Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate
Power BI Data Analyst covers preparing data, modelling it, visualising it and deploying the result so that other people can rely on it.
One hundred minutes, nothing gating it, and a year until the first renewal falls due.
Exam facts
- Exam code
- PL-300
- Level
- Associate
- Field
- Data & AI
- Duration
- 100 minutes
- Questions
- about 40 to 60, including case studies
- Passing score
- 700 of 1,000 (scaled)
- Languages
- English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, ChineseThe badges group regional variants: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) count as one language here, so the vendor lists ten exam editions where this page shows nine.
- Price
- 165 USD (read 8 September 2026)
- Validity
- 1 year, renewable
- Exam delivery
- Pearson VUE (test centre or online proctored); students through Certiport
Prerequisites: No required certification. Microsoft expects familiarity with Power Query and DAX and experience preparing, modelling and visualising data.
Renewal: Free yearly renewal through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn
Source: exam page at Microsoft · Price: Priced by the country where the exam is proctored: 165 USD in the United States, 126 EUR in Germany and Austria (Microsoft Learn country selector, read 2026-09-08)
How to prepare
1. The vendor's free learning path
Microsoft publishes the exam objectives and a learning path free of charge — the authoritative source for scope and weighting. Open the learning path (opens in a new tab)
2. Online courses
Courses and practice questions from the directory that target exactly this exam — details, price and the provider link (affiliate) are on the course page.
3. A practice test in the exam format
MeasureUp sells a practice test for PL-300 with questions in the exam format, an explanation for every answer and a timed mode; the price shows in your currency on the shop page. Affiliate link.
Practice test for PL-300 at MeasureUp (opens in a new tab)Book the exam
Delivered by Pearson VUE (test centre or online proctored); students through Certiport. Schedule with Microsoft (opens in a new tab)
Affiliate disclosure: the course and practice-test links above are affiliate links — buying through them may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. The vendor's learning path and booking links carry no commission.
Most candidates arrive believing this is a visualisation exam and discover it is a modelling exam with charts attached. Relationships, cardinality, filter direction and the behaviour of the formula language under those relationships decide more marks than any question about which chart to use. It is also where the job actually goes wrong: a report with the wrong relationship direction produces confident, plausible numbers that nobody catches until a decision has been made on them.
- Model design before anything else: star schema, relationships, and why a flat table stops working sooner than people expect.
- The formula language at working level, especially how context changes what a measure returns.
- Preparation in the query editor, including the transformations that belong upstream rather than in the report.
- Row-level security, which surfaces more often than its weighting predicts.
- Deployment and sharing, the part self-taught analysts have usually never formalised.
Visual design carries real but modest weight. The exam cares that you choose an appropriate chart, respect accessibility, and avoid the presentations that mislead, which is a lower bar than good practice and a higher one than most business reports clear. It will not teach taste, and it does not pretend to.
The best-value Microsoft certificate for an analyst
We would rank this above the data fundamentals paper for anyone who already produces reports, because it evidences something a hiring manager can act upon rather than something to be quizzed on. The candidate who benefits most is the self-taught analyst: someone who has built working reports by accumulation, has never been shown why their model misbehaves at scale, and would gain more from three weeks of structured modelling study than from another year of practice. The certificate is the smaller half of that benefit.
| Aspect | Data Fundamentals (DP-900) | Power BI Data Analyst (PL-300) | Fabric Data Engineer (DP-700) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level | Foundational | Associate | Associate |
| Time | 45 minutes | 100 minutes | 100 minutes |
| Expiry | Never | Twelve months | Twelve months |
| Renewal | None | Free online assessment | Free online assessment |
| Written for | The person choosing a store | The person building the report | The person building the pipeline |
| Code you read | A simple SQL statement | The formula language and the query editor | SQL, PySpark and KQL |
- A hundred minutes, with case studies that describe one organisation across several questions.
- Microsoft fixes no question count, so let the clock set the pace.
- A scaled 700 to pass, which is not a percentage.
- German is among the nine editions; Pearson VUE runs the sitting, and the fee tracks the country.
- No prerequisite, and Microsoft expects working familiarity with the query editor and the formula language, and experience preparing, modelling and visualising data.
Build a model with two fact tables and one wrong relationship
Load sales and targets against a shared date table, connect them, then reverse the filter direction on one relationship and watch a total change without any error appearing. That single exercise teaches cardinality, filter direction and evaluation context faster than any chapter, and it is the shape of the mistake the exam keeps describing.
The twelve-month term looks harsh beside a permanent fundamentals certificate, and the renewal softens it: a free, unproctored check on Microsoft Learn, done from your own desk during the certificate's last half-year. Analysts lose this certificate by forgetting the date, not by failing the assessment. Set the reminder when you pass, and the annual cycle becomes a fifteen-minute confirmation that you still know a product that changes monthly, which is a reasonable thing for a report builder to be asked.
What a question looks like
Written by us in the exam's style. It is not a real question from any question bank, and we do not publish those.
A report shows total sales by product category and by region. When a region is selected, category totals change as expected; when a category is selected, regional totals do not. The model has one fact table and two dimension tables. What is the most likely cause?
Nothing here is broken in a way the interface flags, and the symptom is asymmetric, which rules out the obvious answers about missing relationships. The question is testing whether you understand filter direction as a property of a relationship rather than as a setting somebody forgot. Candidates who build models by dragging tables together until charts appear consistently miss this class of question.
What it costs to get and to keep
| Item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Exam fee | 165 USD | United States figure; Microsoft prices by country of proctoring (read 12 September 2026) |
| Exam fee, Germany and Austria | 126 EUR | from the Microsoft Learn country selector (read 8 September 2026) |
| Annual renewal | not published | free and unproctored on Microsoft Learn, reachable solely within the closing half-year of the certificate's life (read 12 September 2026) |
| Renewal after lapsing | 165 USD | the full proctored exam again (read 12 September 2026) |
How much preparation, from where you are
- You build Power BI reports weekly
- Shorter than the syllabus looks, with one caveat: if you have never deliberately learned modelling, that section will take longer than everything else combined and will change how you work.
- You are an Excel analyst moving across
- The transition is smaller than it appears, because the query editor and the formula ideas have counterparts you already use. Relationships are the genuinely new concept and the one worth the most study.
- You come from SQL and reporting tools
- Modelling will feel natural and the product surface will not. Concentrate on the formula language's context behaviour, which has no clean SQL analogue and is where experienced people lose marks.
What passing this does not prove
- Whether the report answers a question anyone asked.
- Whether the underlying data is trustworthy, which is upstream and unexamined here.
- Performance at organisational scale, beyond a few modelling habits.
- Any ability to design a chart somebody would enjoy reading.
Against the alternatives
- DP-900 — Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals
- Vocabulary rather than practice, and not a prerequisite. If you already produce reports, skip it and come here.
- DP-700 — Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate
- The engineering side of the same platform. That builds the pipeline, this consumes it, and holding both describes a small-team analyst who does everything.
PL-300 — quick answers
Is it really a modelling exam?
Largely, yes, and that surprises people who came for the charts. Relationships, cardinality and filter behaviour underpin a large share of the questions, and a candidate who is fluent there tends to find the rest straightforward.
How much of the formula language do I need?
Working fluency rather than mastery. You should be able to read a measure, predict what it returns in a given context, and recognise why it returns something else when the filter changes. Composing elaborate expressions from scratch is not what is being asked.
Does it help if I only use Excel?
It is a natural next step and a bigger one than the shared vendor suggests. The transformations and formulas have recognisable relatives, but the relational model underneath is a genuinely different way of thinking about a workbook, and it is the reason spreadsheets stop scaling.
Is the annual renewal a problem?
Only if you forget it. The assessment is free, unproctored and short, though the window sits entirely inside the certificate's closing half-year, and a lapse means paying for the full proctored exam again.
PL-300 or the Fabric data engineer exam?
By which end of the pipeline you stand at. This one certifies the report and the model behind it; that one certifies the ingestion and the warehouse the report reads from. An analyst who builds reports sits this; an analyst moving upstream into pipelines sits that, and should expect PySpark and KQL to be the cost of the move.
What comes next
Concepts this exam draws on
Glossary entries with the reason each one matters for PL-300.
- Data Analysis
Modelling and analysing data with DAX is the largest domain.
- Data Visualization
Visualising and analysing data in Power BI reports.
- Data Wrangling
Preparing data with Power Query.
- SQL
Data preparation assumes you can read the query that fed the model.
Last reviewed 12 September 2026 · Getting Digital