What score do you need to pass?

70%. The paper is 100 questions, so that is 70 correct answers, and you can afford to get 30 wrong.

You find out on the spot — DIR states the result is on screen as soon as you finish, and if you passed, the certification card is posted within 2 weeks of the exam date.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is about why it is harder to reach than it reads.

30 wrong sounds generous

• 70 correct answers needed, out of 100.
• 30 you may get wrong — or leave blank, which is the part that catches people.
• 51.22% of first-time candidates reached it in 2023. About half did not.

A 30-question cushion on an exam where the code book is open in front of you ought to be comfortable. Roughly half of first-time candidates miss it anyway, and the reason is not that the questions are unfair.

The threshold is not what fails people

270 minutes over 100 questions is 2:42 each, and that has to cover reading the question, working out where the answer lives, finding it, reading the rule, and any arithmetic. A candidate who knows where to look spends thirty seconds. A candidate who searches spends four minutes, and there is no room for many of those.

So the 30 spare questions are not really a cushion for wrong answers. They are the cushion for questions you never reach, and it is thinner than it looks: run 30 seconds over on every question and you are out of time before the end, with the unanswered ones counting exactly like wrong ones.

This is why an open-book exam is harder, not easier than a closed-book one at the same threshold.

Where the 70 has to come from

The official content outline is weighted, and it decides the shape of any sensible attempt at 70%:

• 66 Installation — 66% of the paper.
• 22 Determination of system requirements — 22% of the paper.
• 6 Safety — 6% of the paper.
• 6 Maintenance and repair — 6% of the paper.

Put the pass mark next to that list and the strategy settles itself. Installation alone is 66 questions — nearly the whole pass mark in one area. Answer it well and you are most of the way there before anything else is counted. Answer it badly and no amount of safety or maintenance and repair can make it back, because between them those two are only 12 questions.

It also settles the most common way to waste a study month. 70E and Cal/OSHA feel serious and finite, so they are satisfying to revise — and they are 6 questions. The full outline has the rest of the weighting.

What the result does and does not tell you

DIR publishes a single overall threshold of 70% and no minimum for any individual area. It also publishes no breakdown by content area, which means a failing result does not tell you which part let you down — you get a number, not a diagnosis. If you are planning around the scoring in any more detail than that, confirm it against the current candidate bulletin rather than against any prep site, including this one.