Washington electrician exam cost and fees

What you pay

• Application fee, $107.60 to L&I: this covers your eligibility review, where L&I checks your 8,000 hours and 96 classroom hours before PSI will seat you. $41.40 of it is nonrefundable, so it does not come back if you are turned down.
• PSI sitting fee, $75: what you pay PSI Services to actually sit the 4-hour exam. You pay it again every time you retest a section.
• Your reference materials: Washington is open book and you bring your own, so the 2020 NEC, a printed copy of RCW 19.28 and WAC 296-46B in a binder, and any question-and-answer books are out-of-pocket costs on top of the fees.
• Prep is separate and optional: free options exist, and the JourneymanIQ Washington diagnostic is free.

The two-section fee trap

The (01) exam is two separately scored sections, and you have to pass each one on its own at 70%. The first is NEC & Theory: 60 questions in 3 hours. The second is the Washington laws and rules section on RCW 19.28 and WAC 296-46B: 17 questions in 1 hour. That matters for cost because passing one section and failing the other still costs you the $75 PSI fee again to retake the one you missed. Most guys who repay that fee lost the Washington laws and rules half, not the NEC half.

What a retake actually costs

• The $75 PSI sitting fee again, since you reschedule the test. You do not re-pay the L&I application fee on an already-approved candidate.
• A 14-day wait before you can retest. After a third failed attempt the wait jumps to 3 months between attempts.
• You retake only the section you failed, and you have one year from approval to clear both sections.
• The quiet cost: lost study nights and lost momentum. That is the expensive part, and it is the one the fee schedule does not show.

How hard is it, and is the fee worth the risk?

L&I does not publish a pass rate for the Washington exam, so be wary of any site that quotes you a number. What we can tell you is where the fee gets put at risk. The exam is open book, which sounds easy and is not. You pay the same $75 whether you finish calm or scramble, and the clock is the real opponent: 60 NEC and theory questions in 3 hours leaves no room to look up every answer, so the candidates who pass are the ones who already know where the article lives and only flip to confirm.

The second risk is the open-book and two-section trap. Carrying the 2020 NEC and a binder of RCW 19.28 and WAC 296-46B does not help if you never built the habit of landing on the right page fast, and the Washington laws and rules section is its own pass-or-fail gate. Study the wrong NEC edition and you waste the fee on a code-section miss: the exam tests the 2020 NEC even though the field code is the 2023 edition. The cheapest insurance is finding your weak section before test day, not after you have repaid the PSI Services fee.

Before you pay the $107.60to L&I and book the seat, find out which section is dragging your score. Take the free Washington diagnostic and see your projected score on both sections in 15 minutes.