GH-900

GH-900 GitHub Foundations Certification Guide

What the GH-900 GitHub Foundations exam covers, who it is for, what changed in January 2026, and how to prepare, with a link to the official study guide.

By Code Nexus team · 5 min read · Published 2026-09-25 · Updated 2026-09-29 · Reviewed by Code Nexus team

Official exam page

Committing a file is one part of working on a software team. GH-900 GitHub Foundations also covers repositories, pull requests, collaboration, automation and security. This guide explains the exam outline, the January 2026 changes and how to practise the decisions behind the features. Exam facts come from the official study guide.

What is the GH-900 certification?

GH-900 is GitHub Foundations, a foundational exam that Microsoft publishes a study guide for. It confirms that you have foundational knowledge of GitHub and its core features: Git, repositories, collaboration tools, project management and modern development practices.

The audience is deliberately wide. Microsoft describes it as designed for non-developers, developers and all GitHub users who want to improve their proficiency with the fundamentals. If your work touches a shared codebase, even as a writer, analyst or project manager, this exam applies to you.

For anyone heading toward AI engineering, GitHub is where the code, the reviews and the automation live, so it is one of the first tools worth knowing well.

What the exam looks like

The at-a-glance box above lists what Microsoft publishes. In summary:

• Passing score: 700 or greater on a scaled score.
• Skills outline: as of January 2026, split into seven areas (below).
• Question count and time: the study guide does not state them, so check the exam page when you book.
• Language: the study guide notes that English is updated first and other languages follow roughly eight weeks later.

One point matters a lot: the exam changed significantly in January 2026. Microsoft's change log says new objectives were added, some were removed, and the rest were moved and reworded. Notes and videos from before that date may cover topics that are no longer tested and miss ones that are.

What GH-900 teaches

The January 2026 skills outline has seven areas.

The largest block, at up to 30%, is the basics. The rest of the marks are spread thinly across many features, so breadth matters more than depth. A candidate who knows pull requests inside out but has never opened repository settings will lose marks on the administration and community areas.

What people underestimate

• Repository files. Knowing what CODEOWNERS and SECURITY files are for.
• Roles and permissions. Who can do what in a repository or organisation.
• The AI tools. Copilot's plans and modes are named on the outline, so read the current documentation, not old summaries.
• Community features. Small but easy marks, such as what InnerSource means or when to use a fork.

Who GH-900 is for

• Beginners who have never used Git and want a structured introduction.
• Developers who use GitHub daily but have never studied the parts outside their routine.
• Non-developers who work alongside engineers and want to follow the workflow.
• Students who want a credential to sit next to a portfolio of repositories.

The benefits

• It teaches the collaboration workflow. Branches, pull requests and reviews are how nearly every team ships code.
• It covers the safety features. Branch protection, roles and two-factor authentication are the controls that keep a repository trustworthy.
• It introduces automation and AI tooling through Actions and Copilot, both of which come up constantly in modern engineering.
• It is a low-friction credential. It has no coding requirement and a broad audience.

Is there demand for the skill?

GitHub's own numbers show how central the platform is. According to GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report, more than 180 million developers now use GitHub, and more than 36 million new developers joined in the past year. The same report says nearly 80% of new developers adopted GitHub Copilot in their first week.

Those figures describe GitHub's size, not the value of a certificate. We have not found reliable evidence that employers require GH-900 specifically. The reason to learn the platform is that you will almost certainly use it, and the exam gives you a structured route through all of it.

How Code Nexus prepares you for GH-900

Four episodes cover the syllabus, set inside the fictional Code Nexus company, plus one bridge episode.

• Episode 20, Please Stop Emailing Code introduces version control and repositories.
• Episode 21, Your First Pull Request covers issues, branches, pull requests, discussions, reviews, labels, milestones and projects.
• Episode 22, The Community Has Questions covers setting up a repository safely for outside contributors: hosted editors such as Codespaces, security, access and community features.
• Episode 23, The Integration Ticket is an engineering bridge on HTTP and API debugging. It sits between the GitHub episodes and is not part of the exam syllabus.
• Episode 24, First Team Release brings the whole flow together, from issue to branch to review to merge to release, and is the readiness check for the exam.

You practise in an interactive environment that reproduces the GitHub workflow in your browser. It is a simulation, not the live GitHub website, so alongside it you should open a real GitHub account and try each feature yourself. See where these episodes sit in the curriculum.

Code Nexus prepares you for the exam. Microsoft delivers it and issues the certification.

A study plan

1. Get a free GitHub account and use it while you study.
2. Work through the seven areas in weight order, starting with the basics.
3. Create a real repository. Add a README, a licence, a CONTRIBUTING file and a CODEOWNERS file, then open a pull request against it.
4. Try each feature once: an issue, a discussion, a Project board, a GitHub Pages site, and a simple Actions workflow.
5. Read the current documentation for Copilot, because it changes quickly.
6. Use Microsoft's free practice assessment if one is offered for the exam.

What to do next

GH-900 pairs naturally with Linux Essentials, since between them you can work in a terminal and collaborate on code. The next step on the certification roadmap is cloud fundamentals, starting with AZ-900. If you want to see why hands-on work sticks better than reading, see why practice beats passive study.

Ready to start? Create a free account and open Episode 20.

Code Nexus is not affiliated with GitHub (exam delivered through Microsoft). GitHub Foundations and its badge are trademarks of GitHub, Inc. (Microsoft). Code Nexus prepares you for the exam; GitHub (exam delivered through Microsoft) issues the certification.