How to Hire a Relay Technician: License, Pay, Where to Recruit, and How to Screen

A relay technician is the hire that keeps your protection and control scope provable: the person who inspects and tests the relays, control circuits and substation equipment in that scope, and who documents the result so the job can be turned over. BLS lists the duties of the surrounding occupation — electrical and electronics installers and repairers — as discussing problems with customers, inspecting and testing equipment, diagnosing faults, repairing or replacing components, and keeping records of repairs and labor hours. That last duty is a billing function as much as a technical one: on testing and commissioning work, treat the hours and findings your technician records as what you invoice against.

O*NET's task file for the occupation puts the weight on the test bench. Its top-rated core task — importance 88 — is inspecting and testing equipment and circuits to identify malfunctions, using wiring diagrams and testing devices such as ohmmeters, voltmeters or ammeters. The listed tasks also include consulting manuals, schematics, wiring diagrams and engineering personnel to troubleshoot and solve equipment problems, and the core tasks include opening and closing switches to isolate defective relays, performing adjustments or repairs (importance 80), and analyzing test data to diagnose malfunctions or evaluate the effects of system modifications (importance 81). One supplemental task matters for crew planning: scheduling and supervising the splicing or termination of cables in color-code order — on larger jobs your relay tech may be directing other people's hands.

The bench is software-driven, and your posting should say which platforms you run: O*NET's technology-skills list for the occupation includes OMICRON Test Universe and Fluke FlukeView Forms (analytical software), Megger PowerDB (compliance software) and SCADA software. A posting that names the relay test software and record-keeping stack in your trucks and shops screens candidates for you before they apply, and hands your interviewers a concrete skills question.

Post the job under more than one title — O*NET's sample job titles for the occupation include Relay Technician, Substation Technician, Substation Electrician, I&C Technician and E&I Technician. And write the description before you advertise — under the ADA, a written job description prepared before advertising or interviewing is evidence of which functions are essential, and it is the document your interviewers should screen against. The worker-side view of the role, including the day-to-day work and how people enter it, lives on our guide to what a relay technician does; this page stays on the hiring side.

Start from the education data on record for the occupation. In O*NET's education survey, 50% of respondents said a post-secondary certificate is required for new hires and 28% said an associate degree. Treat that as a benchmark for your posting rather than a rule: name the foundation you want — electrical theory, print reading, test equipment — and let certificate and associate-degree programs count toward it.

The certification to check against is NETA's. The InterNational Electrical Testing Association certifies electrical testing technicians at four levels under the ANSI/NETA ETT standard: Level 1 Trainee, Level 2 Certified Assistant, Level 3 Certified Technician and Level 4 Certified Senior Technician, with each higher level requiring passing all the previous ones. The gates on the record: NETA lists experience requirements of two years for Level 2, five years for Level 3 and ten years for Level 4, with two or more years of electrical technical education counting for at most one year; training-hour requirements running from 40 safety plus 160 electrical hours at Level 2 up to 104 safety and 600 electrical hours total at Level 4; and exams of 100 items at Levels 2 and 3 and 65 items at Level 4 — all multiple-choice, closed-book, onsite proctored and two hours long. The Level 1 Trainee examination is the employer's, not NETA's.

Screen NETA claims for what they attach to. Technicians certified at Levels 2 through 4 count as NETA Certified Technicians when they are employed by a NETA Accredited Company, and the certification carries continuing-education and experience requirements — so when you check a candidate's level, confirm the level and the employment side of that definition with the issuer. Our research found no national rule making NETA certification a requirement of substation or relay work: it is a certification, not a license, and where a project spec or a client's testing standard requires a level, it says so in the documents you bid. For crew planning, one level detail does real work — NETA describes a Level 3 Certified Technician as able to supervise Levels 1 and 2 and capable of performing electrical power switching, the rung that turns a testing crew of one into a testing crew.

Substation apprenticeships are the nearest documented training, and the programs are named — but they train substation technicians, not relay testers. The ALBAT substation apprenticeship — the American Line Builders JATC — requires 7,000 hours of on-the-job training, and its curriculum runs from grounding-grid construction, foundations and steel structure erection through cable pulling and termination, installing transformers and circuit breakers, bus work, switchgear assembly and minimum approach distance near energized circuits. The NW Line JATC substation technician apprenticeship requires a Class A CDL with no restrictions, an aptitude test within 2 years and a high school diploma. The California-Nevada JATC runs its substation technician apprenticeship at 7,000 hours over nearly four years in seven steps, with the same entry minimums as its lineman program: age 18, a high school diploma or GED, and an unrestricted commercial license. NW Line also offers a Substation Certification for current journey-level workers, separate from its entry-level apprenticeship. A completion certificate from a program like these is a substation training record — a strong one for the station equipment the protection acts on — but it is neither a license nor a relay qualification, so screen relay testing skill separately.

None of the above settles licensing. Whether a state or city license covers substation relay and control work is a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction question our national research does not answer, and it does not transfer from inside-electrician rules. Before you write the requirement into a posting, confirm with your state licensing board — and with the cities you work in, where municipal rules can add a layer — what licensing, if any, applies to the work you bid. What the business itself needs is a separate question; what license your business needs is covered in our employer guide.

Relay technicians fall inside a broader federal pay series rather than one of their own. BLS OEWS for May 2025, national, all industries, puts Electrical and Electronics Repairers, Powerhouse, Substation, and Relay (SOC 49-2095) at a median of $49.53 per hour ($103,020 per year). The middle half of the distribution runs from $39.35 per hour at the 25th percentile to $57.15 at the 75th; the 10th percentile is $31.60 and the 90th is $62.46. One scope note: the occupation covers powerhouse and substation repairers as well as relay work — O*NET files substation technician titles in it too — so the series is the band around the role, not relay-only pay.

Know which employer you are bidding against. In the same May 2025 release, substation and relay repairers employed by electric utilities (NAICS 221100) numbered 12,920 of the occupation's 20,720 and had a median of $105,940 per year ($50.94 per hour). If you hire out of utility job families, that utility figure is the number your offer has to sit beside.

Three cautions keep the benchmark honest. OEWS covers the occupation, not your contract: it does not split pay by certification level, so a NETA level is not a pay scale. It does not split union from non-union pay — if a collective bargaining agreement covers the role, the negotiated scale in that agreement is the figure that governs, so look there rather than to a national median. And it is national, all-industry data: price the offer against your own service territory and the utilities and testing contractors competing in it.

If the work sends your techs to travel assignments, set the reimbursement rules before the rotation starts. Under the FLSA, travel reimbursements — including per diem — are excluded from the regular rate used to compute overtime only when they reasonably approximate the expense; amounts at or below the federal travel or IRS rates are treated as reasonable.

Recruit with the pool size in mind. OEWS estimates employment in the occupation at 20,720 — against 757,220 for electricians (SOC 47-2111) in the same May 2025 release — and 12,920 of them sit inside electric utilities. That is a small, specialized labor pool, so expect candidates to weigh your offer against a utility's.

Recruit where the adjacent training happens. Graduates of the named substation apprenticeships bring station experience rather than relay testing, so ask for their relay hours separately: the ALBAT substation apprenticeship at 7,000 on-the-job hours, the California-Nevada JATC's at 7,000 hours over nearly four years, and the NW Line JATC program with its Class A CDL and aptitude-test entry requirements. On the education side, the O*NET survey's mix of post-secondary certificates and associate degrees points at certificate and two-year programs as a source of trainees you develop. If your crews work under a collective bargaining agreement, ask the local how its referral and dispatch procedure works before you post; if you hire merit shop, your own applications and referrals are the pipeline — with two cautions from the EEOC: relying on word-of-mouth recruiting from a mostly homogeneous workforce may violate the law if it results in a homogeneous pool of new hires, and job ads may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40+), disability or genetic information. Pair referrals with open postings.

The other employers running your same screen are the accredited testing companies: NETA ties its Level 2 through Level 4 certifications to employment at a NETA Accredited Company, so the certified end of the labor pool is already employed somewhere with a testing bench. Wherever you recruit from, list the role where candidates are looking: your relay technician jobs listing is the job-seeker side of this page, so write the posting against the screening list below. For the full sequence — posting, screening, offers — the hiring process guide walks it end to end, and hiring electricians: the employer guide is the employer-side starting point.

Screen in the order the rules attach: driving credentials first, security and access checks second, testing skill third, background reports fourth, and anything touching medical or physical capability last.

Driving and DOT compliance. If the role operates a commercial motor vehicle and needs a CDL, FMCSA's drug-and-alcohol testing rules (49 CFR part 382) apply to you as the employer: a CDL driver must have a verified negative pre-employment drug test before first performing safety-sensitive functions, and you must run a pre-employment query of the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse before the driver performs safety-sensitive work. The federal trigger is concrete: a straight truck with a gross vehicle weight rating of 26,001 lb or more — or a combination rated at 26,001 lb or more towing over 10,000 lb — is among the commercial motor vehicles requiring a CDL (49 CFR 383.5).

Security and access checks. Substation work can carry a security screen of its own. NERC's CIP-004-7 standard requires utilities to run personnel risk assessments for people with authorized unescorted physical or electronic access to high- or medium-impact BES Cyber Systems, including a seven-year criminal history records check renewed at least every seven years — and it applies to the staff who need that access, not to every crew member. If your contract work puts people into roles with that access, ask the utility how its assessment process reaches your employees, and build the lead time into onboarding.

Testing skill. Screen against the task list, not the title. Ask candidates to walk through one test end to end: the equipment and the relay, the diagrams and manuals they worked from, the test instruments and the software they ran — including the platforms on your own test sets — how they isolated the defective relay, and what the test data told them. Put your senior technician or the engineer who owns the protection scope in the room. Verify any NETA level with NETA rather than taking the card at face value, and read the level structure closely: the Level 1 Trainee examination is the employer's, so "Level 1 certified" can mean an internal exam rather than an association-administered one. On titles, our research could not confirm utility job-family definitions that distinguish relay technicians from substation technicians, or a standard progression ladder or test-platform list behind them — so ask which hours were relay hours and which platforms the candidate actually ran, and weigh those answers over the badge title.

Background reports. Before ordering a background report, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires a clear written disclosure in a document that consists solely of that disclosure, plus the applicant's written authorization — and the FTC's guidance is explicit that this notice must be stand-alone: it cannot sit inside the employment application. Before taking adverse action based on a report, give the person a copy of the report and a written description of their rights under the FCRA.

Physical capability and bench trials. You may ask whether and how a candidate can perform the job's functions, but the ADA bars questions about disability and medical exams before a job offer. If you run a hands-on bench trial at your shop, FLSA rules treat work the employer suffers or permits as work time, so a working trial is generally paid time — budget for it rather than calling it an unpaid tryout.

Cards are not credentials. OSHA says Outreach 10- and 30-hour classes do not fulfill an employer's training requirements under specific OSHA standards, and calls the 30-hour class more appropriate for supervisors or workers with some safety responsibility. A wallet card is neither a relay qualification nor a license: screen for the documented training above and whatever licensing your jurisdiction requires, if any — and confirm the licensing question with your state licensing board.

Set the safety frame on day one and name the standards that govern the work. OSHA's construction rules for electric power transmission and distribution lines live in 29 CFR part 1926 Subpart V (1926.950 onward), and line maintenance work falls under 29 CFR 1910.269 — the rules OSHA applies to line construction and line maintenance. Where the work takes crews into a manhole, vault, tunnel or shaft with limited egress designed for periodic entry, the enclosed-space rule applies: under 1910.269(e), employees who enter one — or serve as its attendant — must be trained in entry hazards, procedures and rescue. OSHA's construction rules also require you to instruct each employee in recognizing and avoiding unsafe conditions, and to provide frequent and regular inspections of job sites, materials and equipment by competent persons you designate.

If you cover peak testing seasons through a staffing agency, OSHA treats the staffing agency and the host employer as jointly responsible for the temporary worker's safety, including training, hazard communication and recordkeeping, and recommends putting each side's compliance responsibilities in the contract.

The administrative steps have fixed clocks: on Form I-9 the employee completes Section 1 at the time of hire and you complete Section 2 within three business days of hire, and you report the new hire to the state where they work within 20 days — sooner in some states.

Retention economics are steep for this role. The documented credentials take years to build — the NETA ladder stacks experience gates of two, five and ten years, and the substation apprenticeship behind some candidates' station experience runs 7,000 hours over nearly four years at one named JATC. A technician who leaves takes that accumulation to the next bench, so be explicit at the offer about travel, call-out and outage-window expectations; a tech surprised by the rotation is avoidable turnover. Then fund the ladder you already have: the training-hour and experience gates are published and the exams are onsite and proctored, and a technician you move toward Level 3 — the level NETA describes as able to supervise Levels 1 and 2 — becomes the person who grows your testing crew instead of guarding your only one.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, code or safety advice. License coverage, certification requirements, DOT and security checks and OSHA duties vary by state, by contract and by access model — confirm with your state licensing board, and with the certification bodies, the utility's security process, OSHA or employment counsel for your own situation.