10 Best SAS Courses for 2026: From Free Fundamentals to Certification

The acronym for Statistical Analysis System, SAS, is a time-honored pillar of data analysis software, trusted and used by professionals worldwide. Even with the emergence of popular tools and programming languages for data analytics such as Python’s libraries (Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, etc.), R, and Julia, SAS remains a potent force in the business analytics landscape.

SAS is renowned for its robust data management capabilities, advanced analytics suite, and widespread industry use, especially in healthcare and finance. While newer tools offer flexibility and a modern approach, SAS’s reliability, extensive documentation, and superior customer support make it a preferred choice for many organizations.

If you’re an absolute beginner seeking to break into the data science field or a seasoned professional looking to expand your skill set, I’ve curated a comprehensive list of both free and paid SAS courses in this Best Courses Guide (BCG). By enrolling in these courses, you’ll gain the knowledge and tools to extract valuable insights from your data using SAS.

Click on the shortcuts for more details:

• Top Picks
• What is SAS?
• Courses Overview
• Why You Should Trust Us
• How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

Which SAS Course Is Right for You?

What is SAS?

SAS, short for “Statistical Analysis System”, is a statistical software suite that’s like the Swiss Army Knife of data analysis.

Born in the 1970s at North Carolina State University, SAS has evolved and adapted to the changing technological landscape over its 5 decades of history. Today, it is a multifaceted software suite that allows users to perform an impressive array of tasks: data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and predictive modeling, to name a few.

From statisticians to data scientists, and from finance professionals to healthcare analysts, SAS users span a broad spectrum. These professionals all have one thing in common: a need to derive meaningful insights from raw, sometimes unwieldy, data. Predicting credit card fraud? Identifying and retaining high-value customers? Optimizing supply chain operations? Or even preventing fires and saving lives? SAS can do it all.

There’s a lot of statistical analysis tools out there that are much more popular than SAS, like Python’s NumPy/Pandas stack or R’s RStudio. So what makes SAS stand out over its competitors?

Well first of all, SAS is a mature and robust tool. Companies with a long history behind them tend to favor tools with a proven track record of stability, as opposed to newer trendy tools that have a lot cooler features, yes, but are more prone to frequent changes and bugs. That’s the reason why SAS has hugged the top spot in the Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions for over 16 years in a row!

And as SAS takes the security of its tools very seriously, providing extensive documentation to assist data analysts in their work, it should come as no surprise that a staggering 90% of Fortune 100 companies or their affiliates choose to be SAS customers. With more than 70,000 organizations around the world using SAS to extract valuable insights from their data, getting a cushy stable job as a data analyst at a well-established company is not far from reach. In fact, SAS’s user-friendly interface and language’s similarity to SQL make it an accessible tool for beginners while remaining a powerful tool for seasoned professionals.

Courses Overview

• Four of these ten picks are free: SAS’s own SAS Programming 1 e-learning, Penn State’s STAT 480 and 481 open courseware, and the two YouTube tutorials.
• The Coursera picks are paid. SAS’s courses on Coursera no longer offer a free audit track.
• Most of these courses use SAS OnDemand for Academics, which is free for learning use and runs SAS Studio in a browser, so nothing needs installing.
• The SAS certification exams are priced separately from every course here. The Base Programming exam (A00-231) costs $180.

Best Free Way to Start Learning SAS (SAS)

SAS Programming 1: Essentials is SAS’s own free e-learning, built to prepare you for the SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4 exam. It covers SAS syntax, accessing and validating messy data, subsetting rows, computing new columns, reporting results, exporting data, and using SQL to query and join tables.

The course runs 3 hours 7 minutes of video plus hands-on practice, done in SAS OnDemand for Academics, a browser-based version of SAS Studio that’s free for learning use. No install needed.

A live-class version of the same material runs 21 hours, but it’s only offered through private training, not public scheduling. SAS’s training site also has free practice exams, e-books, and video tutorials on SAS Studio Flows and Visual Analytics, worth a look once you finish this course.

The $180 certification exam (40 to 45 questions, 135 minutes, pass score 725/1000) is separate from the free course. If your employer covers it, SAS’s paid path bundles the exam voucher, prep guide, and virtual lab access.

Best Paid Certification Path for SAS Programming (SAS)

My favorite SAS Programming certification is the SAS Programmer Professional Certificate, built by the company behind SAS itself. It now spans four courses, roughly 70 hours, taking you from basic syntax through dedicated prep and practice for the SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4 exam (ID A00-231, $180 to sit).

The first two courses cover SAS Studio, importing and subsetting data, conditional processing, summarizing data, formatted reports, and PROC SQL. The last two shift into exam prep and practice questions, which sets this apart from a generic intro course: it’s built around preparing you for certification, not just teaching you the language.

Hands-on work includes analyzing airport passenger claims and restructuring world tourism data, so you’re coding throughout, not just watching. Expect plenty of coding exercises and multiple-choice checks along the way.

There’s no free audit here. You pay for the full certificate track on Coursera.

Best Free University SAS Course Sequence (Penn State)

STAT 480: Introduction to SAS is Penn State’s actual course material, released as open courseware. It covers programming basics, data management, and exploratory data analysis through lessons, demonstrations, and homework, the same setup used in the university’s own statistics program.

The sequence continues with STAT 481: Intermediate SAS, which extends the programming and data-management skills from STAT 480. Together, the two are designed to prepare students for the SAS Version 9 Base Programming Certification Exam. A third course, STAT 482: Advanced Topics in SAS, pushes further into SAS’s statistical procedures and advanced programming practices.

None of the three carry a certificate, workload estimate, or instructor interaction. They’re posted materials, not a managed course experience.

Best Short Basics of SAS Programming in Less Than 2 Hours (Angelica Spratley)

Angelica Spratley is a Data Science Teacher and SAS Foundation Instructor. In this free 1 hour 37 minute course, she teaches beginners the fundamentals of SAS. By the end of this course, you’ll have a solid foundation in SAS programming in a very short time.

What you’ll learn:

• Understanding SAS syntax, including data and proc steps
• Creating and importing datasets, and handling missing or corrupted data
• Recognizing special characters not read by SAS
• Using if-then statements and functions for data manipulation and transformation
• Applying procedures to obtain summary statistics including means and frequencies.

Best YouTube SAS Tutorial (Learnerea)

Sometimes a lengthy hassle-free YouTube tutorial is all you need to learn how to use SAS. This 11 hour 52 minute course by Learnerea is a complete package for learning SAS Programming even if you do not have any technical background. However, no exercises are provided in this course.

In this comprehensive free SAS tutorial, you’ll start by getting familiar with the SAS University Edition interface. Then, you’ll delve into the core components of SAS, including Data Steps and Procedures, and learn about SAS’s different data types. Moving on, you’ll master the art of table creation, library creation, and importing files into SAS, and after that understand how to use variables and ‘if-then-else’ statements for complex data manipulation.

You’ll be introduced to various procedures, which are the heart of various data analyst methods, such as Proc Print, Proc Sort, Proc Frequency, Proc Transpose, and Proc Contents. You’ll also explore various functions to help you exercise text, numerical, and datetime data into the right format for analysis. Finally, you’ll learn various methods to combine tables in SAS, enhancing your ability to handle and manipulate large and complex data sets.

Best Udemy SAS Certification Exam Prep (Aslam Khan)

SAS Simplified: SAS Base & SAS Advanced with AI Buddy is a beginner-friendly SAS programming course, formerly called The Simplest Guide to SAS Programming. Taught by Aslam Khan, it’s full of learning resources: quizzes, practice tests, a capstone project, a downloadable ebook, and a book of the same name. It now also comes with an AI assistant that answers questions about the material, walks through code examples, and helps debug your work.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the knowledge to tackle the following exams:

• SAS Certified Associate: Programming Fundamentals Using SAS 9.4
• SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4
• SAS Certified Professional: Advanced Programming Using SAS 9.4
• SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS®9

One major thing I like about this course is that its syllabus is designed in a streamlined way, focusing on four main areas:

• Data preparation: Here, you’ll learn how to import data from multiple sources, create new variables, write SAS functions, and understand the mechanics of SAS datasets
• Data structuring: This part helps you level up your skills in transforming data. You’ll learn how to merge and join multiple datasets together, as well as sort (flip upside-down) and transpose (flip sideways) them
• Data visualization: This section propels you further into the realm of analytics. It empowers you to gain insightful inferences from your data
• Macro programming: The final section educates you on writing your code in a professional and elegant manner​.

Best Advanced SAS Programming Certificate (SAS)

SAS Advanced Programmer picks up where basic SAS training stops. SAS states that prior SAS programming knowledge is required, and one way to get there is through its own SAS Programmer specialization, so this isn’t a place to start cold.

The three courses cover SQL inside SAS (querying, joins, views, database access), the macro language (text substitution, macro variables and functions, automating and controlling code), and advanced DATA step work: LAG, FINDC, and COUNT functions, PRX pattern matching, arrays, hash objects, the FORMAT procedure, and custom functions built with FCMP. That’s a solid set of tools for programmers who already write straightforward SAS but need to handle messier data and more complex logic.

At 64 hours across three courses, it’s a real time investment, roughly two months at 10 hours a week. It also maps directly to the SAS Advanced Programming certification exam, so it doubles as exam prep if you’re after the credential.

Best SAS Course for Statistical Modeling (SAS)

SAS Statistical Business Analyst is the guide’s one pick that treats SAS as a statistics tool rather than a programming language. Its three courses cover hypothesis testing and ANOVA, regression modeling, and predictive modeling with logistic regression, including model training and validation.

Worked examples pull from agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, banking, retail, and nonprofit data, so you see the same techniques applied across different kinds of problems. The 38 hours of coursework also prepare you for the SAS Certified Statistical Business Analyst Using SAS 9: Regression and Modeling exam.

This isn’t a starting point. SAS says prior SAS programming knowledge is required, and points to its own SAS Programmer specialization as a way to get there.

Best No-Code SAS Course (SAS)

Every other SAS pick in this guide involves writing code. Getting Started with SAS Visual Analytics doesn’t. It teaches SAS through a visual interface, no programming required.

The three modules cover accessing SAS Visual Analytics and the Viya platform, viewing reports across platforms, and navigating the interface itself. A hands-on lab lets you practice in the actual tool. The course also touches on preparing data with SAS Data Studio.

At roughly 5 hours with 4 assignments, it’s a quick, low-stakes way to see what SAS Visual Analytics does before deciding whether to learn the coding side.

For writing SAS code instead of clicking through a GUI, SAS Programming 1 is a free starting point.

Best Course for SAS Users Learning R (DataCamp)

R For SAS Users teaches R by constant comparison, mapping many R functions to their SAS equivalents. It’s built for the transition, not for R in isolation.

Melinda Higgins structures all four chapters around one workflow: check and clean data, explore relationships, model them, present results. You work through it with a single dataset (abalone), using dplyr for wrangling, ggplot2 for plotting, and base R for t-tests, chi-square, ANOVA, and linear regression.

At 4 hours across 56 exercises, this is a quick orientation, not a deep dive into any one topic. The payoff is a set of side-by-side code patterns worth revisiting when you apply R to your own data.

Ratings run high (4.7/5), but from just 29 reviews on DataCamp, too small to lean on heavily. The first chapter isn’t free to preview, so you’ll need to enroll to see if the SAS-to-R framing clicks for you. This pick moves from SAS to R rather than the other way around; for the reverse path, check SAS Programmer.

Why You Should Trust Us

Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 100 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 250,000 online courses and 250,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.

How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

Trying to find “the best” can be daunting, even for those of us who live and breathe online courses. Here’s how I approached this task.

First, I combed through Class Central’s Catalog and the internet to find a variety of free and paid open courses, some with certificates. You don’t need to enroll in a university to learn about SAS.

When choosing courses, I considered the following factors:

• Renowned Institutions: I looked for recognized institutions in SAS
• Instructor experience: I sought instructors with extensive experience in SAS and engaging presentation styles
• Popularity: I checked numbers of enrollments and views to find popular courses
• Course content: I examined courses that covered a range of topics and presentation styles, including the basics and more advanced topics. I watched some course videos to sample courses I hadn’t already taken
• Learner reviews: I read learner reviews (when available) to get a sense of the quality of each course, leveraging the Class Central database with its thousands of course ratings and reviews written by our users as well as available course provider reviews.

Then, I defined the scope for these recommendations. A SAS course can cover various topics, so I chose top courses from a range of sub-fields.

Ultimately, I used a combination of data and my own judgment to make these picks. I’m confident these recommendations will be a reliable way to learn about SAS.

Fabio refreshed this guide in August 2026. Three picks were retired because they are no longer available: the Sasensei quiz platform, SASCrunch.com, and the LinkedIn Learning course SAS Programming for R Users. Six new picks were added.

The post 10 Best SAS Courses for 2026: From Free Fundamentals to Certification appeared first on The Report by Class Central.