Key takeaways
- Whole-house rewiring commonly runs somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 30,000 dollars as general market context, not a Wattsmith quote, and the spread is wider than most electrical work.
- Access drives the price more than square footage does. A single-storey house on a pier and beam foundation with a walkable attic is a different job from a two-storey slab house with finished ceilings.
- A panel is usually part of it. Old wiring and an old panel tend to arrive together, and a rewire that leaves an undersized service in place has solved half the problem.
- Staging is legitimate. Rewiring by circuit priority over time is a real option and is often the right one when the whole number is out of reach.
Rewiring quotes vary more than almost anything else we price. Two houses with the same floor area can be thousands of dollars apart, and homeowners reasonably read that as somebody being wrong.
Usually nobody is. The cost of a rewire is mostly the cost of getting to the wire, and two houses of identical size can be completely different problems in that respect.
What the number is made of
- New branch circuits from the panel to every device, in the quantity current code expects rather than the quantity the house was built with.
- Boxes, devices and covers throughout, including the GFCI and AFCI protection the code now requires in specific rooms.
- A panel, in most cases, and often a service upgrade with it.
- Grounding and bonding brought up to current requirements, which older houses frequently lack entirely.
- Drywall opening and patching where there is no other route.
- Permit and inspection.
Why access is the real variable
A single-storey house with a walkable attic above and a crawlspace below is close to the best case. Most runs can be dropped down from above or pushed up from below, and the wall openings are small and few.
A two-storey house on a slab is the hard case. There is no crawlspace to work from, and the wiring for the ground floor ceiling and the first floor walls has nowhere to travel that is not inside finished construction. That is more openings, more patching, and more hours.
Between those, everything else. This is why a walkthrough matters more on a rewire than on any other job we quote, and why a price given over the phone from a square footage number is a guess.
The panel question
Wiring that is old enough to replace usually arrives attached to a panel of the same vintage, and running new circuits into an obsolete panel leaves the bottleneck where it was. If the existing panel is one of the types with a documented failure history, that answer is easier still, and we covered those in Federal Pacific and Zinsco panels. What a panel adds on its own is broken down in what a panel upgrade costs in San Antonio.
This post is about the money
Whether your house needs this at all is a different question with different signals, and it has its own post: signs your San Antonio home needs a rewire owns that decision. This one owns the cost once the decision is made. If the wiring in question is aluminum or knob and tube, those are specific materials with specific answers, in aluminum wiring in San Antonio homes and knob and tube wiring.
Staging, and doing it in the right order
Rewiring in phases is legitimate work, not a compromise we talk people out of. It costs somewhat more in total because each phase carries its own setup and its own inspection, and it is still the right answer when the alternative is doing nothing for three years.
The order should follow risk. Kitchens, baths, laundry, garage, exterior and anything feeding a metal-cased appliance first, because those are the circuits where an ungrounded fault has somewhere to go. General lighting in bedrooms is the part that can wait.
If an insurer is what put this on your list rather than a symptom, the scope they need may be narrower than a full rewire, which is worth establishing first. That conversation is in what it means when your insurer flags your wiring. When you want the number for your house rather than a range, whole-home rewiring starts with a walkthrough, and it is flat-quoted before anything is opened.