PE Exam Pass Rates: Every Discipline, NCEES Data [2026]

Every January, engineering forums light up with the same ritual: someone posts the new pass rates, everyone compares their discipline to their neighbor's, and at least one commenter declares their own exam obviously the hardest. The numbers behind the ritual come from NCEES, they cover every discipline from Agricultural to Petroleum, and read carefully, they say more about who takes each exam and when than about how hard any single exam truly is. This guide lays out the PE exam pass rates in full: every discipline's first-time and repeat rates, the civil depths in detail, the SE exam's category of its own, and what the patterns mean for your preparation.

What is the PE exam pass rate?

There is no single PE exam pass rate: each discipline's exam is scored against its own standard, and first-time rates in NCEES's latest published year range from 42% to 81%, with the large disciplines clustered between 55% and 75%. Quoting one number for "the PE exam" is like quoting one price for "a car."

The figures in this guide come from NCEES Squared 2025, the council's annual statistics report covering October 2024 through September 2025 — the same primary source the forum threads screenshot, read here in full. Two framing facts help before the tables. First, a pass rate describes a population: disciplines whose candidates arrive well-matched (working daily in what the exam tests) post high rates, and disciplines with broader pools post lower ones, exactly the pattern we documented on the FE side. Second, the PE population is self-selected in a way the FE's is not: these are working engineers who chose to pursue licensure, typically with four years of practice behind them, which is why PE rates generally sit a notch above FE rates despite the harder material.

PE exam pass rates by discipline

Across NCEES's disciplines, first-time PE pass rates in the latest reporting year run from Petroleum's 42% to Agricultural and Biological Engineering's 81%, with the high-volume disciplines — civil, mechanical, electrical power — spanning 55% to 77%. Here are the major disciplines:

(Per NCEES Squared 2025, first-time and repeat takers; smaller disciplines omitted here appear in the report.) The mechanical family's strong showing continues its FE pattern — tightly matched candidate pools — while Electrical Power's 58%, on one of the largest populations (2,632 first-timers), reflects how many working power engineers reach for licensure from varied backgrounds. Treat the table as background information rather than a prediction: within every row, the timing and preparation levers described below move an individual candidate far more than the gaps between disciplines.

PE Civil pass rates by depth

The five PE Civil depth exams post first-time rates of 59% to 71%: Water Resources and Environmental leads at 71%, Geotechnical follows at 65%, Construction at 62%, Structural at 61%, and Transportation at 59%. The ordering tracks candidate-to-depth match more than question difficulty.

Volume adds useful context to those rates: Water Resources and Environmental is also the largest civil depth (4,313 first-time candidates), followed by Transportation (3,677), Structural (2,879), Construction (1,565), and Geotechnical (782). The biggest cohort posting the best rate is no paradox — water-sector employers send large numbers of well-matched candidates — and the spread across depths is modest enough that choosing your depth by pass rate rather than by practice would be a mistake, as our PE Civil exam guide explains in full. Repeat rates across the depths cluster at 40% to 50%: healthier than the FE's repeat rates, but still about twenty points below first-attempt rates.

The SE exam: the pass-rate outlier

The separate PE Structural (SE) exam is the licensure system's true outlier: its components post first-time rates of 46% (Lateral Breadth), 40% (Vertical Breadth), 20% (Lateral Depth, Buildings), and a stark 13% (Vertical Depth, Buildings), per NCEES Squared 2025. No other NCEES exam comes close.

The SE deserves its own mental category, and not only for the numbers. It is structured unlike any other PE exam — separate Vertical Forces and Lateral Forces components, each with breadth and depth sections, a Buildings-or-Bridges choice locked across both, $350 per component — and it serves a different purpose: full structural licensure for engineers designing significant buildings and bridges, required by certain states beyond the standard PE. Candidates weighing the Structural depth of PE Civil (61% first-time) against the SE exam should understand they are choosing between different credentials with an enormous difficulty gap, not two flavors of one exam. We cover the SE fully in its own guide; here it stands as the exception that calibrates the rest of the table.

First-time vs. repeat takers and the experience sweet spot

Two patterns hold across nearly every PE discipline: repeat takers pass at roughly twenty points below first-timers, and candidates around four to five years of post-graduation experience pass at the highest rates. Both patterns are levers you can plan around.

The repeat gap needs the same honest reading it got on the FE side: selection (those who fail once tend to carry the largest gaps) plus drift (retakes happen later, with the same materials producing the same result). The experience curve is the more interesting finding — pass rates climb toward the four-to-five-year mark and soften after it, which matches the exam's design assumption of a candidate fresh from their formative project years. Together they say: take the exam when your experience requirement completes rather than "someday," and make the first attempt the real one. The EIT-to-PE timeline, including what boards count as progressive experience, sets up exactly that schedule, and the FE-vs-PE comparison shows how the same timing physics governs both exams.

What the pass rates mean for your preparation

Read as a preparation brief, the pass-rate tables say three things: match your depth to your practice, take the exam at your experience peak, and prepare for the first attempt as if there is no second — because the second is twenty points harder. None of the three requires unusual ability, but all three require deliberate scheduling.

The method that converts those lessons into a plan is the same one that works for the FE, with deeper material: your depth's specification first, an early diagnostic against it, months of problem volume with the supplied references open, and full-length eight-hour simulations to close. NCEES publishes the current rates on its exam pages and in the annual Squared report, so recheck the year's numbers when you schedule. And the practice volume that carries the middle months — realistic, specification-mapped questions for your discipline and depth — is exactly what our upcoming PE practice exams are built to provide; the waitlist below will tell you the moment they launch.

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