Cable Cost

Wire and Cable Cost Estimation: Building a Defensible Quote Per Foot

What actually drives wire and cable cost per foot, how to structure a quote with a copper pass-through, and the estimating errors that quietly erase margin.

On most building wire and power cable, copper is 60 to 80 percent of the sell price, so your quote lives or dies on the metal line. Price copper at the LME cash settlement plus a fabrication premium of 8 to 20 cents per lb, then convert to your specific mass per foot. A conductor at 0.019 lb per foot with copper at 4.20 dollars per lb carries 0.080 dollars per foot in metal alone. Because that number moves daily, quote it as a pass-through indexed to a named benchmark, not a fixed price. Copper Cost Per Foot and Finished Cable Cost keep the metal line current so you are not eating a 10 percent LME swing.

Polymer is the second material bucket and hides more error than metal. PVC compound runs 1.10 to 1.60 dollars per lb, XLPE 1.30 to 2.20, and low-smoke zero-halogen 2.00 to 3.50, and jacket walls are thicker than people estimate. A 0.045 inch jacket on a 0.5 inch cable can add 30 to 45 g per meter, so at 1.40 dollars per lb that is roughly 0.03 dollars per foot before scrap. Estimate insulation and jacket separately with Jacket Material Usage rather than lumping all plastic into one factor, because wall thickness and density differ by station.

Machine time converts to money through a fully burdened line rate, typically 90 to 180 dollars per hour for an extrusion line and 60 to 120 for a drawing line, covering operator, power, depreciation, and maintenance. If Insulation Extrusion Speed says you run 100 m per minute, that is 6,000 m or about 19,685 feet per hour, so a 130 dollar per hour line adds only 0.0066 dollars per foot of conversion cost at full speed. The trap is assuming full speed. Real availability is 65 to 80 percent, so divide by 0.72 and the honest conversion cost is closer to 0.0092 dollars per foot.

Scrap is a direct metal loss, not an afterthought, and it compounds because you scrap expensive copper plus the value already added. A 3 percent scrap rate on a cable that is 70 percent copper means you throw away roughly 2.1 percent of your sell price in metal alone every run. Recover what you can: clean copper redeem is often 90 to 95 percent of LME, so net scrap cost is the 5 to 10 percent haircut plus lost conversion. Scrap Recovery quantifies both the loss and the redeem credit so your quote reflects net, not gross, scrap.

Changeovers and reel changes are the overhead most estimators forget. A reel change on a high-speed line can stop production for 3 to 8 minutes, and at 100 m per minute an 8-minute stop is 800 m of lost output plus restart scrap. Across a shift with six changes that is roughly 40 minutes of an eight-hour day, an 8 percent capacity tax. Reel Change Downtime turns those minutes into a cost per foot so short-run orders carry their real setup burden instead of hiding it in the long runs.

Build the quote as a stack, not a single markup. Start with metal per foot, add polymer per foot, add conversion time divided by realistic speed and availability, add net scrap, then layer overhead and target margin last. For a 12 AWG THHN estimate you might see 0.080 metal, 0.012 insulation, 0.009 conversion, 0.004 net scrap, and 0.010 overhead, totaling 0.115 dollars per foot cost. At a 22 percent gross margin the sell price is about 0.147 dollars per foot. Finished Cable Cost assembles this stack so every line item is visible and defensible to the customer.

The three estimates that go wrong most often are metal timing, speed optimism, and yield. Quoting yesterday's copper on a job that ships in six weeks can cost you 8 to 12 percent if LME runs. Assuming nameplate line speed instead of 72 percent availability understates conversion by 30 to 40 percent. And using first-pass length instead of net-of-scrap length overstates yield by your full scrap rate. Lock a metal escalation clause, cost at demonstrated speed from your own run data, and always quote deliverable feet after scrap, not extruded feet.

Published 2026-07-01.