What's on the California General Electrician exam
Four areas, and they are not equally weighted. Two-thirds of the paper is installation. If your study time is short, that is where it goes.
Where the points are
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Installation
66%Chapters 3 and 4, plus Article 250. If study time is short, it goes here.
roughly 66 of 100 questions
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Determination of system requirements
22%Load calculations, ampacity, service and feeder sizing. The maths questions.
roughly 22 of 100 questions
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Safety
6%NFPA 70E and Cal/OSHA. Small — do not over-prepare it.
roughly 6 of 100 questions
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Maintenance and repair
6%Troubleshooting, replacement rules, existing-work provisions.
roughly 6 of 100 questions
What that means in practice
Installation — 66%
Chapters 3 and 4 of the NEC — wiring methods, materials, boxes, conduit, devices, luminaires — plus the whole of Article 250 on grounding and bonding. Article 250 is the single biggest source of failed questions, and it rewards learning its Parts rather than searching it cold: Part III is the grounding electrode system, Part V is bonding, Part VI is equipment grounding. Special occupancies (pools, hazardous locations, health care) appear but thinly.
Determination of system requirements — 22%
The maths. Load calculations under Article 220, conductor ampacity and its corrections, service and feeder sizing, motor circuits, transformers, voltage drop, conduit fill. These are the questions that eat the clock, because each one is a procedure rather than a lookup — which is exactly why the procedure order is worth drilling until it is automatic.
Safety — 6%
NFPA 70E and the Cal/OSHA construction rules: the two electrical hazards and their separate boundaries, establishing an electrically safe work condition, lockout/tagout, the energised work permit, PPE selection as the last control rather than the first. It is 6% of the paper — worth one focused session, and no more than that.
Maintenance and repair — 6%
Troubleshooting and existing-work provisions: reading what a symptom tells you, what may be replaced like-for-like versus what must be brought up to current requirements, test instrument selection and category ratings.
The honest reading of this
88% of the exam is installation and calculations. People routinely over-prepare safety because it feels important and under-prepare Article 250 because it is tedious — and the exam does not share that sense of proportion.
Written by Chris Furman · last reviewed September 2026
I built Electrician Cards after watching a friend prepare for this exam and discovering how much of the published advice is written for a closed-book test. I am not an electrician — everything here is researched from the candidate bulletin, the 2023 NEC's own structure, and the official content outline, and it is checked against them again whenever it changes. Always verify against the code book itself.