The clock that matters right now
If you have a test date on or after that day, the book you sit with is the 2026 edition. Every calculation you learned still works. What changed is where the rules live, and under a timed open book paper that is the expensive kind of change.
What the numbers say
TDLR publishes exam statistics every fiscal year. In fiscal 2025, 26,303 attempts across every Texas electrical exam produced 6,181 passes. That is a 23.5 percent pass rate, down from 26.4 percent the year before.
On journeyman calculations specifically, 6,328 people sat and 5,027 failed.
The agency says it out loud too. In the rule it adopted in June 2026 to open a faster route into the trade, TDLR wrote that "historically, the first-time passage rate for the journeyman electrical examination has been less than 30 percent", and gave the shortage of journeymen that produces as the reason for the rule. That is the licensing authority describing its own exam, published in the Texas Register.
The exam is two tests now, scored separately. You can pass one half and fail the other, and the two halves fail for completely different reasons.
You may be able to sit it sooner than you think
Since 1 July 2026 there are two ways to reach the journeyman chair rather than one. 16 TAC 73.21(b) now opens the examination at seven thousand hours of on-the-job training, or on completion of an approved accelerated program. The license itself still needs the full eight thousand hours that the statute sets, so this moves the exam earlier, not the license.
If you are somewhere north of seven thousand hours and were counting on eight, that is a year of waiting that may not apply to you any more. The rule, the hours credit and the arithmetic are set out here.
Start here
- Not sat it yetHow the exam is structured and timed
Two portions, scored separately, failing for different reasons.
- Just failedRead your score report before you rebook
It names the half you lost and roughly where. Most people rebook without looking.
- Studying nowExam wording mapped onto code locations
The exam does not use the code book wording. This maps one onto the other.
Practice against a clock, no account
Four of the five tools hold nothing back. The drill, the drawn scenes, the calculators and the sorter cost nothing, ask for no email address, and have no account behind them. The fifth is the timed paper, where thirty questions are free and the other 148 are the one thing on this site that has a price.
- Timed drillWhere does it live?
A question appears in exam wording. You name the article. Scored in seconds, because seconds are what you actually run out of.
- Timed paperMixed to the published blueprint and clocked
Weighted toward calculations the way the real paper is. Answers withheld until you submit, then every miss worked through. Thirty questions free, 178 in the full bank for $79.
The drill exists because of one number. TDLR reported a 23.5 percent pass rate for fiscal 2025 on an open book examination. The answers were in the room. What ran out was the time spent deciding where to look.
The question bank, and what seventy nine dollars is for
178 questions. 30 are free inside the practice page and work with no network and no payment. The other 148 arrive together for $79, once.
- Every question carries the arithmetic worked out rather than an answer letter: which factor applies before which, where the value came from, and why the final figure rounds the way it does.
- 534 lines explaining wrong options, one for every wrong option in the bank. Each names the specific error that produces exactly that number, because a wrong answer nobody would actually reach teaches nothing.
- 83 questions from the calculation areas and 95 from the knowledge areas, across 8 content areas and four difficulty bands.
- No code table is reprinted anywhere in it. Where a question needs a value out of the book, the value is given as data and the question tests what you do with it.
One payment. No subscription, no account, no password, and no mailing list, so there is no address here for anybody to lose. Stripe takes the payment and sends the receipt, and what comes back to the browser is a token saying a payment happened and nothing else.
If it is not what this page says it is, write through the contact page inside ninety days, quote the Stripe receipt, and the money goes back to the card. No reason needed. What is already loaded stays on your machine, because there is no account to close and no way for us to reach in and take it back.
It is worth saying what it will not do. It will not predict your result, none of the questions came off a real paper, and nobody can promise you a pass on the strength of a question bank. What it does is put the failure in front of you at a desk rather than at the testing center, with the reason attached.
And it is one bank for both licenses. The master paper is a knowledge portion and a calculations portion too, sat against the same book, so the 178 questions are the ones to come back to in two years. What the bank is not is master-weighted, because the blueprint with published item counts behind it is the journeyman one.
The calculations, worked the way the exam wants
Every calculation page here teaches the method and names the table. None of them print the table. You look the value up in your own book, which is what the exam expects you to do anyway.
Conduit fill. Ampacity and derating. Termination temperature. Box fill. Motor circuits. Grounding electrode sizing. Voltage drop. Small conductor limits.
Each one is written around where the points actually go, which is usually a step people skip rather than arithmetic they get wrong.
Why you should believe any of this
- Every rule on this site carries the section it came from. Not a summary of a summary, the actual number, so you can go and read it.
- When we get something wrong we log it in public with the date, what was wrong, and what it says now. There are entries in that log already, and they were found by us checking our own published pages against the code rather than by a reader complaining.
- We publish no pass rate. Three competitors in this market publish pass-rate claims on their own sites that contradict each other, one of them showing three different numbers on three different pages. None of them source it and neither could we.
- No page here reprints a code table. Questions supply the looked-up value as given data and test the method, which is the part people actually lose marks on, and it means you practice the way the exam works: with your own book open.
- Diagrams are drawn here, by hand, for these pages. The most spatial rules in the code are published by every competitor as pure prose.
Built on the 2026 code, which matters right now
Texas adopts the 2026 National Electrical Code effective September 1, 2026 (16 TAC 73.100).
Article 220 is now Article 120. The general lighting figure did not change and did not stay the same, it split. Several sites selling Texas prep still cite the old article numbers.
What this page cites
- 16 TAC 73.100 Texas adoption of the 2026 National Electrical Code.
- 16 TAC 73.21(b) Examination eligibility at seven thousand hours or on completion of an approved program, effective 1 July 2026.
- 51 TexReg, adopted rules of 26 June 2026, TRD-202602382 The preamble in which TDLR states the historic first-time pass rate.
- TDLR examination statistics, fiscal year 2025 Attempts, passes and pass rates by examination.