PE Power exam pass rates — and what they actually tell you

NCEES updates pass rates for the year-round CBT exams twice a year — in July, covering the January–June population, and in January, covering July–December. The figures below are the most recent full year, which is the only basis on which the three electrical exams can be compared honestly.

	Candidates	Pass rate
First-time takers	2,632	58%
Repeat takers	1,319	41%

Six in ten pass at the first attempt. That's the number worth carrying: this is a hard exam that most prepared engineers pass.

Source: NCEES Squared 2025 — the 2025 full-year population, the most recent published. The July 2026 half-year update (January–June 2026) puts first-time takers at 62% on 1,344 candidates and repeat takers at 42% on 721. We quote the full year throughout this page because the comparison below needs populations large enough to mean something.

How Power compares to the other electrical exams

Exam	Total candidates	First-time pass
Power	3,951	58%
Electronics, Controls & Communications	196	69%

Resist reading that as a difficulty ranking. Different exams attract differently prepared populations — a specialized exam sat almost entirely by people who work in that specialty will show a higher rate without being an easier test. NCEES also publishes a Computer Engineering exam; its volumes are too small to report meaningfully — a handful of candidates a year — so it is left out of the table rather than given a pass rate that reads as more solid than it is.

Power's real story in that table isn't the pass rate, it's the volume: it's twenty times the size of ECC. Nine in ten electrical PE candidates sit Power.

The repeat rate, and why it's lower

41% is the number that surprises people. It seems backwards — repeat takers have seen the exam, know the format, and have a diagnostic report. Why would they do worse?

Because the population is different. First-time takers include everyone who prepared well; repeat takers are, by definition, the group whose first preparation didn't work. Unless something changes between attempts, the same approach produces a similar result — which is exactly what the number reflects.

That's not a reason for pessimism if you're retaking. It's a reason to change the method rather than the hours — the thing second-attempt passers describe doing almost universally. What actually changes between attempt one and two.

What a pass rate can't tell you

It's a population statistic, and you're not a population. It says nothing about how prepared you are, and there's no meaningful way to place yourself inside it in advance — practice scores are poor predictors in both directions, and NCEES doesn't publish a passing score to aim at.

What the number is genuinely good for is calibration of effort. Six in ten passing means this is not a lottery and not a formality: it rewards structured preparation over months. Most candidates who put in 200–400 hours across roughly four months pass. That's the actionable version of the statistic.

Sources: NCEES Squared 2024 (2023–24 testing year) and NCEES Licensure Exchange*, December 2025. Pass rates are published annually and this page is updated when new figures appear.*