Failed the TDLR Journeyman Exam? Here's What to Do Next

You are not alone in this

TDLR’s published Electrician Exam Statistics for fiscal year 2024 show 2,365 passes out of 8,490 Journeyman Electrician exam attempts. That is a 27.86% overall pass rate. Roughly seven in ten attempts in FY2024 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 FY2024 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. Roughly $78 per exam attempt at the time of writing. 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’s 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.

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 didn’t

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). Don’t re-study branch circuits.

3. Studied the wrong code edition

Symptoms: rules don’t 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’s 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 in practice mode.

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’re running longer, your wave-pass strategy needs work, not your knowledge.

Week 4: full mocks + cleanup

Two full 80-question timed mocks, three days apart. Score them. Spend the days between fixing the misses. Last 3 days: light review, no new material, sleep.

Mental side

We’ve heard from candidates who failed the TDLR exam four times and passed on the fifth. We’ve heard from one who passed first try after barely studying because he’d 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 predicts your score in 90 seconds and shows your bottom-2 domains. From there, the platform surfaces practice questions weighted toward your gaps. The 30-day plan is built around the same retake structure above. We can’t promise you’ll pass. Nobody honest will. We can promise the prep window isn’t spent on what you already know.