignores them cannot make that up elsewhere.
Case Management: The 30% Domain
Expect scenario questions here: a business process is described, and you choose the right case design or configuration. Think in terms of a case life cycle, not a flowchart of screens.
Case Lifecycle Anatomy
Know the vocabulary and how the pieces nest.
- Case type: the blueprint for a unit of work, such as an expense claim or a service request.
- Stages: the major phases a case moves through, such as intake, review, fulfillment and resolution.
- Processes and steps: the work inside a stage, including assignments, approvals, automations and wait steps.
- Alternate stages: exceptional paths, such as cancellation or rework, that sit outside the primary path.
- Child cases: separate cases spawned from a parent to handle sub-work, with the parent able to wait on their completion.
Service Levels and Urgency
A service-level agreement defines goal, deadline and passed-deadline intervals for an assignment or case, and each interval can trigger actions such as increasing urgency or notifying someone. Urgency is the number that drives work-queue ordering. When a question asks how to make overdue work surface earlier, urgency increases tied to a service level are the pattern to recognize. Do not confuse the SLA timeline with case-level resolution time. An SLA can be set on an individual assignment as well as on the case.
Routing and Waiting
- Assignment routing: routes an assignment to a worklist (a person) or a work queue (a group), and can route by operator, work queue, or rules-driven logic. Work queues suit pooled work where anyone qualified can pick it up.
- Wait steps: pause a case until a time elapses, a date passes, or another case reaches a state. Use a wait when no human action is needed; use an assignment when a person must act.
- Parallel work: child cases and parallel processes let independent tasks proceed together, with the parent gated on their completion.
Candidates who find the scenario style hard should read How Hard Is the CPBA Exam? for an honest look at where these questions tend to bite.
Application Development: The 25% Domain
This domain is where the platform's structure matters. Questions probe whether you understand where rules live, how they are found at run time, and how to build in App Studio without breaking reuse.
Rules, Rulesets and Classes
The three terms are related but not interchangeable.
- Rule: a configured piece of application behavior, such as a flow, a data transform or a validation.
- Ruleset (and version): the container that packages rules for versioning and deployment.
- Class: the inheritance structure that determines which rules apply to which work, and where a rule can be reused.
The Situational Layer Cake
The Situational Layer Cake is Pega's approach to specializing an application for different business situations, such as region, customer segment or product line, without copying the whole application. You build a base layer of broadly applicable rules and add thin layers on top that override only what differs. Rule resolution then finds the most specific applicable rule at run time. The core exam idea: specialize by layering, not by cloning, so that a change to the shared layer flows to every situation that has not overridden it.
Accessibility Belongs Here
In the official exam outline, accessibility is listed under Application Development. Treat it as a build-quality concern: building so that users of assistive technology can complete the work, for example by using clear labels and logical structure. It overlaps conceptually with user experience, and a separate section below touches on that, but remember that when you are mapping an objective to its official domain, accessibility sits with Application Development.
Key Takeaway
When an Application Development question offers "copy the application and modify it" against "add a layer that overrides only the difference," the layered answer is almost always the intended one.
Data and Integration Essentials
At 15%, this is the third-largest domain, and it rewards clear thinking about where data comes from and how it enters a case.
- Data objects and data pages: a data object models a business entity, and a data page makes that data available on demand to the case, often with refresh and scope behavior you should recognize.
- Sourcing data: data can be defined in Pega, retrieved from an external system via an integration, or fed by a connector or service. Scenario questions ask which approach fits when the system of record lives elsewhere.
- Field and data mapping: know how case fields relate to data objects and how values populate forms and decisions.
- Business-architect scope: the exam targets what a business architect configures and decides, not low-level coding. Recognize integration concepts and choose the right approach, rather than memorizing implementation detail.
Pega GenAI and User Experience
These two domains are each 10%, and both reward recognizing the right tool for a described need.
Pega GenAI Objectives
The current official headings name specific capabilities, so know what each one is for.
- Blueprint: generative design assistance that helps draft an application structure from a description of the business need.
- Autopilot: in-product generative assistance during building and working.
- Knowledge Buddy: answers drawn from an organization's own knowledge content.
- GenAI Connect Rules: the rule type that connects an application to a generative AI service.
- Agents and Tool Rules: agents that pursue goals and the tool rules that give them defined capabilities to act with.
Keep the names version-aligned. Older study material may use different topic names or different thresholds, and the '25 exam preserves the current GenAI headings.
User Experience
Focus on views, which define what a user sees and enters for an assignment or case, and on how layout, labeling and field behavior support the person doing the work. Questions tend to be practical: which view type fits, how to present related data, how to keep a form usable. Separate this from the accessibility objective noted under Application Development, even though a well-built form serves both.
Security and Insights: Small Weights, Easy Marks
At 5% each, these two domains total roughly five questions on a 50-question form. They are narrow enough to master quickly, which makes them efficient points.
Security
The single most testable distinction in the domain.
- Authentication: proving who the user is, such as logging in.
- Authorization: deciding what that authenticated user may do, driven by access roles and the permissions attached to them.
Insights
Reporting and analysis on case and application data.
- Know how to choose a visualization that fits the question being asked, such as a trend, a comparison or a distribution.
- Recognize that insights are built from the data your cases generate, so well-designed case data produces better reporting.
Do not spend a disproportionate share of your time here, but do not skip it either. A candidate near the threshold can be separated from a pass by a handful of questions.
Policy and Logistics Facts to Memorize
Exam-day and retake rules are easy to confuse with those of other vendors, so anchor them to Pega's published policy.
- Retakes: after a first failure, wait three calendar days; after a second, wait 14 days. No more than three attempts in a 12-month period, and each attempt requires a new fee. These apply to retaking the same exam version.
- Identification: you must satisfy the identification and account-matching requirements for your delivery method, whether a test center or OnVUE online proctoring. Sort this out before exam day, not during check-in.
- Closed-book: no reference material during the exam.
- Validity: Pega currently states that certifications do not expire, subject to its discretion. Version equivalency, mission completion and the continuing record of an earned certification are separate questions, so check Pega's follow-up guidance if currency matters to an employer.
- Practice material: Pega does not provide official practice examinations and does not endorse third-party exam dumps. Use legitimate practice that tests understanding, such as the CPBA practice test, rather than recalled questions.
For eligibility questions, see CPBA Requirements 2026, and for scheduling logistics, see CPBA Exam Dates 2026.
Look-Alike Concepts That Cause Wrong Answers
| Concept A | Concept B | How to tell them apart |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Authorization | Who you are versus what you are allowed to do |
| Wait step | Assignment | System pauses on a condition versus a person must act |
| Worklist | Work queue | Belongs to one person versus a shared pool of work |
| Child case | Subprocess within a stage | Separate case with its own life cycle versus steps inside the parent's process |
| Ruleset | Class | Packaging and versioning container versus inheritance structure |
| Layering a rule | Cloning an application | Override only the difference versus duplicate everything |
| Mission badge | Proctored certification | Preparation milestone versus the Pearson VUE exam |
| Passing score | Pass rate | Required result on one attempt versus a population statistic |
A Note on CPBA and CSA
Candidates often ask how this credential differs from the Pega Certified System Architect. In short, the business architect track emphasizes configuring and designing applications in App Studio from a business perspective, while the system architect track goes deeper into technical rule development. Treat them as distinct roles and distinct exams, and do not carry one's topic list into the other.
A Domain-Ordered Review Plan
This is the one planning section, tied to the weights above rather than to a generic template. The order reflects dependency: structure first, then the features that sit on top of it.
Case Management
- Sketch two or three case life cycles on paper, naming stages, steps, wait points and child cases.
- Attach an SLA and an urgency increase to at least one assignment in your sketch.
Application Development
- Explain rules, rulesets and classes aloud without notes.
- Describe a Situational Layer Cake for a two-region business, and note where accessibility fits.
Data and Integration, User Experience, GenAI
- Match each GenAI capability to a one-line purpose.
- Decide which data should live in Pega and which should be retrieved from a system of record.
Security, Insights, then full review
- Run through the look-alike table until every pair is automatic.
- Finish with timed scenario practice on the practice test, and revisit weak domains.
For a broader plan and resource list, see CPBA Study Guide 2026: How to Pass on Your First Attempt.
Career Context, Briefly
Business architects typically work on application design and delivery inside organizations that run Pega, or at partners and consultancies that implement it. Whether the certification is worth the fee depends on your role and employer, and role salary should not be read as proof of a certification premium. For a balanced view, see Is the CPBA Certification Worth It? and CPBA Salary Guide 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
The exam has 50 questions and a 90-minute allocation, which includes the nondisclosure agreement. Eligible candidates registered for an English exam in designated non-native-English-speaking countries receive 30 additional minutes.
The passing score is 65%. That is a threshold on your own attempt, not a statistic about how many candidates pass overall.
You may retake the same exam version after waiting three calendar days following a first failure and 14 days following a second. You are limited to three attempts in a 12-month period, and each attempt requires a new fee of USD 190 plus applicable taxes.
Pega currently states that certifications do not expire, subject to its discretion. Version equivalency and the continuing record of an earned certification are separate matters, so check Pega's follow-up guidance if an employer asks about currency.
No. The Business Architect mission is the listed preparation path, and a mission assessment or badge is not the proctored certification. The certification itself is earned by passing the exam delivered through Pearson VUE.
Use this sheet as a recall check, not a substitute for the mission and hands-on practice in App Studio. If you can explain each section here from memory and apply it to a fresh scenario, you are close to exam-ready.