Every three years or so, CompTIA rewrites each exam's syllabus. Not a tweak — a proper rebuild. Objectives get renumbered, whole topics vanish, new ones appear, and everyone who wrote a study guide for the old version has to start again. If you are studying for the exam and miss the cutoff date, you'll have about 20% new content to learn!
The Network+ is due for an update next year. The current version, N10-009, launched in June 2024, which puts the three-year mark somewhere around June 2027. The draft objectives for its replacement, N10-010, are now circulating — and they're the most interesting rewrite I've seen on this exam in a long time.
Before you panic and put your studies on hold: you shouldn't. I'll come back to that. First, here's what the draft actually says.
How the CompTIA Cycle Works
It's worth understanding the rhythm, because it saves you a lot of anxiety.
CompTIA refreshes each certification roughly every three years. When the new version launches, the old one doesn't disappear overnight—the two typically run side by side for about six months while the old exam winds down. Anyone who passed the outgoing version keeps a fully valid certification for its normal three-year renewal period. Nobody's certificate gets downgraded because a new exam came out.
So if N10-010 lands mid-2027, N10-009 will likely still be sittable into late 2027 or early 2028. That's a long runway.
Do not wait for N10-010. I say this every cycle and people ignore me every cycle. If you're studying Network+ now, sit N10-009. You'll be certified roughly eighteen months before the new exam even exists, and by the time you renew, you'll do it with continuing education credits rather than another exam. Waiting for the “newer” version costs you a year and a half of career progress in exchange for nothing.
What's Being Dropped from N10-009
This is the fun part. Some of these genuinely surprised me.
The port numbers table is gone. N10-009 objective 1.4 made you memorize the whole list—20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 53, 67/68, 69, 80, 110, 123, 143, 161/162, 389, 443, 445, 514, 587, 993, 995, 3389, 5060/5061. In the N10-010 draft, ports are reduced to two bullets: well-known and dynamic. That's it. Two decades of flashcards, retired in a single edit. I'd still learn the common ones — CompTIA notes its bullet lists aren't exhaustive, and you can't do the job without knowing 22, 53, 80, and 443 — but the brute-force memorization looks over.
The troubleshooting methodology has vanished. This one floored me. N10-009 had an entire objective (5.1) devoted to the seven-step process: identify the problem, establish a theory, test the theory, establish a plan of action, implement, verify, document. It has been part of Network+ for as long as I can remember. In the draft, Domain 5 goes straight into cabling, then services, then tools. No methodology objective at all.
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) and SSE (Security Service Edge) are out. They only arrived in N10-009, and they're already gone from the draft.
The DNS/DHCP configuration objective is gone. N10-009 objective 3.4 had you configuring services — DHCP scopes, exclusion ranges, reservations, lease times, relays, and the full DNS record type list (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, NS, PTR), plus NTP stratum levels, PTP, and DNS over HTTPS/TLS. In N10-010, DNS, DHCP, and NTP appear only under troubleshooting. Record types are mentioned generically, not enumerated. The emphasis has moved from “configure it” to “work out why it's broken.”
A pile of physical media is out. Coax, direct attach copper, twinaxial, F-type and BNC connectors, MPO, SFP+/QSFP+, and the fiber channel vs Ethernet distinction — all absent from the draft's media objective.
Wireless loses some detail. Ad hoc mode, infrastructure mode, channel width and non-overlapping channels, and the pre-shared key vs enterprise authentication distinction are all missing. SSID/BSSID/ESSID terminology has been simplified to basic service set and extended service set.
Odds and ends: virtual IP, voice VLAN, MTU/jumbo frames (moved into troubleshooting), rack diagrams and cable maps, configuration management and golden configs, SNMP traps/MIBs/OIDs, the Cisco-style show command list, cable testers, Wi-Fi analyzers, visual fault locators, and ifconfig.
What's New
Artificial intelligence gets its own objective. Objective 3.5 is entirely new: generative, non-generative and agentic AI, LLMs, machine learning, network infrastructure for AI, and — the part I actually approve of — proper tool use. Results verification, bias, hallucinations, ethics, avoiding overreliance. Plus the security angle: data poisoning, prompt injection, social engineering, and access control. Whatever you think about AI on a networking exam, this section is more sensible than I expected.
Attacks now come with business impact. Objective 4.2 pairs each attack type with what it actually costs the organization: data exfiltration, compromised credentials, reputation, privilege escalation, service degradation, financial impact, regulatory consequences, legal, insurance, competitive advantage, business continuity. New attacks also appear —ping sweeping, overflow, password sniffing, hijacking, vandalism, and rubber duck (malicious USB devices).
Security+ concepts bleed in. Zero-day, CVE, attack surface, attack vector, data in use, PAM, HIDS/HIPS, security baselining, frameworks, and the four risk management strategies (acceptance, avoidance, mitigation, transference). If you've done Security+, chunks of Domain 4 will feel familiar.
Governance and vendor management. Objective 3.1 has grown a business brain: master service agreements, licensing, warranty support, vendor lock-in and lock-out, NDAs, incident response, ticketing systems, key risk indicators, service windows, and acceptable use / BYOD / password policies. This objective best reflects what a working network admin deals with on a Monday morning.
CDP and LLDP. Discovery protocols arrive in the switching objective, alongside MLAG, LACP by name, port mirroring, SVIs, error disable detection, and a much deeper Spanning Tree treatment (bridge selection, port types, port states, modes).
Wireless catches up. Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6E, and Wi-Fi 7 are named explicitly, with band steering, the 6GHz band, and low-power vs standard-power access points. Extenders and point-to-multipoint are in. Cellular and satellite have moved here from the media objective.
Physical installations expand a lot. Generators, water cooling vs air cooling, access control vestibules, biometrics, access cards, video cameras, asset labeling, cable management, fiber distribution panels — plus an entirely new safety section covering PPE, accessibility, crash carts, medical considerations and emergency procedures.
Telephony troubleshooting is back. Jitter, VLAN assignment, RTP, and codec mismatch. Voice never really went away in the real world.
Smaller additions: containerization, microservices and hypervisors in the cloud objective; the TCP/IP four-layer model alongside OSI; PDU encapsulation and decapsulation; classful addressing returns; REST, GraphQL and SOAP APIs; microtunneling and context-aware Zero Trust policies; synthetic path monitoring; netcat and debug; network taps and NetFlow; and installation planning considerations like attenuation, weather, budget and bandwidth.
What Hasn't Changed
Plenty, thankfully. The five domains keep the same names and the same order: Networking Concepts, Network Implementation, Network Operations, Network Security, Network Troubleshooting. The passing score stays at 720 on the 100–900 scale, the format is still multiple-choice plus performance-based questions, and the recommended experience is unchanged — A+ or equivalent knowledge, 9–12 months of hands-on networking, or roughly two years in IT overall.
The exam's core is unchanged. Subnetting, VLSM, CIDR, RFC 1918, APIPA. OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, NAT, PAT, FHRP. VLANs, trunking, tagged vs untagged, Spanning Tree, PoE. WPA2 and WPA3, controllers, access points, captive portals. RTO, RPO, MTTR, MTBF, and cold/warm/hot sites. SNMP, syslog, SIEM, packet capture, baselines. Zero Trust, IPv6 with SLAAC, dual stack, tunneling and NAT64, SDN and SD-WAN, VXLAN, infrastructure as code. ping, traceroute, nslookup, dig, netstat, arp, tcpdump, nmap. IDF, MDF, patch panels, demarcation points, meet-me rooms.
In other words: if you learn networking properly, you're covered either way. The fundamentals don't move. Only the packaging does.
The Caveats
Two things to keep in mind.
First, this exam syllabus is a draft. The exam number appears as both “N10-010 V1” and “V10” in different places; the domain percentages are all marked TBD; the number of questions and test length are TBD; and the acronym list has a handful of typos. Draft objectives change before launch. Topics get added back. Weightings shift. Treat everything above as a strong signal of direction, not a final specification.
Second, CompTIA hasn't publicly announced a launch date. June 2027 is my estimate based on the three-year pattern, not an official date. It could slip either way by a few months.
What You Should Actually Do
Sit N10-009. Now, or as soon as you're ready. You'll be certified long before N10-010 exists, and your certification will be just as valid.
If you're building training material, teaching, or writing — that's a different calculation, and this draft is worth reading properly. The shift away from memorization and toward troubleshooting, governance, and business impact is the real story here, and it's a change I broadly support.
If you want to get started on Network+ today, our free Network+ study guide will get you moving, and the full N10-009 course has the video lessons, labs, and practice exams to get you through it. We also have a 101 Labs – CompTIA Network+ labs course on our sister website.
Have fun,
Paul
