Home › vs. Mike Holt
If you're prepping for the Texas Journeyman exam and looking at Mike Holt, here's the honest breakdown — pricing, format, what each one is for, and where they're different. No chest-thumping.
Mike Holt has been in this market since 1974 and the brand trust is real. If you fit any of these, buy from Mike Holt and skip the rest of this page:
The $645 Intermediate Library and the $1,999 Ultimate Library are serious products. The reason people buy them is they work — for the right candidate.
We didn't try to out-Mike-Holt Mike Holt. We built a smaller, cheaper, narrower tool aimed at one specific problem: the Texas TDLR Journeyman exam — and the lookup-speed skill that makes the difference between passing and running out of time.
Mike Holt's product line is fragmented — book + video + online portal + practice exam often need to be bought separately for full coverage. We sell one product. $99. You're done. NEC 2026 update is free when TDLR transitions in September.
In March 2025, TDLR split the Journeyman exam into two separate open-book tests — Journeyman NEC and Journeyman Calculations. FY2025 first-try pass rates: NEC 24.46%, Calculations 20.56%. Most prep on the market still describes the legacy 85-question single exam. We built for what TDLR is actually administering now.
Forum consensus on the open-book journeyman exam: "If you know how to find things in the NEC and can do basic calculations, you should pass with relative ease. The time limit is what gets people." Mike Holt teaches the code. We drill finding the code under a clock. Different skill. We ship both — the lookup-speed simulator is the part nobody else builds.
Books are great at the kitchen table. They're useless in the truck on lunch break. We're built for the phone first.
That review is honest. The product is good. It's also $645+. The right comparison isn't "us vs. them" — it's "is the Mike Holt premium worth it for your situation?" For some people, yes. For a working electrician studying on lunch break who needs to pass the TDLR exam on a $99 budget, probably not.
50 practice questions written for the TDLR 2-part exam. No credit card, no subscription. Try the free NEC navigation drill while you're at it.
We email about the launch and the questions. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
No. Different product, different price tier, different format. Mike Holt sells books and DVDs. We sell a web/mobile tool with a NEC navigation simulator. The 50-question free PDF is ours, written for the TDLR 2-part exam.
Yes, for the NEC portion. Mike Holt's content is general NEC — not TDLR-tuned. You'll need to supplement with the TDLR Candidate Information Bulletin for exam-specific topic distribution. Our content is built around TDLR's outline directly.
Narrower scope. Mike Holt covers Journeyman, Master, contractor, CE, and multi-state. We cover one state, one tier. Lower production cost. We also don't have a 50-year-old physical-book inventory, classroom programs, or a national sales team to support.
TDLR transitions to NEC 2026 on September 1, 2026. Mike Holt sells new 2026 books and video sets — separate purchase. Our NEC 2026 update is included free for everyone who bought the $99 product — one purchase covers the transition.
Probably not. If you bought Mike Holt and you're studying with it, finish what you started. Our NEC navigation simulator is free and useful as a supplement — link's in the email after the 50-Q PDF.