Electrician licensing in New Hampshire

New Hampshire takes a qualifying out-of-state card by endorsement — no NH exam, no transcripts. Hold a journeyman or master license from one of the partner states above, fill out the Universal Application, and pay the fee: $110 for a journeyman, $198 for a master. Two things do the gatekeeping. Your license has to be active and unencumbered — never a temporary or provisional card — and you need one year of professional experience in the exact category you're applying for.

There's no criminal background check for electricians here. Mind the split between the two lists. The master list runs one state shorter than the journeyman list, and Connecticut only counts at master level through its Electrical Contractor license — so if you're a master, confirm your state sits on the master side before you bank on the transfer.

Timing is the good news. The board asks you to allow ten business days from the day it receives your packet — either to issue the license or to come back with a first request for more information — and it works applications in the order they arrive. The license lands by email. A clean endorsement is a days-to-two-weeks matter, not months, though you should budget for one round of back-and-forth if anything in the packet is missing.

If your state isn't on either list, you're not shut out. You apply the traditional way and sit the NH exam instead, and you can petition the board to have your home state judged substantially similar.

No. Until your New Hampshire license number actually exists, you can't work the trade here. The board is flat about it: if the state licenses a profession, you get the NH license before you practice it. Electricians have no temporary or provisional permit to bridge the gap. That holds for military members and spouses too.

They don't get a temporary card either — they run the same endorsement route, just on a faster statutory clock. The saving grace is that the pipeline is short. Coming from a qualifying state there's no exam to wait on and a ten-business-day processing target, so "wait for the license" means days, not a season. Don't put yourself on tools, and don't let anyone else put you on tools, until the number is issued.

One possible bridge is unconfirmed: whether an already-experienced traveler could register as an apprentice ($33) and work under supervision while the endorsement is pending. Nothing on the books today clearly allows or forbids it, so confirm with the board before anyone leans on it.

If you're testing instead of transferring a card, New Hampshire's own path is 8,000 hours of service as an apprentice electrician plus at least 600 hours of approved education, then a passing score on the board's exam. The board can credit recognized schooling or military time toward the hours. The exam runs through Prov, which charges its own exam fee on top of the license fee — confirm the current amount when you book.

Fail it and you can retest at your own expense, but an application goes stale if you haven't passed within a year, so don't let it sit. High and medium voltage work takes a different door: instead of the hours-and-exam path, you show proof of finishing a board-approved certification program. Once you're licensed, the continuing-education duty attaches every code cycle — 15 hours on the changes in the latest NEC, at least 1 of them covering New Hampshire's own rule changes.

It has to be done within 12 months of the January 1 after a new code is published, and letting it lapse makes your license invalid until you cure it.

Apprentices have to register with the state, and it isn't optional — you need a high school diploma or the equivalent to do it. Registration, renewal, and reinstatement each run $33. You work under the direct supervision of a master or journeyman, never on your own. The ratios are set by statute: a journeyman in their first licensed year supervises one apprentice, then up to two after that, with further caps on how many apprentices a single job site can carry.

Those supervised hours are the whole point — they build toward the 8,000 hours and 600 education hours you'll need before you can sit the journeyman exam.

One statewide license covers the whole state. New Hampshire vests electrician licensing entirely in the state board, and no city or town runs its own electrician card on top of it — so the license you earn in Concord is good on a job site anywhere in New Hampshire. The only local layer is inspection and permitting. Town and city building officials can check the license or ID card you carry, and they sign off on corrected work, but they don't license the electrician.

The business credential is separate from your worker license, and in New Hampshire the two connect in a way that catches travelers. A journeyman here has to be employed by a New Hampshire licensed master electrician or a licensed business entity. That means 1099 or direct-to-customer journeyman work isn't lawful — if you want to work on your own account, the credential you need is the master license, not the journeyman.

A company that makes electrical installations — a corporation, LLC, or partnership — needs its own entity license, $137 for an electrical corporation, and it has to keep a licensed master directly in charge of the business. That entity license dies the moment that master leaves or passes away. The employer carries real exposure here, not just you.

Hiring an unlicensed person to do electrical work — anyone other than a registered apprentice — is itself an offense. So the shop that places you should be checking your license as closely as you check theirs. A few kinds of work sit outside the license law altogether — utility work, genuine in-house staff at an industrial or manufacturing plant, and a homeowner working on their own single-family home among them.

Don't assume the in-house-plant exemption covers you if a staffing agency drops you at a plant; that's not obviously the same thing, and it isn't safe to lean on.