Marinas, NEC 555.35 and the one ordering a Texas item is built on

What the exam asks about marinas

The bank behind this site holds 500 questions, and 140 of them sit in the installation area that takes in Chapter 5 work. Marinas own a small corner of that. Three items put a docking facility or a pier in the stem, and two more use a marina as the example in a question that is really about how the book is arranged.

That matches the published blueprint. Special Occupancies, Equipment, and Conditions carries 6 of the 56 scored items on the journeyman NEC Knowledge portion and 3 of the 24 scored items on Calculations, and Article 555 shares that pool with health care, pools, hazardous locations and agricultural buildings. Plan for one marina item and treat a second as a gift.

Every marina item in the bank is a placement question. One hands you a hazard and asks what the ground fault requirement is answering. One runs feeder conductors out along a floating pier and asks which wiring method the article recognizes. One describes a pond with a dock on it and asks which article covers the water. Arithmetic stays out of all of them, which is why this topic rewards twenty minutes with the article more than it rewards practice with a calculator.

Three ground fault levels, sorted by load

Article 555 carries three separate ground fault requirements at three separate levels, and an item is usually testing whether you can put the right value at the right point. The sorting rule is the number of things sitting downstream of the device. The fewer loads under it, the tighter the section lets it be set.

Read the three values off NEC 555.35 in your own copy and write each one beside the point it applies to. The ordering above tells you which slot each value belongs in, and your book tells you what the values are. The reason for the split is arithmetic. A shore power receptacle watches one boat, so the background leakage under it stays small enough for a tight setting to hold. A dock feeder watches everything under it at once, and forty wet hulls add up.

Sort the water before the rule

The hardest marina item in the bank never says the word marina. It puts a pump and a floating dock on a private irrigation pond and asks which article covers the work in and around that water. Article 555 is written for marinas, boatyards and docking facilities, so a private pond sits outside it. Article 680 covers constructed pools and similar water. Article 553 covers floating buildings. The answer is Article 682, written for the natural and artificial bodies of water the other three leave alone, and it carries its own electrical datum plane, its own ground fault requirements and its own equipotential planes.

Each wrong answer in that item is a real article stretched past the water it was written for. Sorting the water first is what makes the rest of the question fast, because these articles set different distances and different levels of protection for installations that look identical from the bank.

The same reflex pays on the topic next door. Pools and spas sits in the same blueprint pool and is built on the same first move.

Why a marina lives in Chapter 5

Two items in the bank use a marina to test how the book is organized, which makes this one of the cheapest facts on the paper. Chapter 5 in the 2026 edition is titled Specific Occupancies and Locations, and a marina is a location. Chapter 6 is Specific Equipment, which is where an electric sign lives. An item that hands you both and asks which chapter each one sits in is answered by the titles alone.

A second item goes one level up. In the 2026 text, Chapters 5 through 8 supplement or modify Chapters 1 through 8. Earlier editions kept Chapter 8 apart from the rest unless a requirement inside it said otherwise, and that carve out is gone from the 2026 wording. So the general chapters still govern a marina, and Article 555 changes only what it says it changes.

Deciding whether an installation is an occupancy question or an equipment question is the fastest route into the right article, and it also tells you which general chapter the article you land in is modifying.

Three thirties and three units

Article 555 uses the number thirty for three unrelated things, and an item writer only has to leave the unit off the answer choices to make that expensive.

• Thirty milliamperes is the trip setting at the shore power receptacle, from NEC 555.35.
• Thirty amperes is the smallest shore power receptacle the article recognizes, from NEC 555.33.
• Thirty inches is the furthest a disconnecting means may sit from the receptacle it controls, from NEC 555.36.

Read the unit in the stem before you read the number. The same discipline covers the mounting rule in NEC 555.33, where a shore power receptacle on a fixed pier answers to two floors at once, one measured up from the deck surface and one measured from the electrical datum plane, and the governing figure is whichever of the two lands higher.

The pier that moves under the run

One bank item runs feeder conductors along a pier that floats and moves with the water, and asks what Article 555 recognizes for that run. The answer is portable power cable as permanent wiring, under the conditions the article states on listing, on support, on protection from damage and on where splices may be made.

All three wrong answers come from treating the pier as a building. Tubing with an expansion fitting at each section is a rigid method on a structure that rises, falls and flexes in every direction at once. Type NM belongs indoors and dry. Open conductors on insulators have no place over water at a public pier. A break in a raceway over water is the kind of fault that stays hidden until somebody is in the lake.

Physical exposure runs through the whole article, which is why protection from physical damage reads as the companion topic here.

What this costs on a Texas job

Two things attach to Texas specifically. The first is the edition. Texas adopts the 2026 National Electrical Code on 1 September 2026 under 16 TAC 73.100, and the examinations are referenced to that edition from the same day, so the values you write beside NEC 555.35 should come out of a 2026 book.

The second is what the 2026 edition added here. Ground fault protection at a marina now has to be coordinated and performance tested by qualified persons following the manufacturer's instructions, with a written record kept available for the inspector. That is a commissioning step, which makes it the kind of new material that turns up as a knowledge item long before anybody meets it on a job.

Cities amend on top of the state adoption, and Tex. Occ. Code 1305.201(c) and (d) are what let them. Work inside the corporate limits is installed in accordance with all applicable local ordinances, so the governing text at a Texas lake town is the state adopted edition plus whatever that city wrote on top of it. Ask which edition and which amendments before you price dock work somewhere unfamiliar, because the answer moves twenty miles down the road.

What to do before test day

An hour here is cheap, because the article is short and the same idea comes back three or four times. The knowledge portion is scored on 56 items against a 70 percent cut, which leaves room for about sixteen wrong answers, and TDLR recorded 1,402 passes on 5,731 journeyman knowledge attempts in fiscal year 2025, a pass rate of 24.46 percent. On a paper that thin, every item is worth having.

1. Read the scope at the front of Article 555, then read the Article 100 definitions it leans on. Docking facility and electrical datum plane both decide what the rest of the article means.
2. Find NEC 555.35, mark all three ground fault levels, and write each value beside the point it applies to.
3. Read the leakage current measurement paragraph to the period and mark every qualifier inside it. The trigger is the boat that will take shore power, and the section attaches no testing interval, so an answer offering you a frequency is offering you something the section leaves out.
4. Skim signage at NEC 555.10, bonding at NEC 555.13, receptacles at NEC 555.33 and the disconnecting means at NEC 555.36. Recognition is enough on all four.

The worked arithmetic and the section by section walk through live in the question set. This page is the Texas candidate's half of the same subject.

Questions people ask

How many marina questions should I expect on the Texas journeyman exam?

Plan on one. Special Occupancies, Equipment, and Conditions carries 6 of the 56 scored items on the journeyman NEC Knowledge portion and 3 of the 24 scored items on Calculations, and Article 555 shares that pool with health care, pools, hazardous locations, agricultural buildings and the rest of Chapter 5. In the 500 question bank, three items put a docking facility in the stem and two more use a marina as the worked example in a question about how the code book is organized. An hour on this article is enough to cover all five shapes.

Which ground fault device at a marina carries the tighter setting?

The one with the least under it. A receptacle at the dock that supplies something other than shore power takes personnel protection, which is the tightest of the three levels in NEC 555.35. A shore power receptacle takes the middle value, because it watches one boat. Feeder and branch circuit conductors out on the docking facility take the loosest value, because every boat on the run sits under them at once. Read the three figures out of your own 2026 book and write each one against the point it applies to.

Does Article 555 cover a dock on a private pond?

It usually does not, and one bank item is built on exactly that. Article 555 is written for marinas, boatyards and docking facilities. A private irrigation pond with a pump and a floating dock falls to Article 682, which covers natural and artificial bodies of water used for industrial, agricultural and similar purposes and carries its own electrical datum plane, its own ground fault requirements and its own equipotential planes. Article 680 stays with constructed pools, and Article 553 covers floating buildings. Sorting the water decides which distances and which protection levels apply.

What changed for marinas in the 2026 NEC?

Two things worth carrying. The equipment level ground fault protection on feeder and branch circuit conductors now reaches piers as well as docking facilities. And the ground fault protection at a marina has to be coordinated and performance tested by qualified persons following the manufacturer's instructions, with a written record kept available for the inspector. That second one is a commissioning requirement, so it tends to appear as a knowledge item well before an inspector asks for the record. The subdivision letters under NEC 555.35 also moved between recent printings, so find each rule by its heading.

Why should I study marinas if I will never work on the water?

Because the paper does not care where you work. The journeyman NEC Knowledge portion is scored on 56 items at a 70 percent cut, which leaves about sixteen wrong answers of margin, and TDLR recorded a 24.46 percent pass rate on that portion in fiscal year 2025. Article 555 is short, the same idea repeats through it, and the item it produces is a placement question with no arithmetic attached. Texas also has a great deal of fresh water with docks on it, so the topic is closer to home than it looks.

Which chapter of the code holds marinas, and why does that matter?

Chapter 5, which the 2026 edition titles Specific Occupancies and Locations. An electric sign sits in Chapter 6, Specific Equipment, and one bank item hands you both and asks which chapter each one is in. The titles answer it. The reason it matters past that single item is speed on an open book exam: deciding whether the stem describes an occupancy or a piece of equipment sends your hand to the right part of the book first time, and it tells you which general chapter the article you land in is modifying.