Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam Guide

About the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam
Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer
Purpose of This Exam Guide
About the Exam
Exam Outline
Recommended Training and Resources
Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct
Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

About the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam is intended for individuals who have related knowledge, skills, and experience building custom applications on the Lightning Platform.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam encompasses the fundamental programmatic capabilities of the Lightning Platform to develop custom business logic and interfaces to extend Salesforce using Flow, Lightning components, Apex, and Visualforce.

This exam is a prerequisite to the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Exam.

Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam is intended for an individual who has experience developing, testing, and deploying basic business logic and user interfaces using the programmatic capabilities of the Lightning Platform, including practical application of the skills and concepts noted in the exam objectives located in this guide.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer generally has 1–2 years of experience as a developer and at least 6 months of experience on the Lightning Platform. Candidates have invested time in studying the resources listed in the exam guide and the additional required study materials provided by Salesforce.

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer candidate has the experience, skills, and knowledge outlined below:

Experience with data-driven applications and relational databases.
Experience with object-oriented languages such as Apex, Java, JavaScript, C#, and TypeScript.
Familiarity with governor limits, their implications, and awareness of scale testing.
Experience with Model View Controller (MVC) and component-based architectures.
Knows the capabilities of the core objects in the Salesforce schema.
Knows the capabilities and use cases for formula fields and roll-up summary fields.
Knows when to use declarative vs. programmatic methods to solve business requirements.
Understands the capabilities of AI products, such as Agentforce, where appropriate.
Knows the Apex programming language and can use Apex best practices to customize Salesforce.
Extends the Lightning Platform using Flow, Apex, Lightning components, and Visualforce.
Utilizes the fundamental programmatic capabilities of the Lightning Platform to develop custom interfaces to extend Salesforce capabilities and develop custom business logic.
Familiarity with testing, debugging, and deploying code, and knows the available environments.

A candidate for this exam is not expected to administer any standard Salesforce applications, develop mobile applications, develop and publish managed products on AppExchange, perform tuning, or design integrations such as callouts, APIs, and email services.

Purpose of This Exam Guide

This exam guide is designed to help you prepare for the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam. This guide provides information about the target audience, the recommended training and documentation, and a complete list of exam objectives. Salesforce highly recommends a combination of on-the-job experience and self-study to maximize your chances of passing the exam.

About the Exam

Here are details about the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam.

Content: 60 multiple-choice questions and up to five unscored questions
Time allotted to complete the exam: 105 minutes
Passing score: 68%
Version: Exam questions align to the Summer ’25 Release.
Registration fee: US$200, JPY¥30,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Retake fee: US$100, JPY¥30,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Delivery options: Proctored exam delivered onsite at a testing center or in an online environment; find more information on scheduling an exam here.
References: No hard-copy or online materials may be referenced during the exam.
Prerequisite: None

This exam may contain up to five additional unscored questions to gather performance data. Unscored questions are randomly integrated and have no impact on your final exam result.

Exam Outline

The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Exam measures a candidate’s knowledge and skills related to the following objectives.

Developer Fundamentals: 27%

Understand multi-tenant concepts and design frameworks, such as MVC architecture and Lightning Component Framework.
Given a scenario, identify common use cases and best practices for declarative versus programmatic customizations, including governor limits, formula fields, and roll-up summaries.
Given a scenario, determine, create, and access the appropriate data model including objects, fields, relationships, and external IDs.
Understand use cases and limitations of using Agentforce for Developers.

Process Automation and Logic: 28%

Identify the capabilities of the declarative process automation features.
Understand how to declare variables, constants, methods, modifiers, Apex interfaces, and the appropriate use cases for each.
Given a scenario, assess how Apex control flow statements will execute and when to apply different control flow statements.
Given a scenario, write SOSL, SOQL, and DML statements in Apex, and assess what they will return.
Given a scenario, follow best practices to write Apex classes and triggers.
Given a scenario, understand governor limits and their implications on Apex transactions.
Describe the relationship between Apex transactions, the save order of execution, and the potential for recursion and/or cascading.
Implement exception handling in Apex, including custom exceptions as needed.
Given a scenario, use declarative functionality and Apex together to automate business logic.

User Interface: 25%

Given a scenario, prevent user interface and data access security vulnerabilities.
Given a scenario, display and use custom user interface components, including Lightning components, Flow, and Visualforce.
Describe the use cases and best practices for Lightning Web Components, including the framework, benefits, and events.
Given a scenario, implement Apex to work with various types of page components, including Lightning components, Flow, and Agentforce.

Testing, Debugging, and Deployment: 20%

Write and execute tests for triggers, controllers, classes, and flows using various sources of test data.
Given a scenario, know how and when to use the Salesforce Developer tools such as Salesforce DX, Salesforce CLI, and Developer Console.
Describe how to approach debugging system issues and monitoring flows, performance, asynchronous, and batch jobs.
Describe the environments, requirements, and process for deploying code and associated configurations.

Recommended Training and Resources

As preparation for this exam, we recommend a combination of hands-on experience, training course completion, Trailhead Trails, and self-study in the areas listed in the Exam Outline section of this exam guide.

The self-study materials recommended for this exam include:

Trail: Study for the Platform Developer Exam
Trailmix: Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform Developer Certification

To continue developing your Salesforce skill set, visit Trailhead Academy to enroll in expert-led courses.

The courses recommended for this exam include:

Build Applications Programmatically on the Salesforce Platform (DEX450)

The certifications recommended (not required) for this exam include:

Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator
- The Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator certification is designed for those who have experience with Salesforce and continuously look for ways to help their company get even more from additional features and capabilities.

Additional resources:

To review online documentation, tip sheets, and user guides, search for the topics listed in the Exam Outline section of this guide on Salesforce Help and study the information related to those topics.

Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct

At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value. Protecting the security of Salesforce Certifications is up to all of us. As a participant in the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to review and accept the terms of the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct at the beginning of each exam.

Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

One of the benefits of holding a Salesforce Certification is always being up to date on new product releases. You'll be required to complete the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer certification maintenance badge on Trailhead once a year.

Don’t let your hard-earned certification expire! If you don't complete all maintenance requirements by the due date, your certification will expire.

Bookmark these useful resources for maintaining your certifications.