How to qualify for the exam

8,000 hours of on-the-job experience, then the exam. That is about 4 years of full-time work before you are allowed to sit it.

If you do not have the hours yet, you are not stuck — you register as an electrician trainee, which is how you work legally while you earn them. This page is the whole path, with everything cited.

Who has to be certified

Anyone doing electrical work for a contractor with a C-10 licence. That is the whole test — not your job title, not how long the project runs, not which state you learned the trade in. The one exception DIR names is the contractor's own qualifying person, the individual who sat the contractor's licence exam.

The hours, by classification

• 8,000 General Electrician — the one this site is about.
• 4,800 Residential Electrician
• 4,000 Fire/Life Safety Technician
• 4,000 Voice Data Video Technician
• 2,000 Non-residential Lighting Technician

General Electrician is the longest road of the five, and by a distance. The eligibility rules themselves are in Title 8, California Code of Regulations, section 291.1; DIR publishes the table above as its public face.

If you do not have the hours: the trainee route

Registering as an electrician trainee is what makes it legal to do electrical work for a C-10 contractor while you are still earning the hours. It has three conditions, and the third one surprises people:

1. $25 and a registration form. Renewal after that is annual and free — you send proof you are still enrolled, not another payment.
2. Enrolment at a state-approved school. Not optional, and not a formality: withdraw and your status goes inactive, at which point you are no longer legal to work for a C-10 contractor. That is why all 19,661 registered trainees in California are enrolled somewhere, across 85 approved schools — 41 of which are open to the public rather than tied to an employer or a union.
3. A supervisor who supervises only you. DIR's rule is that a certified electrician overseeing a trainee may supervise no more than 1 of them. Not a crew of trainees under one certified electrician — one each. It is the most concrete constraint in the whole scheme, and it is why trainee places are scarcer than the school seats are.

Coming from another state

An electrician's licence from another state makes you eligible to sit the exam — which is worth having, because it is the alternative to the 8,000 hours. What it does not do is replace the certification. DIR is explicit that out-of-state electricians must be certified before starting work in California, that there is no grace period, and that this holds however short the job.

What it costs, end to end

• $25 to register as a trainee, if you go that route. Renewals free.
• $75 to apply to DLSE for certification.
• $100 to sit the exam — and again for every retake. What a retake involves.
• $100 every 3 years to renew, with 32 hours of continuing education and 2,000 hours of industry work behind it.
• $200 if you let it lapse — and you sit the exam again. Continuing education will not save a card that has already expired.

Fees are set by Title 8, California Code of Regulations, section 292.0 and were last revised on 24 January 2019. Confirm them on DIR's own fee page before you post a cheque — a schedule that has not moved in years is exactly the kind that moves without announcement.