[ STORY · ELECTRICIAN · JOURNEY · ILLUSTRATIVE COMPOSITE ]

Travis

Richmond journeyman electrician working through the master exam, the contractor-tier choice, and the conversation with his current employer before he hangs his own shingle

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Trades Navigator — Editorial composite · Virginia · Electrician

The situation

Travis is 31 and lives in Richmond. He earned his Virginia DPOR Journeyman Electrician license in 2022 after logging the required trade hours at a Richmond electrical contractor and passing the state exam. He has worked the last three years as a journeyman, mostly on commercial tenant fit-outs and a hospital electrical retrofit on the south side of the city.

He and his wife — who handles the books and the office side of the side jobs he has taken on weekends — have been talking for two years about opening their own residential-commercial electric shop in the Richmond metro. Before they incorporate or rent a yard, Travis is reading the Virginia regulations cold so he knows which license and which contractor class the business actually needs.

The Master exam — and the day it didn't go

Per 18VAC50-30-39, a journeyman electrician in Virginia is eligible to sit for the Master Electrician exam after at least one year of practical experience as a licensed journeyman. Travis met the experience threshold two years ago. He sat the exam at PSI Services in October.

He did not pass. The result sheet showed he had missed by four points, and that the section that hurt him was the National Electrical Code questions on bonding and grounding theory in service entrances and on healthcare electrical systems beyond the residential scope. He had been studying nights for six months, and he had assumed his on-the-job knowledge was enough. It was, for most of the exam. It was not, for the parts of the NEC he had not personally pulled in three years.

He paid the $125 retake fee, bought a used Mike Holt master prep book for $25, and spent the next twelve weeks working through practice problems after dinner. His foreman, when Travis told him he had failed, said most of the masters in the shop had failed once. He sat the exam again in January and passed.

The lesson is one Travis would now give to anyone in his shoes: the Virginia master exam is not a formality. It tests material that journeymen who specialize in commercial fit-out have not seen since their original tradesman exam. PSI publishes a candidate information bulletin with the exam outline. Read the outline before you write the check.

Class A vs Class B vs Class C, and the kitchen-table money conversation

A Virginia tradesman license lets Travis do the electrical work. A Virginia contractor license is a separate thing entirely and is what the business itself holds to bid and perform contracts. Per Code of Virginia §54.1-1100, the contractor tiers are set by project size and annual revenue.

Class C: any single project from $1,001 to $29,999 and total annual gross revenue under $250,000. This is the smallest tier and is the lightest application.

Class B: any single project from $30,000 to $149,999 and total annual gross revenue between $250,000 and $999,999. Class B adds a financial-responsibility requirement (minimum net worth showing on the balance sheet) and a business-and-law exam beyond Class C.

Class A: any single project of $150,000 or more, or total annual gross revenue of $1,000,000 or more. Class A has the highest financial, experience, and exam thresholds.

Travis and his wife sat at their kitchen table and counted what they had. Eight thousand two hundred dollars in savings after the year's taxes. A modest emergency fund they were not willing to touch. One used pickup that was paid off. Class B's financial-responsibility documentation was a stretch they could not make cleanly without draining the emergency fund. A surety bond would cost roughly 1 to 3 percent of the bond amount per year for a credit-OK applicant, and would require them to personally guarantee the bond.

They decided to start at Class C in year 1. Class C lets them take any single residential project up to $29,999, which covers most service-panel upgrades, kitchen rewires, EV-charger installs, and small commercial tenant fit-outs in the Richmond metro. They will pursue Class B in year 2 once revenue and balance-sheet history confirm the model. Operating above a tier's threshold without the correct class is an enforcement issue with DPOR — the worst version of which is a complaint from a competitor who looked up the contractor lookup and saw the mismatch.

The conversation with his current employer

Travis currently works under his employer's contractor license at a Richmond electrical contractor that does about $4M a year in commercial work. He has been there four years. His foreman is the person who told him he could pass the master exam if he kept showing up, and who then drove him home from the testing center the day he didn't.

Leaving without burning the relationship matters in a way that is not in any DPOR fee schedule. Most small contractors get their first year of work from their previous employer subcontracting overflow jobs back to them. If Travis and his employer separate badly, that pipeline closes — and the year-1 financial model the kitchen-table conversation produced quietly stops working.

He scheduled coffee with his foreman in November, named the plan, and asked honestly whether there was a path to year-1 subcontract work. The foreman said he would think about it. He came back two weeks later with a soft yes — overflow on small residential service work, paid as a 1099 sub, no commitment beyond what was actually available in any given month. They agreed Travis would finish out the hospital electrical retrofit through February so the project did not lose continuity. His last day is set for the end of February.

This part of the plan is not in any code section. It is the part the regulations cannot tell him how to handle.

The Master exam calendar and the renewal cycle

Per 18VAC50-30-39, the tradesman license (journeyman and master) renews on a 2-year cycle, and tradesmen are required to complete 3 hours of continuing education per renewal cycle. Travis is tracking his current CE hours so the master license, once issued, lines up cleanly with his existing renewal window and not a second one.

DPOR contracts the Master exam through PSI Services. Per the DPOR Tradesman fee schedule, the master exam fee is $125 (exam-only fee; license issuance fees are separate). The application requires proof of the journeyman license and the one-year experience documentation — a packet Travis already had assembled when he sat the exam in October.

What is on the table

BLS OES reported a national median annual wage of $62,350 for electricians (SOC 47-2111) in May 2024. For the Richmond VA metro (OES area 40060), the OES table publishes an area-specific median. Travis is comparing his current W-2 against the Richmond metro median as one input into the go/no-go on self-employment.

The master exam is $125 at PSI. Initial Class C contractor license fees, the business-and-law exam, certificate-of-insurance documentation, and registration with the State Corporation Commission for the LLC vary by tier and source per DPOR's contractor fee schedule. These are one-time and renewal-cycle costs, not ongoing operating costs.

Travis is reading the regulations because the regulations are the business plan's load-bearing wall. The site's role is to put the exact citation (18VAC50-30-39, §54.1-1100, the DPOR fee schedule, the OES table, the PSI candidate information bulletin) within two clicks of where he is reading.

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