About the North Dakota Journeyman Electrician license
North Dakota licenses electricians through the North Dakota State Electrical Board. The Journeyman Electrician license authorizes you to perform electrical work, generally under the responsibility of a master, supervising, or administrator electrician. You earn it by meeting the experience-and-education requirement — a combination of documented on-the-job hours and approved classroom instruction, or completion of an approved apprenticeship — and passing the trade exam.
The exam covers fundamental electricity and North Dakota's own electrical laws, rules, and wiring standards, plus the National Electrical Code (NEC), because North Dakota adopts the NEC as its electrical code. The Journeyman exam is given as two sections on the same day: a one-hour closed-book section on fundamentals, laws, and rules, followed by a 3.5-hour open-book NEC section. The North Dakota State Electrical Board (NDSEB) supplies the code book, a calculator, and pencils at the test site for the open-book section — you do not need to buy or bring your own copy. Tabs and highlighting on the provided book are commonly permitted, and loose or handwritten notes are not, but confirm the current tab policy directly with the board before test day. Because you'll be working from a book handed to you that morning, practice the same tab layout on your own study copy so you can reproduce it quickly — 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 North Dakota licensing works
- Experience: 8,000 hours, obtained over no less than 3 years, registered as an apprentice electrician under a contracting master or master of record. At least 4,000 and up to 8,000 of those hours must be hands-on practical wiring/installation experience; the rest can come from credited categories below. (The senior Master license then requires 1 year and 2,000 hours as a licensed journeyman on top of this.)
- Education/other credit: up to 2,000 hours for graduating a board-accepted 2-year-or-longer electrical school; up to 2,000 hours for equivalent U.S. armed-forces electrical construction work; up to 1,000 hours each for electrical repair work and fire-alarm system wiring; up to 2,000 hours for power-limited/process-control systems work.
- Application: you must apply to the NDSEB and be approved before you can sign up for an exam date; once approved, you must test within six months.
- Exam administrator: the exam is administered directly by the North Dakota State Electrical Board — not a third-party testing vendor. Passing grade is 70 percent. Score 60-69 and you may retest immediately; 50-59 requires a 3-month wait; below 50 requires a 6-month wait.
- Renewal: the Journeyman license expires every year on March 31 (currently a $25 annual fee) and requires 8 hours of continuing education on file, at least 4 of which must be code hours, before you can renew.
Before you rely on any value in this guide, confirm the currently adopted NEC edition with the NDSEB. 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.
This is the opening of the full study guide. The complete guide continues into code navigation, worked calculations and solved exam questions.
