A certificate helps you get read. It does not tell you what is open. The board does: every live internship we can find, filterable by company, location, deadline and start date.
27 credentials you can earn without paying, checked against the official pages. Each one says plainly whether it is free outright, free only once you prove you are a student, or a free course bolted to an exam that costs money.
Updated September 20, 202627 certifications
Lists of free certifications are everywhere, and most of them are wrong in the same way: they count the course, not the certificate. You finish forty hours of material and discover the credential at the end costs $200.
So every entry here carries the same three things: what it actually is, what the catch is, and a link to the issuer's own page. Where there is no catch, it says so.
A free course is not a free certificate. Voucher rules, student verification and "while supplies last" offers change often, so check the official page before you plan around any of these. And do not describe a paid exam as free on a resume.
How free these actually are
All 27 entries, split by what it takes to walk away holding the credential.
The 4 in the bottom band are the ones worth reading twice. They are still worth doing, but what you earn is a badge or a completion record, not the certification the brand is known for.
How to read a card
Five entries carry a Start here tag. Those are the picks for computer science and software engineering students, if you want to do one thing rather than browse. The coloured tag on every card is the cost: green is free, blue needs student verification, amber means the exam is paid.
Showing all 27 certifications
Cloud
6 entries
The vendor certifications that carry the most weight on a software resume, and the two paths that are genuinely free rather than discounted.
1
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
Free for studentsOfficial AWS certificationStart here
Foundational AWS cloud certification. Verified higher-ed students unlock Skill Builder Premium, and after 21 Builder Center badge milestones, a $100 voucher for the foundational exam.
The catchStudent status is verified through SheerID, and the voucher only arrives after the badge milestones. Budget time for those.
Language tracks, platform certifications and skills assessments you can finish without an employer paying for them.
7
freeCodeCamp certifications
freeCodeCamp
FreeVerified freeCodeCamp certificationStart here
Project-based developer certifications with a verified credential after the coursework and exam. Tracks include Responsive Web Design, JavaScript, Frontend Libraries, Python, Relational Databases, Backend and Full Stack.
The catchNone. This one is free end to end, and always has been.
Nothing matches that. Try a broader search, or clear the filters.
Do not call these free
Every one of these turns up on "free certification" lists. None of them is free in the way a student needs it to be, and claiming one you did not pay for is the kind of thing that unravels in an interview.
Google Career Certificates (Coursera)
Paid for most individuals. Free only through an institution.
Meta Professional Certificates (Coursera)
Paid for the certificate. Auditing a course is not the same as earning one.
Microsoft AZ-900, DP-900, AI-901 exams
Paid. A student discount is not free.
Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator
Paid, around $200. Trailhead badges are not this.
Cisco CCNA and CyberOps exams
Paid. A NetAcad discount is not free.
HashiCorp Terraform Associate
Paid exam. Ignore expired event-only free offers.
Databricks Associate and Professional exams
Paid. The Fundamentals badge is the free path.
Where these go on a resume
Exam-based vendor certifications from AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, GitHub and MongoDB go under Certifications. These are the ones that survive scrutiny.
Forage simulations go under Projects or career exploration, not Certifications. They are short pieces of sample work, and presenting them as credentials reads badly.
Trailhead and NetAcad go in by their exact badge name. Never write CCNA or Salesforce Certified Administrator unless you sat and passed the paid exam.
Micro-courses under an hour, such as the Google generative AI badge, are worth listing but not worth leading with. They show currency, not depth.
What this list leaves out
Two large families of certificate are deliberately absent.
Google Career Certificates and Meta Professional Certificates on Coursera. Both are widely recommended and neither is free for most individuals. Auditing a Coursera course does not earn the certificate.
The paid Microsoft exams, AZ-900, AI-901, DP-900 and their siblings. The Applied Skills credentials listed above are the free Microsoft path, and they are a different thing.
A certificate gets you read. An open role gets you hired.
