Checked against primary sources 2026-08-24

Questions about the Texas electrician exam, answered with the source attached

The journeyman exam is 85 scored questions across 240 minutes, 70 percent passes it, and 27.52 percent of candidates managed that in fiscal 2025. The rest of the answers are below.

How many questions is the Texas journeyman electrician exam?

85 scored questions, split 59 on the NEC knowledge portion and 26 on the calculations portion.

Unscored pretest items sit on top of that, three in knowledge and two in calculations, so 90 items appear in front of you and 85 of them count toward your result.

There is no combined total. The portions are scored apart from each other, so the number that decides your day is 59 or it is 26, never 85.

How long do you get for the journeyman exam?

240 minutes, which is four hours, divided as 130 minutes for the knowledge portion and 110 minutes for the calculations portion.

Measured against the scored item counts, that is about 2.2 minutes per question on knowledge and about 4.2 minutes per question on calculations.

Calculations questions are longer rather than more numerous, which is why the portion with fewer items gets almost as many minutes. One full dwelling load problem eats the whole four.

What is the passing score on the Texas electrician exam?

70 percent, and each portion is measured against it separately.

A candidate can clear the knowledge portion comfortably and miss calculations by two questions, and the result on the record is a failed calculations portion.

The same 70 percent applies to every electrical examination TDLR administers, not only the journeyman.

Is the Texas electrician exam open book?

Yes, and the reference list holds a single title: the National Electrical Code, which from September 1, 2026 means the 2026 edition, in a copy you bring yourself.

Nothing else comes into the room with you, and the rules about what that one book may look like are stricter than most candidates expect. They are further down this page.

Open book puts the difficulty somewhere other than recall. Every answer is inside the book you carried in, and the constraint is how quickly you can land on the right page.

When did the Texas journeyman exam split into two parts?

March 11, 2025. TDLR states the change on its electrician examination page:

Starting March 11, 2025, the Journeyman Electrician exam was changed to consist of 2 separate parts: a knowledge portion and a calculations portion.

TDLR, Electrician Examinations

Any guide written before that date is describing a single combined journeyman examination that no longer exists, whatever else it gets right.

Fiscal 2025 statistics still carry a row for the legacy single exam alongside rows for the two new portions, because the year straddled the change.

What happens if you pass one portion and fail the other?

The published answer stops at the money: a failed Master or Journeyman portion is retaken at $78.

That fee is documented. The mechanics around it are not. No plainly worded public statement sets out whether a passed portion has a shelf life, how long you have to come back for the other half, or what happens to the passed result if you let that period run.

PSI administers the examination and holds the scheduling rules, so that is where the answer lives. Ask PSI directly and write down what you are told, with the date. This page is not going to guess at it, and a study site that states it confidently without a source is guessing.

How many questions are on the Texas master exam and how long is it?

108 scored questions across 320 minutes, which is five hours and twenty minutes in the chair.

The split is 70 scored knowledge items in 150 minutes and 30 scored calculations items in 170 minutes. Five unscored items ride along on the knowledge side and three on the calculations side, so you actually answer 75 and 33.

Counting every item you actually answer, that is exactly 2.0 minutes each on the knowledge side and about 5.2 minutes each on the calculations side. Nobody publishes those two numbers, and they are the ones worth knowing before you sit down, because the pacing of the two halves is nothing alike.

The master calculations portion is the longest sitting in the Texas electrical program and the slowest paced. It also has the lowest pass rate of anything TDLR reports.

What is the pass rate for the Texas journeyman exam?

27.52 percent in fiscal year 2025, from 1,390 passes on 5,050 attempts, published by TDLR in its electrician examination statistics.

That row is the legacy single journeyman exam. The two portions that replaced it report on their own lines: knowledge passed 1,402 of 5,731 for 24.46 percent, and calculations passed 1,301 of 6,328 for 20.56 percent.

So there are three defensible answers to this question depending on which exam you mean, and all three are published with the counts behind them. A source that hedges at somewhere under 30 percent is rounding one of them and not saying which.

Which Texas electrician exam is the hardest?

Master calculations, at 19.08 percent in fiscal 2025, which is the lowest pass rate of any electrical examination TDLR reports.

It held the same position the year before at 19.96 percent, so it has been the hardest exam in the program two years running.

The fiscal 2025 counts behind that percentage are 753 passes on 3,946 attempts.

Are Texas electrician exam pass rates getting worse?

Yes. Across all electrical examinations the pass rate fell from 26.37 percent in fiscal 2024 to 23.50 percent in fiscal 2025.

Volume rose over the same period, from 15,170 attempts to 26,303.

TDLR publishes the figures and publishes no explanation for the movement. Neither does this page.

Which code edition is the Texas electrician exam based on?

The 2026 National Electrical Code from September 1, 2026. The PSI Candidate Information Bulletin, updated July 9, 2026, prints the line in capitals:

Effective September 1, 2026: THE EXAMINATIONS WILL BE REFERENCED TO THE 2026 NEC

PSI Candidate Information Bulletin, updated 9 July 2026

Texas adopts the 2026 edition statewide on the same day under 16 TAC 73.100, following a unanimous vote of the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation on July 28, 2026.

If your test date is on or after September 1, 2026, the book in front of you must be the 2026 edition.

As of August 24, 2026, TDLR's own electrician examination page still described the 2023 edition. The bulletin carries a revision date and the web pages do not, so read the bulletin and check its date.

What kind of code book can you bring to the Texas electrician exam?

A softbound copy of the National Electrical Code, and from September 1, 2026 that means the 2026 edition, with nothing else standing in for it.

Loose-leaf, spiral-bound and ring-bound copies are refused at the door. The binding is the check, and it is made before you reach the workstation.

The NEC Handbook does not serve as the code book, because it prints commentary alongside the rule text. It is an easy book to buy by mistake, since it looks like the same volume with more in it, and it is the wrong one.

Can you tab your code book for the Texas exam?

Manufacturer-supplied permanent index tabs are accepted and tabs you made yourself are not, per the PSI Candidate Information Bulletin.

Highlighting, underlining and handwritten notes entered in the book before the exam are all fine, so the restriction is narrower than people assume. It lands on tabs and on nothing else in the book.

A pre-tabbed softbound copy clears both checks at once, which is why it is the version worth owning. A month spent building a personal flag system out of sticky tabs buys you nothing at the door.

Does the testing center give you a code book?

No. The PSI Candidate Information Bulletin puts the code book on the candidate, and no test center keeps a loaner copy at the counter.

Advice to the contrary circulates widely and is wrong. Arriving without a compliant book costs you the fee and the seat.

Bring the copy you studied in rather than a clean one. Your hands already know where things are in it, and on a retrieval test that is worth real minutes.

What is on the journeyman knowledge portion?

Ten subject areas covering 56 blueprint items, weighted by count in the outline the testing vendor publishes:

The top three areas account for 30 items between them, better than half the outline, and the bottom four account for nine.

Those counts add to exactly 56, which is the scored-item count for the portion. The other three items you answer are unscored pretest questions the vendor is trialing, and you cannot tell which ones they are. So the blueprint accounts for every scored item on the portion, and the weighting above is the whole picture.

What does the Texas electrician exam cost, and what does a retake cost?

$78 for the journeyman examination, covering both portions, and $78 again to retake a portion you failed.

The master examination is priced the same way: $78 covers both portions, and a failed portion is retaken at $78.

The single-portion examinations cost less. Maintenance electrician, residential wireman, journeyman industrial, master sign, journeyman sign and residential appliance installer are $64 each. Journeyman lineman is $61.

Those are examination charges paid to the testing vendor and they are separate from anything TDLR charges for the license itself.

What this page cites

• PSI Candidate Information Bulletin, TDLR Electricians Item counts, timing, fees, the 2026 edition line, and the reference and code book rules. Updated 9 July 2026. source
• TDLR, Electrician Examinations The March 11, 2025 split of the journeyman exam into two portions, and the current examination page. source
• TDLR Electrician Exam Statistics FY2025 Pass rates and counts by examination for fiscal 2025, including the 27.52 and 19.08 percent figures. source
• TDLR Electrician Exam Statistics FY2024 Fiscal 2024 comparison figures, including the 26.37 percent overall rate and 19.96 percent on master calculations. source
• 16 TAC 73.100 Texas adoption of the 2026 National Electrical Code, effective September 1, 2026. source