LBExamEvery applicant for a California contractor license sits the Law and Business exam. It does not matter whether you are applying for a B General Building license or a C-27 Landscaping one: the trade paper changes with the classification and this one does not. In FY 2022/23 it was attempted 17,737 times, more than any other CSLB examination by a wide margin, and 57 percent of those attempts passed.
Most of what candidates want to know about it, CSLB does publish. Two things it does not, and those two are where most of the wrong information online comes from.
Two exams, and only one of them can be waived
The Contractors State License Board (CSLB) requires an applicant to pass the law and business exam and a trade exam for the classification applied for. There is one classification with no trade exam at all, C-61 Limited Specialty, and the statute says so outright: no trade examination is required for the limited specialty classification (Bus. & Prof. Code s. 7065.01).
Waivers exist, and every one CSLB describes is a waiver of the trade exam. The registrar may waive it where the applicant is currently the qualifier for a license in good standing in the same classification, has been that qualifier within the past five years, or has passed both exams in that classification within the past five years. Further grounds sit in s. 7065.1, s. 7065.2 and s. 7065.3.
California also has reciprocity arrangements with Arizona, Louisiana and Nevada. CSLB is explicit about what those cover: the registrar may waive the written trade exam for a contractor licensed in one of those states, and the applicant still takes and passes the California law and business exam (s. 7065.4).
Getting to the test center
You cannot book a sitting the day you file. CSLB has to accept the application and refer it for testing, and it then mails a Notice to Schedule for Examination. From that point the booking is yours to make directly with PSI, the company CSLB contracts to administer its examinations, online or by phone. Each exam is a separate fee, and the law and trade papers can be sat on the same day or weeks apart.
The clock that matters is the application’s. Eighteen months from the day CSLB accepts your application, it is void, and a new one with new fees starts everything again. Results themselves last longer: they are good for five years, so an applicant who passes one paper and fails the other only has to go back for the one they failed.
What the sitting looks like
| What | CSLB’s answer |
|---|---|
| Time | 3.5 hours per examination |
| Delivery | On a computer, at a PSI test center |
| Format | Multiple choice, four options, one best answer |
| Reference material | None. Closed book |
| Calculator | Provided, for the questions needing arithmetic |
| Guessing | No penalty |
| Sections | Seven, with published shares of the paper |
| Question count | Not published |
| Pass mark | Not published |
The closed-book rule is the one that shapes how you have to study. The Law and Business study guide states it plainly: it is a closed-book examination and no reference materials may be used. Your own calculator stays outside too, along with phones, watches, smart devices of any kind, notes, reading material, food and drink including water, hats, sunglasses, and sweaters or sweatshirts with pockets. Bring one valid, unexpired, government-issued photo identification in the name the application is in. Turning up without it counts as a missed appointment and forfeits the fee.
The two numbers CSLB does not publish
How many questions. CSLB publishes a time limit and not a count. Any site that tells you the number is not reading it off CSLB. The nearest thing to a public figure is buried in the board’s 2023 sunset filing, where a UC Berkeley report describes specialty examinations as drawing about a hundred items from a much larger bank, and that is a description of specialty exams in a consultant’s report rather than a published fact about this paper.
What score passes. CSLB’s applicant guide answers this directly and the answer is that there is no published figure: the percentage needed to pass varies for each exam, and an applicant can ask CSLB what it is. There is no seventy percent rule, no seventy-five percent rule, and nothing on this site claims one.
What you are told afterwards
Before you leave the test center you are handed a printed report saying whether you passed. A pass report says so and nothing more: it carries no score, and it is not a license. What follows a pass is a Bond and Fee letter in the post, listing the issuance requirements for your application.
A fail is more informative. The failing report carries the overall score and the number of questions answered correctly, and a breakdown of how you performed in each section of the exam, against the same sections the study guide lists. That breakdown is the most useful thing a retaking candidate has, because it points at exactly which of the seven sections cost the sitting.
You cannot see the questions. CSLB does not release test questions or answer keys to anybody. You can type a comment about a question while sitting the exam, before it is scored, and you can ask CSLB for an Examination Appeals Form afterwards. CSLB says an appeal is answered by post in two to four weeks.
Retaking
A failed exam can be retaken after 21 calendar days, as long as the application has not passed its eighteen-month void date. There is no limit on the number of attempts that fit inside that window, and each rescheduled or repeat sitting costs a non-refundable $100 paid to PSI.
The figure worth knowing before you book the retake is what happens to everyone else who books one. Across all CSLB examinations in FY 2022/23, first attempts passed at 71 percent and retakes at 37 percent, and the same gap holds in each of the three years before it. A retake is harder than the first attempt, not easier, and the section breakdown on the fail report is the only thing that changes that.
Sources
- CSLB Examinations Frequently Asked Questions, committed in the corpus as a document of
cslb-applicant-pagesand read from the copy fetched September 2, 2026 - Get Licensed to Build, CSLB
- Law and Business study guide, form 13E-LAW rev. 03-2026, CSLB
- CSLB 2023 Sunset Report, Table 8 and pages 57 to 58, committed in the corpus as
cslb-sunset-review-report-2023 - Contractors State License Law, Business and Professions Code, Division 3, Chapter 9