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A plain guide to the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification as of October 2026. It covers the hands-on EX200 exam and its move to RHEL 10, the ten groups of exam objectives, the format, price and ways to test, Red Hat’s May 2026 certification framework, the jobs it fits, and how it compares to Linux+ and the CKA.
RHCSA, the Red Hat Certified System Administrator, is Red Hat’s certification for the core system administration skills used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments. You earn it by passing one exam, EX200.
EX200 has no multiple choice questions. You get a list of tasks and live systems to do them on, and Red Hat checks whether each system ends up in the required state. Red Hat’s exam page says the current exam is based on RHEL 10. There is no internet access and no notes, and every change has to survive a reboot. Set up an LVM volume that mounts fine until the machine restarts and you haven’t finished the task.
Since May 11, 2026, Red Hat places RHCSA at Level 2 of its five-level certification framework, and EX200 is the base exam for both the Enterprise Linux and Ansible tracks toward RHCE. There are no formal prerequisites, though Red Hat recommends RH124 and RH134 or comparable experience as a RHEL administrator. The certification is issued and maintained by Red Hat, which also publishes the official EX200 objectives.
Shell, redirection, grep, SSH, archives, links and documentation.
RPM and Flatpak repositories and packages.
Conditionals, loops and script arguments.
Boot targets, boot recovery, processes, tuning and journals.
GPT partitions, LVM and swap.
XFS, ext4, VFAT, NFS and autofs.
Scheduling, services, time sync and the bootloader.
IPv4, IPv6, hostnames and firewalld.
Accounts, password aging and privileged access.
Firewall, SSH keys and SELinux. Red Hat lists no weights for any group.
Four things that set EX200 apart from a multiple choice Linux exam in 2026, including one limit worth knowing before you book.
Red Hat calls EX200 a hands-on, practical exam of real-world tasks. Nothing is graded on what you say you would do. Red Hat looks at the state of the system, and its rule for all performance-based exams is that configurations must persist after a reboot without intervention. You can usually open the documentation that ships with RHEL during the exam, but you get no internet access.
Red Hat’s May 11, 2026 framework makes EX200 the Level 2 exam in both the Enterprise Linux and Ansible tracks. Add EX342 for RHCE in Enterprise Linux, or EX294 for RHCE in Ansible.
Red Hat lists the objectives as ten groups of tasks with no percentages attached, so nothing tells you which group you can afford to skim. The objective breakdown below covers all ten.
Red Hat’s RHCSA and EX200 pages still list administrators who need a certification under the DoD 8570 directive among the audience. The DoD 8140 program has since replaced that directive, and Red Hat doesn’t publish a DoD 8140 work role mapping for RHCSA on its certification or exam pages.
So if a federal or contractor position requires an 8140 qualification, don’t count on RHCSA alone until you’ve checked it against your work role. The current qualification matrices are published at the DoD Cyber Exchange.
The certification, the EX200 exam, and what it takes to keep RHCSA current, as of October 2026.
Red Hat’s EX200 page names RH294 and EX294 as the next step. Under the May 2026 framework, RHCSA plus one advanced exam in the same track earns an RHCE, and there are now two to pick from. The third direction leaves Red Hat for containers.
EX294, the Red Hat Certified Advanced System Administrator in Ansible exam, tests writing playbooks to manage systems with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Its objectives start with every task expected of an RHCSA. Pass it while you hold RHCSA and you have RHCE in Ansible. On its own it earns the advanced administrator credential.
The second route to RHCE stays on the operating system. EX342, now called the Red Hat Certified Advanced System Administrator in Enterprise Linux exam (it used to be the Linux Diagnostics and Troubleshooting specialist exam), is a four-hour hands-on exam on RHEL 10.2 covering boot failures, broken LVM, corrupted RPM databases, PAM and SELinux faults, and kernel crash dumps.
The RHEL 10 objectives no longer include the container management group that the RHEL 9 versions had. For container work, the Certified Kubernetes Administrator is a two-hour, performance-based exam on live clusters, and its troubleshooting tasks need the same Linux command line that EX200 tests.
Red Hat recommends RH124 and RH134 or comparable RHEL experience before EX200. From there the path branches toward RHCE in Enterprise Linux, RHCE in Ansible, or container work.
The Linux groundwork
The Red Hat system administrator level
Two questions to answer before you commit: can you sit it, and should you pursue RHCSA specifically. Here’s a straight answer to both.
No prerequisites, no application.
RHCSA has no formal prerequisites. Red Hat says attending its classes isn’t required and candidates can choose to take just the exam. Buy the exam, then book a remote session, a testing station or a classroom exam. Most testing sites ask for government-issued photo ID.
Experience changes the timeline.
Red Hat recommends RH124 and RH134, or the RH199 Rapid Track, or comparable experience as a RHEL administrator, and the format shows why. If you’ve never interrupted a boot to reset a root password or written an fstab entry by UUID, build a practice system first. Windows administrators and people new to RHEL get a longer list from Red Hat that starts with its RH024 technical overview.
Red Hat aims RHCSA at administrators who run enterprise Linux servers day to day, at DevOps professionals and at people working toward RHCE. These are the roles where the EX200 tasks show up most. None of them maps to a DoD 8140 work role through RHCSA, since Red Hat publishes no 8140 mapping.
The job RHCSA was written for. Runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers day to day: accounts and sudo rules, LVM and file systems, services and timers, patching from repositories, and the SELinux denial that stops a service after a change.
Looks after servers, accounts and services across an organization, often a mix of Linux and Windows. RHCSA covers the RHEL side, from boot targets and tuning profiles to NFS mounts and firewall rules.
Designs server builds instead of only maintaining them. Storage layouts with GPT and LVM, mounts by UUID, bootloader changes and time service setup are all EX200 tasks, and they are the parts of a build that have to be right the first time.
Red Hat lists DevOps professionals in its RHCSA audience. Pipelines, containers and automation all run on Linux, and the failures often come down to permissions, systemd units or networking. RHCE in Ansible, through EX294, is the natural next exam.
Keeps production services up and finds out why they went down. Reading journals, preserving them across reboots, spotting CPU or memory hogs and adjusting scheduling are EX200 tasks, and EX342 goes further into root cause analysis.
Takes escalated tickets on RHEL systems: a server that won’t boot, a lost root password, a file system that won’t mount, a port that SELinux won’t allow. Each of those maps to an EX200 task.
RHCSA and the CKA are both hands-on exams on live systems. Linux+ is CompTIA’s vendor-neutral Linux credential. Here’s how the three line up as of October 2026.
| RHCSA | Linux+ | CKA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issuer | Red Hat | CompTIA | CNCF via the Linux Foundation |
| Focus | Red Hat Enterprise Linux administration | Linux server administration | Kubernetes cluster administration |
| Platform Scope | RHEL 10 | Any major Linux distribution | Kubernetes v1.35 environment |
| Prerequisites | None (rec. RH124 and RH134 or RHEL experience) | None (rec. 12 months on Linux servers) | None |
| Exam Format | EX200, hands-on tasks, 3 hours | XK0-006, up to 90 items, 90 min | Performance-based, live clusters, 2 hours |
| Scoring | Pass or fail, with a score breakdown by objective | 720 of 900 | Not published on the exam page |
| Exam Cost | $500 in the U.S., free retake after a failed first attempt | $399 | $445, one retake included |
| Renewal | Current for 3 years, renew by retesting or earning another certification | 3 years, CE program | 2 years |
| Best For | Teams standardized on RHEL | Admins in mixed Linux shops | Platform, DevOps and SRE teams |
The RHCSA price is Red Hat’s U.S. individual exam price as of October 2026, and Red Hat sets prices by country, so check its exam page for yours. Linux+ is CompTIA’s U.S. voucher price and the CKA is the Linux Foundation’s exam-only price. Full facts for the other two are in the Linux+ guide and the CKA guide.
Certification Matchups puts the published facts, strengths and weak spots of two certifications side by side.
Our RHCSA boot camp covers the EX200 objectives in five days of live, instructor-led training, in person or live online. It uses Red Hat’s authorized courseware and hands-on labs in a provided environment, so there’s nothing to install. Your $500 exam voucher, practice questions, a certificate of completion and 180 days of one-on-one coaching after class are included, and if you need a second attempt you can retake the course free within a year. In-person students also have an on-site exam option.
The vendor-neutral alternative, command line basics, studying from an objectives list, and the certifications people weigh after RHCSA.
The vendor-neutral exam people weigh against RHCSA. What each of its five domains tests, what the performance-based questions look like, and why a home lab with Ubuntu and a Red Hat derivative like Rocky or AlmaLinux is a good starting pair.
Users and passwords, file permissions and ownership, sudo, open ports and login history. The everyday command line habits that EX200 assumes you already have.
How to turn an official objectives list into a study plan with one row per objective, which suits a task list like the 62 EX200 study points.
All three Kubernetes exams are hands-on with live clusters. Which one to take first, and why rusty Linux administration slows candidates down on the CKA.
CompTIA’s vendor-neutral automation exam, and how it compares with vendor automation credentials such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer.
Red Hat lists the EX200 objectives as ten groups of tasks, 62 tasks in all, and publishes no weights for them. Nothing in the outline says which group carries the most points, so plan to be fluent in every one. Click any group for what it covers.
The command line basics the rest of the exam depends on, in eleven tasks: issuing commands with correct syntax, input-output redirection and pipes, grep with regular expressions, SSH to remote systems, logging in and switching users, archiving with tar, gzip and bzip2, creating and editing text files, hard and soft links, standard ugo/rwx permissions, and finding answers in man, info and /usr/share/doc. There is no internet during the exam, so that last task matters more than it looks.
Configuring access to RPM repositories and installing and removing RPM packages, then the same two jobs for Flatpak repositories and Flatpak applications. Four tasks, which makes it one of the shortest groups on the list.
Conditional execution with if, test and [ ], for loops that process files or command line input, script arguments such as $1 and $2, and using the output of shell commands inside a script. The scope is small, but a script only counts if it runs.
Ten tasks on keeping a system running: booting, rebooting and shutting down normally, booting into a different target by hand, interrupting the boot process to gain access to a system, finding and killing CPU or memory intensive processes, adjusting process scheduling, managing tuning profiles, reading logs and journals, preserving the journal, controlling network services and transferring files securely between systems.
Listing, creating and deleting partitions on GPT disks, creating and removing LVM physical volumes, assigning them to volume groups, creating and deleting logical volumes, mounting file systems at boot by UUID or label, and adding new partitions, logical volumes and swap without destroying what is already on the disk.
Creating, mounting, unmounting and using VFAT, ext4 and XFS file systems, mounting NFS shares, configuring autofs, extending existing logical volumes, and diagnosing and correcting file permission problems.
Scheduling tasks with at, cron and systemd timer units, starting services and enabling them at boot, setting the default boot target, configuring time service clients, installing and updating packages from the Red Hat Content Delivery Network, a remote repository or the local file system, and modifying the system bootloader.
Configuring IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and hostname resolution, making network services start automatically at boot, and restricting network access with firewalld and firewall-cmd.
Creating, deleting and modifying local user accounts, changing passwords and adjusting password aging, managing local groups and group memberships, and configuring privileged access.
Firewall settings with firewall-cmd and firewalld, default file permissions, key-based SSH authentication, SELinux enforcing and permissive modes, listing SELinux file and process contexts, restoring default file contexts, SELinux port labels and SELinux Booleans. Five of the eight tasks in this group are SELinux.
Objective groups and tasks reflect the study points on Red Hat’s EX200 exam page, which says the exam is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, read October 21, 2026. Groups are numbered here in the order Red Hat lists them. Red Hat publishes no per-group weights.
The questions candidates ask most often when researching the Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification.
RHCSA, the Red Hat Certified System Administrator, is Red Hat’s certification for the core system administration skills used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments. You earn it by passing one performance-based exam, EX200, where you configure live systems rather than answer multiple choice questions. Red Hat places it at Level 2 of its certification framework, and it is the required first step toward RHCE.
Red Hat’s EX200 exam page says the exam is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, and the objectives it lists are the RHEL 10 ones. Red Hat’s Exam Objectives by Version document still lists two RHEL 9 objective sets for EX200 without marking them retired. If you prepared on RHEL 9, confirm which version your exam session uses before you book. The RHEL 10 objectives add Flatpak and systemd timer units and drop the container management group that the RHEL 9 sets included.
No. Red Hat doesn’t require a prior certification or class. It recommends Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) and II (RH134), or the RH199 Rapid Track course that combines them, or comparable work experience as a RHEL system administrator, and it says candidates can choose to take just the exam. You must be 18 or older to sit a Red Hat exam.
EX200 is a hands-on exam. You get a list of tasks and live systems to complete them on, and Red Hat checks whether each system ends up in the required state. Red Hat’s U.S. catalog lists it at 3 hours. Internet access isn’t provided and you can’t bring notes or books, though the documentation that ships with the product is usually available. Every configuration has to persist after a reboot. Results arrive by email within three U.S. business days as a pass or fail with a breakdown by objective.
Red Hat lists 62 tasks in ten groups: essential tools, managing software, simple shell scripts, operating running systems, local storage, file systems, deploying and maintaining systems, basic networking, users and groups, and security. No weights are published for the groups, so plan to be fluent in all of them. The security group leans heavily on SELinux.
As of October 2026, Red Hat’s U.S. training catalog lists the EX200 individual exam at $500 USD. Red Hat sets prices by country, so check its exam page for your location. Candidates who don’t pass their first individual exam attempt get a free retake from Red Hat. Training Camp’s RHCSA boot camp includes the $500 exam voucher.
Yes. Red Hat offers remote exams you take from home or work, and you must pass its Mandatory Compatibility Test, run from a LiveUSB, before your exam date. You can also take EX200 as an individual exam on a testing station at a Red Hat or Red Hat partner location, or as a classroom exam at a Red Hat testing facility. Red Hat runs its own exam delivery rather than using Pearson VUE.
RHCSA fits Linux systems administrator, systems administrator, infrastructure engineer, DevOps engineer, site reliability engineer and technical support engineer roles in organizations that run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat aims it at administrators who run enterprise Linux servers day to day, at DevOps professionals, and at people working toward RHCE.
Red Hat doesn’t say. Its RHCSA and EX200 pages list administrators who need a certification under the DoD 8570 directive among the audience, and the DoD 8140 program has since replaced that directive, but Red Hat doesn’t publish a DoD 8140 work role mapping for RHCSA. If your position needs an 8140 qualification, check the current qualification matrix for your work role before you pick a certification. See the full DoD 8140 work role paths.
RHCSA is current for three years from the date you earn it. Under the rules Red Hat introduced on May 11, 2026, you keep it current by passing EX200 again, by earning another certification at the same level, or by earning a higher-level certification such as RHCE. Renew before the end date, because Red Hat says expired certifications have to be earned again from scratch.
RHCSA is Red Hat’s credential and tests RHEL 10 only, through hands-on tasks on live systems that must still work after a reboot. CompTIA Linux+ is vendor-neutral and covers any major distribution with multiple choice and performance-based questions on the XK0-006 exam. Pick Linux+ if you manage a mix of distributions. On a team standardized on RHEL, RHCSA is the one named for the platform, and it is the required step toward RHCE.
Since May 2026 there are two routes to RHCE. Pass EX294 for RHCE in Ansible, the step Red Hat’s EX200 page recommends next, or pass EX342 for RHCE in Enterprise Linux, a four-hour troubleshooting exam on RHEL 10.2. Add three Red Hat specialist exams in the same track to reach Red Hat Certified Architect. For container work, the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) builds on the same Linux command line skills.
Red Hat aims EX200 at experienced RHEL administrators, and the format is the hard part. You have three hours, no internet and no notes, and a task only counts if the system ends up in the required state and stays that way after a reboot. A mistake in a mount entry or a bootloader change can cost you more than one task. Hours on a practice RHEL system, rebooting after every change, are the best preparation.
For anyone who runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux or plans to move into RHCE, Ansible automation or platform work, yes. The exam grades working systems, it now covers RHEL 10, and since May 2026 it is the base exam for both the Enterprise Linux and Ansible tracks. It is a weaker pick if your servers are mostly Ubuntu or Debian, or if you need a DoD 8140 qualification today.
Whether you’re weighing the certification, working out funding, or planning training for a team, tell us where you are and we’ll help you map out the right path.