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

NCEES publishes pass rates once a year. For the PE Electrical and Computer: Power exam, the most recent figures are:

	Candidates	Pass rate
First-time takers	2,230	60%
Repeat takers	1,040	42%

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

How Power compares to the other electrical exams

Exam	Candidates	First-time pass
Power	3,270	60%
Electronics, Controls & Communications	293	71%
Computer Engineering	41	46%

Resist reading that as a difficulty ranking. Different exams attract differently prepared populations — a specialised exam sat almost entirely by people who work in that specialty will show a higher rate without being an easier test. And the Computer Engineering figure rests on 39 first-time examinees, which is far too small a group to mean anything for an individual.

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

The repeat rate, and why it's lower

42% 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.*