How Much Does It Cost to Rewire a Home in Columbia SC? (2026)

For most homes, a full rewire is a five-figure project. National cost guides put rewiring an existing home at $6–$10 per square foot — This Old House (updated June 2026) works that out to $12,000–$20,000 for a typical 2,000-square-foot house — and HomeGuide's whole-house estimate runs $10,000–$30,000. No guide publishes Columbia-specific rewire pricing, and two houses on the same street can quote thousands apart — the only real number comes from a walkthrough of your home. Here's the published data, what moves a quote, and what permits cost around the Midlands.

Why nobody honest quotes a rewire over the phone

A whole-home rewire replaces the branch wiring buried in your walls, attic, and crawlspace — every circuit, every outlet and switch leg, often the panel too. The materials are predictable. The labor is not, because nobody can see how a 60- or 90-year-old house was framed, fished, and patched until the work starts. A firm price quoted sight unseen is either a guess or the start of a change-order conversation.

The factors that move the number, named across every cost guide we checked:

• Size and circuit count. Every published range is built on square footage; more outlets and switches mean more openings and more labor.
• Access. A dry crawlspace and a walk-up attic let us fish wire quickly. Finished ceilings, tight crawls, and two-story wall chases slow everything down.
• Wall construction. Bob Vila's guide (last updated early 2023 — treat its figures as conservative now) pegs fully opening walls at an extra 25–30%, and notes lath-and-plaster is harder to fish than drywall — a real factor in Columbia's pre-war neighborhoods.
• What's in the walls now. Knob-and-tube sits at the top of every range — HomeGuide estimates $12,000–$35,000 for knob-and-tube replacement versus $10,000–$30,000 for rewiring generally.
• Whether the panel rides along. Many rewires bundle an electrical panel upgrade; This Old House lists panel upgrades at $1,300–$3,000.
• The patching afterward. Fishing wire leaves access holes. HomeGuide puts drywall repairs at $300–$1,500-plus, so make sure your quote says who handles them.
• Local labor rates. Southeast labor tends toward the lower-middle of national ranges; no Columbia-specific index exists.

What the cost guides publish — and why they disagree

Here are the published national ranges and what each one measures. None is a quote and none is Columbia data — they're the backdrop for judging the quotes you collect.

Why the spread? Mostly definitions. Fixr's per-square-foot figure blends new-construction wiring with rewires, so it sits lower than This Old House's rewire-specific range — wiring open studs costs far less than fishing finished walls. Angi's guide goes as low as $2–$4 per square foot, but Angi owns HomeAdvisor and the two share data, so don't count them as two independent sources.

Permits in Columbia: small money — never skip them

Rewiring requires a permit and inspections everywhere in the Midlands, and the fees are a rounding error:

• Lexington County publishes its fee schedule (effective July 2025): residential permits are valuation-based — $50 covers the first $4,000 of job value, then $5 per $1,000 above that, with county staff calculating the final fee at issuance. On a rewire valued in the $12,000–$20,000 range, that works out to roughly $90–$130. Towns inside the county set their own fees.
• City of Columbia — per the city's published schedule, a rewire permit lands around $60–$80 on a $15,000–$20,000 job — confirm with the Development Center at 803-545-3483.
• Richland County doesn't post its fee amounts publicly — call Building Permitting & Inspections at 803-576-2140, or let your electrician pull the permit — we handle that anyway.

Permits total well under 1% of a typical rewire. There's no money in skipping them — unpermitted work has a way of surfacing at the worst time, usually during a home sale.

What a quote visit actually looks like

We don't price rewires by phone. A real quote starts with a free in-home assessment: we walk the house, open the panel, check attic and crawlspace access, note the wall construction, count the openings, and identify what wiring is in the walls. Then you get a written flat-rate quote — the number you sign is the number you pay.

That walkthrough also tells us whether you need a full rewire at all — plenty of houses need targeted work instead, and we'll say so. Aluminum branch wiring is the common example: Homewyse benchmarks aluminum wiring repair at $395–$476 per circuit under favorable conditions, so correcting a handful of circuits is a much smaller job — that's why aluminum wiring repair is its own service. Replacing all of a home's aluminum wiring, though, is essentially a full rewire. Not sure what you have? Start with our guide to identifying aluminum wiring.

As for schedule: for most homes the work is measured in days, not months, and we work zone by zone so you keep power in most of the house. Duration depends on the same factors that drive cost, so we put it in the written quote.

You don't have to write one check

A five-figure project is a real budget event, so we offer financing through Wisetack and MoneyLion. Monthly payments run as low as $89 a month — that example assumes a $5,000 project at typical terms, so a whole-house rewire finances higher — and checking your options takes about a minute with no impact on your credit score. For a lot of homeowners, that's the difference between putting off a rewire and getting it done.

The bottom line

Plan on five figures for a true whole-home rewire, with $6–$10 per square foot as the most honest published yardstick and knob-and-tube pushing toward the top. Don't anchor on "typical cost" figures that average in partial jobs, don't skip a permit to save less than 1%, and don't accept a sight-unseen price. Get a walkthrough, get the quote in writing, and compare quotes on scope, not just the bottom line.