My first CCNA score was 792. Passing is 825. I missed by 33 points, which works out to about three or four questions depending on how Cisco weights them. The Pearson VUE proctor handed me a printout, told me to have a nice day, and I walked out into a parking lot feeling like someone had pulled my chest out through my sternum.
If you’re reading this article, one of two things is true. You just failed the CCNA and you’re trying to figure out what comes next. Or you haven’t taken it yet and you’re terrified of being in this exact situation. Either way, I have actual answers for you because I lived through it and came back six weeks later to pass with an 875.
Failing the CCNA is not the disaster it feels like in the parking lot. Let me walk you through what actually happens, what Cisco’s rules are, and what you do next.
What Happens In The Test Center That Day
The instant you submit your exam, the screen tells you whether you passed. There’s no waiting period, no email, no calling someone for results. You see it in real time before you’ve even stood up.
If you failed, the screen shows your overall score and a section-by-section breakdown. Network fundamentals at 65%. IP services at 71%. Security fundamentals at 48%. That kind of thing. You don’t get to see which specific questions you got wrong, but you see your performance in each topic area.
A few minutes later, the proctor prints that breakdown on paper. Hang on to that printout. We’ll come back to why it’s the most valuable piece of paper you’ll get out of this whole experience.
Then you walk out. Nobody at the test center says anything dramatic. They process the next candidate. Your failure doesn’t get announced. It doesn’t go on a public list anywhere. Your employer doesn’t get notified. Cisco knows, Pearson VUE knows, and you know. That’s the whole audience.
I want to underline this part because I didn’t understand it when I failed. There is no record visible to the outside world. You don’t lose anything by failing other than the exam fee and your time. Your resume, your job, your credit score, your dignity in front of coworkers, none of it changes. The only person treating your failure as a public event is you, and that’s a choice you can stop making.
Cisco’s Official Retake Policy
You can retake the CCNA. There’s no limit on how many times you can attempt it across your lifetime. But there are rules about timing.
Cisco’s official retake policy says you have to wait five calendar days, starting the day after your failed attempt, before you can sit for the same exam again. If you fail on a Wednesday, you can take it again the following Tuesday at the earliest.
That five-day rule is the only mandatory wait. After that, you can register and pay whenever you want. There is no probation period, no extra paperwork, no requirement to retake a course first. You schedule a new appointment, pay the $330 exam fee again (yes, the full fee, every time), and show up.
A few things that surprise people about the retake process:
The exam you sit for on attempt two pulls from the same question pool as attempt one, but you won’t see the same questions. The pool is large enough that a retake feels like a different test. Some topics that crushed you the first time may not show up in the same way. Some topics you barely studied may suddenly dominate.
Your previous score doesn’t carry over. You start from zero. There’s no partial credit for “almost passing” the first time, which is mathematically how most failures happen.
The voucher you originally bought is gone. You’re paying the full price for the second attempt. Some employers reimburse retake fees, some don’t. Worth asking your manager before assuming you’re stuck with the bill.
The Score Report Is The Whole Game
The printout the proctor hands you matters more than the failure itself. It tells you exactly where you bled points, and that information is the entire blueprint for how to pass the next time.
Look at the percentages by section. Anything above 75% is fine for now. Anything between 60% and 75% needs reinforcement. Anything below 60% is where you actually failed the exam. Those low sections are the only thing standing between you and a passing score.
I made a specific mistake here on my first failure. I looked at my score report, saw I’d bombed routing protocols and security fundamentals, and immediately doubled down on routing protocols. Why? Because routing protocols were what I felt I should know cold, and the low score hurt my pride.
Wrong move. Security fundamentals was where I’d lost the most points, and I’d been undervaluing it the entire study cycle because I thought security was the “easy” section. Spending another month on routing protocols and ignoring security would have set me up to fail in a different domain.
Look at the math on your own report. Identify the two or three sections where you lost the most points. Spend the majority of your retake prep time on those sections. Don’t let pride or interest drag you back toward the topics you already know.
Why You Probably Failed
Most CCNA failures I see fall into one of four categories. Allow me to be direct about them.
The first is not enough lab time. Cisco’s exam has simulations. You sit at a router CLI and have to actually configure something, then verify it. If you’ve spent your study cycle reading and watching videos but not labbing, the simulations will eat you alive. You can’t watch your way through CLI fluency. You have to type the commands, break things, and fix them. Plenty of times. If you don’t have your own setup yet, the home lab guide on this site covers the cheap and free options.
The second is misjudging the time pressure. The CCNA gives you 120 minutes for around 100 questions, and you can’t go back to previous questions once you move forward. Many people who know the material fine still fail because they spent fifteen minutes on a subnetting question early on and ran out of time before the last twenty questions. If you can’t subnet in your head fast, that’s a real problem on exam day, not just an academic problem. The mental math subnetting guide on this site is where I’d send you to fix it.
The third is misreading how Cisco asks questions. Cisco questions tend to be longer, more scenario-based, and full of subtle distractors compared to most other certifications. They list four answer choices and three of them sound almost identical. The exam tests not just whether you know the material, but whether you can spot the trap. Free practice tests rarely prepare you for that level of question construction.
The fourth is skipping topics you assumed wouldn’t show up. The CCNA covers everything listed in the exam objectives. If wireless feels boring and you skip wireless, wireless will absolutely show up on your exam and you’ll lose points you didn’t have to lose.
Take an honest look at which of those four buckets applies to you. The retake plan is different depending on which one it was.
How Soon Should You Schedule The Retake
Five calendar days is the minimum. Five days is also way too soon for almost everyone.
If you failed because you genuinely don’t know the material, the answer is not to take the test again in a week. The answer is to actually learn the material. That takes more than a week.
My rule of thumb: don’t schedule the retake until your practice exam scores are consistently 10% above passing. That means you’re hitting 90%+ on quality practice exams before you book the appointment. If you’re scoring 75% on practice exams and you take the real thing, you will fail the real thing too. The real exam is harder than most practice exams.
For most people, that level of preparation takes three to six weeks after the failure. Less than three weeks and you usually haven’t moved the needle on your weak sections. More than six weeks and you start forgetting the material you already knew.
I waited about five weeks for my own retake, and that was right. By the third week, my practice scores had jumped from the low 700s to the 850s. By week five, I was consistently scoring above 900 on the same practice exams that had been kicking me. That’s when I knew it was time.
Schedule the retake the week before you’re actually ready. Having a date on the calendar focuses your final week of study in a way that no amount of self-discipline replicates.
What You Should Actually Change For The Retake
This is the part where people get it wrong most often. They blame their study materials, buy new books, and start over from scratch. That’s almost always the wrong move.
The right move is to keep most of what you were already doing and add the missing piece.
If you didn’t have practice exams in your first study cycle, that’s the gap you need to fill before the retake. Practice exams trained me in how to read Cisco questions, which was the single biggest reason I went from 792 to 875. I used Boson ExamSim specifically, and I wrote a long review of it elsewhere on this site that explains why. The short version is that quality practice exams put you under the same pressure as the real test, with the same trap-laden question style, so you build that muscle before you sit in the real chair.
If your weak sections on the score report were configuration-heavy (routing protocols, ACLs, VLAN trunking), the gap was lab time. Open Packet Tracer and rebuild every topology that gave you trouble. Break the lab on purpose. Diagnose what broke. Fix it. Then break it differently. That’s how the configuration questions stop being scary.
If you ran out of time, your gap is fluency, not knowledge. Stop reading new material. Drill the topics you already covered until you can answer them quickly. Speed comes from repetition, not from depth.
If you skipped topics, the fix is obvious. Go cover the topics you skipped. The exam objectives are published on Cisco’s site. Match your study plan against the official list and find the holes.
In my case, the gap was practice exams and time pressure. I’d done the reading. I’d done the labs. I just hadn’t trained myself to answer Cisco-style questions at speed. Six weeks of practice exams fixed it.
The Part Nobody Tells You
Failing the first time is not a disqualifier. It’s not even unusual. Plenty of working network engineers I respect failed their first CCNA, and a few failed it twice. The certificate that arrives in the mail after you pass on attempt two looks identical to the one that would have arrived after attempt one. Same paper, same wording, same value on your resume.
The story you tell yourself about the failure matters more than the failure itself. If you treat it as proof that you’re not cut out for this work, you’ll quit. If you treat it as expensive feedback about which sections to study harder, you’ll come back stronger and pass.
I’ve had four conversations with friends who failed CCNA over the past two years. Three of them went on to pass within a few months. One quit and went back to help desk work because the failure broke something in his confidence. The variable was not raw networking talent. He was probably the smartest of the four. The variable was how each of us interpreted what the failure meant.
If you’re sitting in a parking lot somewhere right now reading this on your phone with a fresh score report in your hand, here’s what you actually do next. Drive home. Eat something. Sleep on it. Tomorrow, look at your score report and identify your two weakest sections. Build a study plan around those two sections. Schedule a retake about five weeks out. Add practice exams to your study mix if you didn’t have them. Then do the work.
That’s the whole playbook. Failing the CCNA does not end your networking career. Walking away from it does, and that’s a decision you don’t have to make today.
Network Engineer | CCNA | CCNP Enterprise
Allen Viola is a CCNP-certified network engineer who writes about exam prep and networking fundamentals from hard-won personal experience. He failed his first CCNA attempt, rebuilt his study approach from scratch, passed with an 875, and has kept going ever since. Everything he writes comes from that same mindset.
