One of two California-specific exams every civil engineering applicant must pass on top of the national Professional Engineer (PE) exam. It covers how buildings and structures respond to earthquakes and how seismic design forces are determined. Required for a California civil licence regardless of the discipline you actually practise in.
Start studying California Seismic PrinciplesThe Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists (BPELSG) publishes a reference list for this exam, not a formula sheet.
| Exam | Eligibility summary |
|---|---|
| Civil Seismic Principles | An application for California civil engineering licensure approved in technical review (which requires having passed the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) and Professional Engineer (PE) Civil exams and meeting the experience requirement). |
Weights are published per content area: 8 / 8 / 6 / 26 / 14 / 26 / 12 percent in the order below. CURRENCY WARNING, AND IT NOW HAS A DATE. The Board's reference list still names the 2022 California Building Code and ASCE/SEI 7-16, and for the rest of 2026 that is affirmatively correct rather than merely uncontradicted: an announcement on the Board's home page dated 10 July 2026 says the Seismic Principles exam continues to test to the 2022 code and ASCE 7-16 for the remainder of 2026, and that the 2025 California Building Code and ASCE 7-22 will be implemented on the 2027 exam. So this track is right today and wrong from some point in 2027. Content here follows 7-16 and names the edition wherever the two differ, which is what makes the swap tractable. THE DESIGN CRITERIA TOPIC NEEDS A FULL PASS BEFORE THAT SWITCH: 7-22 replaces the F_a and F_v site-coefficient route with multi-period response spectra, so the topic is not re-cited, it is rewritten. Two practical wrinkles. The Board gave no date sharper than the 2027 exam, and since this is continuous testing there is no single sitting to key off, so do not assume a clean 1 January cutover without asking the Exam Unit. And the reference list page carries no revision marker and returns no Last-Modified header, so watching it for change is unreliable; the home page announcement column is the thing to monitor. Checked 2026-09-12. EXAM LENGTH IS NOT PUBLISHED, and the 60 below is this app's own figure. Verified 2026-09-12 across seven official documents: the Board's candidate information page, the 2022 Seismic Principles test plan, the 2022 Civil Engineering Surveying job analysis, the superseded 2018 seismic plan, and both Prometric Candidate Information Bulletins. Every one of them states the 2.5-hour limit and none states an item count, so questionCountPublished stays false. The figure was 100 until 2026-09-12, which paced the mock at 90 seconds per question on a calculation paper and was not defensible; 60 paces it at 2.5 minutes, which suits the work. Treat it as a presentation choice, not a claim about the exam. If a candidate count ever surfaces from the Board's Exam Unit, that supersedes this. Note also that these two are Board exams delivered by Prometric, not National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) papers, and the Prometric bulletins are stale against the test plans: they still describe six seismic content areas and four surveying ones, where the current plans have seven and five.
Topic coverage follows Civil Engineer Seismic Principles Examination Test Plan, effective 2022 (California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists). Practice questions are written only from publicly available sources (that outline and the regulations and references it cites); they are not real exam questions, which are confidential. Check current application requirements, fees and exam dates on the certifying body's own page: official certification page.
Questions, flashcards, and explanations are AI-written from publicly available sources only: the exam content outlines and candidate materials each certifying body publishes without restriction, and the regulations and technical references they cite. No confidential material is used, including actual exam questions, recollections of any exam sat by the author, or any handbook or document released under a confidentiality agreement. Content is then put through repeated review — regulatory values checked against primary sources, every calculation recomputed, and errors corrected — plus spot checks by the author, who holds California water operator certifications and a California civil engineering licence. Those spot checks are sampling, not a professional review: nothing here is stamped, sealed, or offered as engineering advice, and not every item has been individually verified, so mistakes can still slip through.