Conduit, boxes and raceways on the Texas journeyman exam

How the fifty-one break down

We sorted every question in this area by what it asks for. Twenty-seven are raceway fill, twelve are box fill, four are bends and pull points, four are underground, three are expansion and one is support. That sums to fifty-one with nothing left over, which makes the weighting here a measurement.

Box fill is the harder block of the two big ones. Ten of its twelve sit in the top two difficulty bands against fourteen of the twenty-seven fill items, and nine of the twenty-seven fill questions print decimal conductor areas, which is where the arithmetic gets slow.

The Texas journeyman exam is two separately scored papers taken in one sitting. NEC Knowledge is 56 scored items inside 59 sat, with 130 minutes on the clock. Calculations is 24 scored inside 26 sat, with 110 minutes. Each half passes at 70 percent on its own, so you can clear one and rebook the other. For fiscal 2025 TDLR reports 24.46 percent passing the knowledge portion and 20.56 percent passing calculations, out of 26,303 attempts across every Texas electrical exam that produced 6,181 passes.

The finding worth an evening back

That does not make bending less of a trade skill. It makes it a poor use of study time in the weeks before a Texas exam, and the bending page explains what the four items do ask so you can spend the hour on the thing that scores.

The eight topics

• Conduit fill on the Texas journeyman exam, and the notes under Chapter 9 Table 1 that decide the answer. Chapter 9 Table 1 by conductor count, and the decimal areas that hide the answer.
• Conduit bending math for the Texas exam, where the bank counts degrees and leaves the bender constants to the tool. The bench arithmetic earns nothing, and the 360 degree count earns every mark.
• Box fill on the Texas exam, where twelve items in the bank turn on how three of the six categories are counted. 314.16 allowances by what is in the box, and the items people count twice.
• Boxes and conduit bodies on the Texas exam, where the conductor size picks your sizing method before any arithmetic starts. Sizing a pull box by 314.28, and where 314.23(E) lets the raceway carry it.
• Expansion fittings on the Texas exam, and the quarter inch that settles them. Length change per degree, per hundred feet, and the fitting that is the wrong answer.
• Support and securing on the Texas exam, and the two distances every item is built from. Support interval and termination distance are two different numbers.
• Burial depth on the Texas exam, and why cover and trench depth are two different numbers. Cover depth by wiring method and by what is above it, at 300.7 in the 2026 book.
• Cable tray on the Texas exam, and the one word in Article 392 that settles the answers. Article 392 calls it a support system, and everything on the exam follows from that.

The two numbers people merge

Support interval and distance to a termination are separate requirements with separate figures, and items in this area put them in the same stem on purpose. A candidate who has learned one number applies it to both and loses the item. Support and securing pulls the two apart.

The same pattern shows up in fill. Support spacing has no bearing on how many conductors a raceway may carry, and one bank item offers that connection as an answer to see who takes it.

What moved for the 2026 edition

This area was renumbered more than most. Cover depths moved from 300.5 to 300.7. Securing moved to 300.13. 300.4(H) became 300.6(H) and 300.7 became 300.9(B). 300.15 became 300.17 and 300.14 became 300.16. Most published study material still points at the old addresses, which is a live problem for anyone sitting after 1 September 2026 with a 2026 book on the desk.

There is no fixed offset between the old numbers and the new ones, so a mental rule like add two will fail. Find the section by its title.

What these cost on the job

Fill and cover are the two topics in this area that get written up. An inspector reading a run counts conductors against the raceway size, and a run that is over is a run that comes apart. Cover depth is worse, because it gets found after the trench is closed. Both are cheap to get right at layout and expensive to get right afterward.

Expansion is the quiet one. A PVC run installed tight in February and left in a Texas summer moves, and the fitting that was left out is a repair with concrete around it. The expansion page covers the length change per degree per hundred feet that the calculation runs on.

What to do with this before test day

Tab Chapter 9 Table 1 and its notes, 314.16, 314.28, 300.7 and 358.24. Practice reading a decimal conductor area under time, because that is the step that turns a solvable fill item into a clock problem. Thirty free questions, timed gives you a read on whether fill or box fill is the weaker half for you.

The worked fill arithmetic, with the areas and the percentages shown, is in the question set.

Questions people ask

Do I need to know conduit bending math for the Texas journeyman exam?

Not for marks. We searched all five hundred questions in our bank for shrink, take up, cosecant, saddle, bender and stub and found none of them. The word offset appears once, inside a question that counts degrees of bend. All four bending items in the bank turn on the 360 degree limit between pull points. Bending is a trade skill worth having and it is a poor use of the last two weeks before a Texas exam, where the same hour spent on fill or box fill returns more.

Is box fill or conduit fill harder on the exam?

Box fill, measured by how our own items sort. Twelve questions in this area are box fill and ten of those twelve sit in the top two difficulty bands. Twenty-seven are raceway fill and fourteen of those sit in the top two. Box fill is harder because more things get counted and several of them get counted twice by mistake, while raceway fill is mostly a lookup plus a multiplication. Nine of the twenty-seven fill items print decimal conductor areas, which is where the clock becomes the problem.

Where are underground cover depths in the 2026 code?

300.7(A) in the adopted 2026 edition. A 2023 book carries the same material at 300.5. Most published study material and a fair amount of exam prep still points at 300.5, which matters because Texas adopted the 2026 edition under 16 TAC 73.100 effective 1 September 2026 and the examinations follow the same date. Since there is no consistent offset between the old and new section numbers in Article 300, the reliable habit is finding the section by its title in the table of contents.

Is the support interval the same as the distance to a box?

They are two separate requirements with two separate figures, and questions in this area put both in the same stem to see whether you have merged them. One governs how often the raceway or cable is supported along its run, and the other governs how close to a termination the first support has to be. Learn them as two numbers. A candidate who carries one figure and applies it to both parts of the question loses an item that was otherwise straightforward.

Does support spacing affect how many conductors fit in a conduit?

It does not, and one question in our bank offers exactly that connection as an answer choice. Fill is decided by the cross-sectional areas of the conductors against the area of the raceway, using Chapter 9 Table 1 and the notes with it. Support spacing is a mechanical requirement about holding the raceway in place. They are unrelated, and the item exists because a candidate working fast will accept any sentence that sounds like a code rule and contains a number.