LBExamAlmost everyone applying for a California contractor license sits the Law and Business exam. Whether you are going for a B General Building license or a C-27 Landscaping one, the trade paper changes and this one does not. In FY 2022/23, 17,737 candidates sat it, far more than any other Contractors State License Board (CSLB) exam, and 57 percent of them passed.
CSLB publishes most of what you would want to know about it. It leaves out two things, and those two are where most of the bad information online comes from.
Two exams, and what a waiver covers depends on the section
CSLB requires an applicant to pass the Law and Business exam and a trade exam for the classification applied for. One classification has 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 the section you come in under decides whether one paper goes or both. Under s. 7065(d), no examination is required of a qualifying individual who, within the five years before the application, personally passed the written examination for the same classification being applied for, or served as the qualifying individual for a licensee whose license was in good standing in that classification. Section 7065.1 and s. 7065.2 are discretionary: the registrar may waive the examination for a contractor’s license on the conditions each of them sets out. Section 7065.3 adds a classification to a license already held without further examination. CSLB adds two things about ss. 7065.1 and 7065.2. Some applications come out of the review with the trade paper waived and this one still to sit, and the registrar has suspended waivers under s. 7065.1(a).
California also has reciprocity with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada and North Carolina. CSLB is clear about what that covers: the registrar may waive the written trade exam for a contractor licensed in one of those states. You still take and pass the California Law and Business exam (s. 7065.4).
Getting to the test center
You cannot book the day you file. CSLB has to accept the application and refer it for testing first, and then it mails you a Notice to Schedule for Examination. From there you book directly with PSI, the company that runs the exams for CSLB, online or by phone. Each exam is a separate fee, and you can sit the law and trade papers on the same day or weeks apart.
The clock that matters is on the application. Eighteen months after CSLB accepts it, it is void, and you start again with a new application and new fees. Results last longer. They are good for five years, so if you pass one paper and fail the other, you only go back for the one you 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 study. The Law and Business study guide says 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. Turn up without it and it counts as a missed appointment, and you lose the fee.
The two numbers CSLB does not publish
How many questions. CSLB publishes a time limit, not a count. Any site that gives you a number did not get it from CSLB. The closest 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. That is a consultant describing specialty exams, and CSLB has published no such figure for this paper.
What score passes. CSLB’s applicant guide answers this one directly: there is no published figure. The percentage needed to pass varies for each exam, and you 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 get a printed report saying whether you passed. A pass report says that and nothing more. It has no score on it, and it is not a license. What comes next is a Bond and Fee letter in the mail, listing the issuance requirements for your application.
A fail tells you more. The report shows your overall score, how many questions you answered correctly, and how you did in each section of the exam, against the same sections the study guide lists. If you are retaking, that breakdown is the most useful thing you have. It tells you which of the seven sections cost you the sitting.
You cannot see the questions. CSLB does not release test questions or answer keys to anyone. You can type a comment about a question during the exam, before it is scored, and you can ask CSLB for an Examination Appeals Form afterwards. CSLB says it answers an appeal by mail in two to four weeks.
Retaking
You can retake a failed exam after 21 calendar days, as long as your application has not hit its eighteen-month void date. There is no limit on attempts inside that window. Each rescheduled or repeat sitting costs $100, the rescheduling fee set by 16 CCR s. 811(b)(1). PSI’s candidate bulletin says a re-examination fee is required and must be paid to PSI, without putting a figure on it.
One number is worth knowing before you book a retake. Across all CSLB examinations in FY 2022/23, first attempts passed at 71 percent and retakes at 37 percent, and the same gap shows up in each of the three years before it. At page 102 of its 2023 Sunset Report the board puts that gap down to who is in the second group rather than to a harder paper. There is no limit on attempts, so a candidate who keeps failing keeps being counted, and of everybody who failed in FY 2022/23, 56 percent were sitting for the first time. The eighteen-month clock on your application keeps running while you wait for a retake either way.
Sources
- CSLB Examinations Frequently Asked Questions, committed in the corpus as a document of
cslb-applicant-pages - Get Licensed to Build, CSLB
- Law and Business study guide, form 13E-LAW rev. 03-2026, CSLB
- CSLB 2023 Sunset Report, Table 8, the first-attempt and retake table at page 57, and the board’s response on examination passage rates at page 102, committed in the corpus as
cslb-sunset-review-report-2023 - Contractors State License Law, Business and Professions Code, Division 3, Chapter 9
- CSLB board rules, California Code of Regulations, Title 16, Division 8, s. 811
- Licensing Examination Information Guide, PSI’s candidate bulletin for the CSLB examinations, committed in the corpus as
psi-candidate-information-bulletin