Failed the Texas Journeyman Electrician Exam? Here Is the Retake Plan
A failed TDLR exam is not a verdict on your career. It is a score report. The mistake is treating the retake like a fresh start. The better move is smaller: find the weaker part, repair it, then test under the same clock again.
Last reviewed May 2026
You are not alone in this
TDLR's published Electrician Exam Statistics for fiscal year 2025 show 1,390 passed of 5,050 (27.52%). That is a 27.52% overall pass rate. Roughly seven in ten attempts in FY2025 did not pass. If your exam was one of them, you are inside a very normal distribution, not at the edge of it.
Source: TDLR FY2025 Electrician Exam Statistics
The honest first step
Most candidates who fail the TDLR Journeyman exam do not fail by a wide margin. They fail by 4 to 8 percentage points. The score report you get back is the most valuable document of your prep cycle: it tells you exactly which domains lost you the points. Open it, look at it, then put it down for a day. The work starts tomorrow.
TDLR retake rules
- Wait period. TDLR generally allows you to retake without a long mandated wait. Practical advice: wait 30 to 45 days. Long enough to fix gaps, short enough to keep momentum.
- Retake fee. $78 if one or both portions are failed. Verify the current fee on the PSI candidate bulletin and the TDLR website.
- Score report. Your domain breakdown comes from TDLR after the exam. That is the document the retake plan is built around.
- Re-application. No need to re-apply for the license. The eligibility you already had carries forward. You just reschedule the exam through PSI.
- Attempts. TDLR says you may retake each exam as many times as needed until you pass, with another fee possible on each attempt. Keep your one-year application eligibility window in mind.
Why most candidates fail
Three patterns repeat across hundreds of failed score reports.
1. Time ran out before they finished
Symptoms: the calculations section is the lowest scoring domain, and several questions in the back third of the exam were left blank or answered in panic. Fix: codebook navigation drills, the wave-pass strategy, and timed full-length mocks. The math is rarely the problem. The speed is.
2. Strong on what they knew, weak on what they did not
Symptoms: 90% on branch circuits, 45% on grounding. Common in apprentices who learned residential first. Fix: spend the retake window on grounding (Article 250), motors (Article 430), and services (Article 230). Do not re-study branch circuits.
3. Studied the wrong code edition
Symptoms: rules do not feel right on exam day, GFCI/AFCI questions in particular feel mismatched. TDLR is on NEC 2023. If you studied from a 2017 prep book, several rules changed. Fix: rebuild prep from a 2023-aligned source.
The 30-day retake plan
Week 1: read the score report
Spend the first day with the score report. Identify the bottom-2 domains. That is your study target. The next 4 days are pure code navigation drills focused on finding the rule for the questions you missed.
Week 2: targeted practice
Daily 60-minute sessions on your weakest domain. The adaptive engine surfaces only questions in your bottom-2 categories. By end of week 2, your score on those domains should be at 75% or better before you move to mixed practice.
Week 3: timed mini-mocks
20-question timed sets that mirror exam pacing. Goal is 1 minute per known answer, 2-3 minutes per code lookup. If you are running longer, your wave-pass strategy needs work, not your knowledge.
Week 4: full mocks + cleanup
Two full two-part timed mocks (85 questions), three days apart. Score them. Spend the days between fixing the misses. Last 3 days: light review, no new material, sleep.
Mental side
We have heard from candidates who failed the TDLR exam four times and finally got through it later. We have heard from one who cleared it first try after barely studying because he had run residential service calls for 10 years. Both stories are real and neither tells you anything about you. The retake is its own exam. Walk in with what you know now.
What we offer for retakers
JourneymanIQ's diagnostic shows your bottom-2 domains and the weak areas behind them. From there, the platform surfaces practice questions weighted toward your gaps. The 30-day plan is built around the same retake structure above. No prep tool controls an exam result. What we do is keep the prep window focused on the sections that cost you points.
Quick answers
How many times can you take the Texas journeyman electrician exam?
TDLR says you may retake each exam as many times as needed until you pass, but you may owe another exam fee for each attempt. Your application also has an eligibility window, so confirm your status with TDLR or PSI before scheduling.
Do you retake both parts if you fail the TDLR journeyman exam?
The current TDLR journeyman electrician exam has two separately scored parts: NEC Knowledge and Calculations. If one part is the problem, build the retake plan around that part instead of spreading study time across everything.
What should I study after failing the Texas journeyman electrician exam?
Start with the score report. Circle the weaker part, then drill the exact missed rule families: calculations, grounding, services, motors, box fill, conduit fill, or code lookup speed. A retake is a repair job, not a full restart.
Is there a long wait before retaking the TDLR electrician exam?
TDLR does not publish a long mandatory retake wait on its main electrician exam page. Scheduling depends on PSI seat availability and your active eligibility window. Check the current PSI and TDLR instructions before booking.
Take the diagnostic and see the gap
15 minutes. No signup. The score report shows which TDLR domains need work before you pay another retake fee.