Kentucky Master Electrician Exam Prep

About the Kentucky Master Electrician license

Kentucky licenses electricians through the Kentucky Dept. of Housing, Buildings and Construction. The Master Electrician is the senior individual credential. Kentucky qualifies you by experience rather than by requiring you to hold a journeyman license first: you must document 16,000 hours of verifiable experience in the electrical trade accrued since your sixteenth birthday (KRS 227A.060), and pass a more demanding exam that adds heavier load-calculation, design, and code-application content. Certain education and training substitute for part of the total — an approved electrical training course or two years teaching electrical technology each counts for 4,000 hours, and an associate's degree or diploma in electrical technology counts for 6,000 hours. A master electrician can pull permits, supervise electricians and apprentices, design installations, and serve as the qualifying master for a licensed electrical contractor (in Kentucky an electrical contractor license must be associated with a master electrician).

The exam is National Electrical Code (NEC) based, because Kentucky adopts the NEC as its electrical code. It is open book: you may bring the adopted edition of the NEC (Kentucky's approved references also include Ugly's Electrical References). Tabs, highlighting, and notes written in the book in pen are permitted; Post-it notes, loose papers, and photocopied pages are not — confirm the current rule on the Prov candidate information bulletin. Plan to tab and index your code book before test day, because the exam is as much a test of how fast you can locate a section as it is of what you have memorized.

Know these scope facts cold, because the exam asks them in plain-language form: the license is held by the individual, not the company; most installations require a permit and inspection before concealment (rough-in) and again at final; you must work within the classification you hold; and performing electrical work without the required license, or beyond your scope, is a violation that can cost you the license and carry civil penalties.

How Kentucky licensing works

• Experience: Kentucky requires 16,000 hours of verifiable experience in the electrical trade since your sixteenth birthday for the master license, with limited education/training substitutions (see Section 1).
• Education: approved instruction hours or completion of an approved apprenticeship program count toward the journeyman experience that underlies the master credential.
• Application: submit the application, fees, and proof of experience (often signed off by a supervising/master electrician or employer) to the board before you are approved to sit.
• Exam vendor: Prov, Inc. (the department contracts with Prov; some sittings can also be scheduled through Pearson VUE). The Kentucky Master Electrician exam is 100 questions, open book, with a 4-hour limit, and the passing score is 70 percent; the computer-based exam fee is $80. Confirm current details on the Prov candidate information bulletin before you test.
• Renewal: licenses renew on a fixed cycle and usually require continuing education, including code-update hours each time a new NEC edition is adopted.

As of 2026 Kentucky's electrical exams are based on the 2023 edition of the NEC (through the transition the exam bank drew on the 2017, 2020, and 2023 editions, with the 2023 NEC becoming the standard on January 1, 2026). Before you rely on any value in this guide, confirm the currently adopted NEC edition on the board and Prov bulletin. Ampacities, GFCI/AFCI scope, working-clearance distances, and receptacle-spacing rules all change between editions, and the exam is written to the edition your state has adopted — not necessarily the newest one published.