Texas Electrician ExamTexas journeyman & master

Checked against primary sources 2026-08-24

Ten hours a week, and the calculations half gets more than half of them

Built for somebody working full time with about ten hours a week to spend. The shape of the plan is our judgment. The two facts it is weighted against are TDLR's and PSI's, and both are in the first section.

On this page
  1. What the weighting is built on
  2. Week one: learn the book, not the code
  3. Week two: calculation chains, worked end to end
  4. Week three: the knowledge areas, in the published order
  5. Week four: rehearse at the real length
  6. If you have two weeks, or eight
  7. The last three days, which are not the last night
  8. Which parts of this are ours
  9. What this page cites

What the weighting is built on

Two published figures decide how the evenings get divided, and neither one is ours.

The first is the pass rate. In fiscal 2025, which TDLR runs from 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2025, the journeyman calculations portion passed 1,301 of 6,328 attempts, or 20.56 percent. The journeyman knowledge portion passed 1,402 of 5,731, or 24.46 percent. On the master side, calculations passed 753 of 3,946, or 19.08 percent, against 771 of 3,472, or 22.21 percent, for knowledge. Every electrical examination TDLR administers passed 6,181 of 26,303, or 23.50 percent.

The second is the clock. PSI puts 59 items on the journeyman knowledge paper with 130 minutes to answer them, and 26 items on the calculations paper with 110. That is 2.2 minutes an item against 4.2. Counting only the items that score, 56 and 24, it is 2.3 against 4.6. Either basis puts a calculations item at roughly twice the minutes of a knowledge item.

Now the part that is ours. A calculations item costs about twice the time to practice, sits behind the lower of the two pass rates, and belongs to a portion that is scored entirely on its own at 70 percent. So it gets at least half the evenings even though it carries less than a third of the scored items, 24 of 80 on the journeyman program and 30 of 100 on the master program, which is exactly 30 percent on both.

That is an argument rather than a rule, and you can check every number in it. If your own rehearsal says your calculations method is solid and your recall is not, invert the weighting. The evidence points at a starting position, not at a law.

Week one: learn the book, not the code

Spend the first week finding things, not learning things. The examinations are open book, the book is the one you carry in, and on the knowledge portion you have about two minutes an item to decide where to look and then look there.

Drill retrieval against a clock, out loud, one target at a time. Open the book, land on the section, close it, again.

Two things about the physical book belong in this week rather than later. Tabs come from the publisher or they do not come at all, so a tab decision made in week three is a purchase, not an evening. And marking the book is something PSI allows before the session and not during it, which makes every evening from now until the night before your last chance to write anything useful in the margins.

This week feels like it is not studying. It is the highest yield week of the four for one reason: nothing else you learn pays out if you cannot reach it inside two minutes.

Week two: calculation chains, worked end to end

PSI publishes what the calculations portion is made of, and it is a short list with the item counts attached. On the journeyman outline, services and separately derived systems carries 4 of the 24 scored items and branch circuit calculations and conductors carries another 4. Feeders is 3, special occupancies 3, and motors, wiring methods, equipment and devices, and theory carry 2 each.

A master candidate planning around a journeyman list will point the extra evenings in the wrong direction. On the master calculations outline services carries 8 of 30, and motors and generators carries 6.

Work whole problems, to a final rounded answer, with the book open every time. Stopping once you can see how it would finish trains only the part that is already automatic, and working from memory trains a skill the room does not ask for.

Mark each attempt by naming the step you got wrong, not by ticking the final number. Twenty problems logged that way will point at your two real weak spots inside a week. A column of ticks and crosses points at nothing you can act on.

Week three: the knowledge areas, in the published order

Ten subject areas carry the journeyman knowledge portion, and three of them tie at the top on 10 scored items apiece. Wiring methods and materials is one. Equipment and devices is another. Branch circuits and conductors is the third. Between them they are 30 of the 56 scored items, which is more than half the portion in three subjects.

The other seven areas run from 6 items down to 1, and the bulletin prints the whole outline at no charge. Read that list next to your own list of shaky subjects, and let the overlap decide the order.

Grounding is not on that list, and its absence catches people. There is no grounding row on either outline. The grounding questions are distributed through the areas that are named, which means the article gets studied because it turns up everywhere rather than because it has a share of the paper.

A master candidate should not carry the journeyman weighting across. Definitions, theory and plans is 3 items on the journeyman knowledge outline and 7 on the master one, and control devices and disconnecting means goes from 1 to 3.

One evening on a one item area is one evening for at most one item. That is the whole of what the weighting should decide for you, and it decides it only when two areas are equally weak.

Week four: rehearse at the real length

Sit a full portion at its published length, on a clock, with the book you will carry. The journeyman knowledge paper runs 59 items across 130 minutes and the calculations paper 26 items across 110. On the master program it is 75 items in 150 minutes and 33 in 170.

Nothing else in the four weeks measures endurance. An hour after work is long enough to practice a method and far too short to tell you what your accuracy does in the ninetieth minute, which is where a well prepared candidate is most often surprised.

Score the rehearsal, take the two weakest areas, and give the remaining evenings to those two only. Reviewing everything at this point is comfort. The two areas are points.

Whether you rehearse both portions back to back depends on whether you are sitting them back to back, and that is a scheduling question PSI can answer and no published document does.

If you have two weeks, or eight

Two weeks: compress week one into two evenings of pure retrieval drilling, give everything else to calculation chains, and keep one full length rehearsal of the portion you are least sure of. Cutting the rehearsal is the tempting move and it removes the only feedback in the plan.

Eight weeks: do not run each week twice. Add a second full length rehearsal at the halfway point and let its result direct the middle four weeks. A plan that runs for eight weeks without a measurement in it is eight weeks of preparing for the exam you imagine.

There is an outer bound on all of this that TDLR publishes. An applicant has one year from the date TDLR received the application to satisfy every requirement, and passing the examination is one of them. So the honest answer to how many weeks you have is that it depends on when your year started, and it is a number worth knowing rather than assuming.

The last three days, which are not the last night

The decision about whether to sit is made three days out, not the night before. PSI holds your fee if a cancellation reaches them 2 days before the examination date, and lets it go if it does not, so the go or no go call has a deadline of its own and it arrives before you feel ready to make it.

The night before is for the book and the route rather than the code. Check the binding, press every tab back down, check the expiration date on the identification you plan to carry, and know where you are parking.

PSI asks for you 30 minutes ahead of the appointment, and a late arrival is refused admission with the fee gone. An hour of last night cramming trades a small gain in recall for a real loss in the thing that actually fails people, which is working accurately while tired.

Which parts of this are ours

Sourced, and checkable against the documents in the citations below: the item counts, the minutes, both content outlines and every item count in them, the 70 percent standard on each portion, the pass rates with their numerators and denominators, the open book and reference material rules, the two day cancellation window, the arrival time, and the September date the examinations change edition on.

Ours, and argued rather than proved: the four week shape, the order of the weeks, the decision to give calculations at least half the time, the ten hours a week the plan assumes, and the advice to rehearse at full length.

Not on this page: what a compliant book and tabs cost, the full argument for weighting by gate rather than by item count, and the minute by minute clock strategy. All three are elsewhere on this site and all three are linked below.

What this page cites

NEC and National Electrical Code are registered trademarks of the National Fire Protection Association.

Trojan Digital Marketing is an independent company. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NFPA, TDLR, PSI Services, or any licensing authority.

Bring your own current copy of the National Electrical Code. The Texas exam is open book.

All practice questions are original. They are not actual exam questions.

Built and maintained by Jeff Clerisier, Trojan Digital Marketing.

Every rule here is cited to the section it comes from, and corrections are logged in public with the date. This is study material rather than electrical advice, and it does not replace your own code book or your inspector.