The 003 exam retired on 7 January 2026. The 004 launched the next day, tests against Terraform 1.12 instead of 1.3, and question banks built for 003 will steer you wrong on exactly the topics HashiCorp added.
State is still where people fail: remote backends and locking, state manipulation with terraform state mv and import, drift, and what taint and replace actually do. On top of that, 004 added dedicated objectives for lifecycle rules (depends_on, create_before_destroy, prevent_destroy), custom validation conditions, ephemeral values and write-only arguments, and organising HCP Terraform workspaces and projects - features most self-taught users have never touched.
An hour on the clock, and HashiCorp likes multiple-response formats that punish half-knowledge. This PDF has 147 real questions from the actual 004 exam, covering the state, lifecycle, and HCP scenarios the new version draws from.
