Think you know what’s on the electrical exam? Think again.
Many exam bulletins list vague categories like “Motors” or “Special Equipment”—but that doesn’t tell you how many questions you’ll actually see or what NEC Articles to focus on.
If you're preparing for your electrical license exam, one of the biggest questions on your mind is probably this: "What’s actually on the test?"
Even if you’ve taken the exam before, you may not have a clear picture of the topics covered. That’s because the exam is often designed with traps, misdirection, and vague content categories that confuse test takers. Many people spend time studying the wrong material simply because they didn’t understand how the exam is structured.
Across the country, licensing exams are typically administered by organizations like PSI, ICC, or Prometric. Each of them publishes a Candidate Information Bulletin (CIB) on their website. These bulletins usually include a general outline of exam topics, often in table form, with percentages and section titles that sound straightforward... but aren’t.
Here’s the problem: those outlines rarely provide enough detail to build an effective study strategy. They might list broad subject areas like “Motors,” “Special Equipment,” or “Wiring Methods,” but they don’t tell you how many questions to expect from each Article or which sections of the NEC are worth deeper focus.
Take Texas, for example:
- A Journeyman exam might include only one or two questions from Article 450 (Transformers), yet some students spend days studying it.
- Chapter 5 (Special Occupancies) spans over 160 pages, but only 4–6 questions are typically pulled from its 15-question pool.
- Compare that to Chapter 2 (Wiring and Protection), which has around 93 pages, but over 175 different questions have been known to appear from that chapter alone across various exams.
This clearly shows why you can’t rely on the length of the Code section, or even its complexity, as your guide. What matters is understanding how the exam pulls and prioritizes its content.
