How Much Does It Cost to Rewire a House in New Orleans? (2026)

Access is the price, not size

Two 1,500 square foot houses in this city can be $8,000 apart on the same scope. The difference is almost never the square footage. It is whether the electrician can get to the walls.

The cheap case is a raised cottage or shotgun with a walkable under-house and a full-height attic. Runs drop from above or rise from below inside the wall cavity, and the only openings are at device boxes that were being replaced anyway. Plaster medallions, picture rails and original millwork generally survive untouched.

The expensive case is slab-on-grade with a low-clearance attic, plaster walls, and fire blocking in balloon-framed cavities. Every run has to be fished or surface-routed, and every opening has to be cut and patched. This is why postwar Metairie and Harvey rewires quote higher per square foot than a comparable Uptown or Gretna frame house.

What is actually in your walls

Most pre-war New Orleans houses have been wired three times and none of the old work was removed.

Knob-and-tube, standard from roughly the 1880s to the 1940s, is the layer insurers care about. The ceramic hardware is durable; the rubber-and-cloth conductor insulation is not. It embrittles with age, faster in heat and humidity, and fails at mechanical stress points where a wire passes a joist or enters a box. It also has no equipment grounding conductor, which is why every outlet on it is two-prong.

Aluminum branch circuits, common in construction from roughly 1965 to 1975, fail at the terminations rather than in the conductor. Aluminum expands and contracts more than copper, so each thermal cycle works the screw connection slightly looser until it goes resistive and heats.

Cloth-insulated copper from the 1940s to early 1960s sits in between. Often serviceable, often not, and it needs looking at rather than assuming.

Full rewiring is not always the answer for aluminum. Approved remediation at the terminations, using listed connectors, is frequently correct and far cheaper.

The line items that get left out of cheap quotes

• A new panel, at $1,200 to $2,400, or $2,000 to $4,500 if the service is being raised. A rewire feeding an obsolete panel is half a job.
• Patching and paint. Ask explicitly whether the quote makes good the openings or leaves you holes.
• The permit, $50 to $300, filed by the contractor.
• Removal of the old system. De-energizing knob-and-tube is not the same as removing it, and if your insurer wants it gone, "abandoned in place" may not satisfy them.
• Dedicated circuits for kitchen, laundry and fixed appliances, which a rewire is the natural moment to add.

Partial rewiring: when it makes sense

Partial rewiring works when one identifiable system is the problem and it is geographically contained, for example knob-and-tube confined to two original bedrooms while the rest is sound 1980s copper. It works badly when the wiring eras are interleaved throughout, because you end up paying twice to open the same walls.

Get your insurer's position in writing first if insurance is the reason you are doing this. Carriers differ substantially: some accept certification that all knob-and-tube has been de-energized and removed from accessible areas, others require complete removal including inaccessible cavities.

Bottom line

$5 to $14 per square foot, with access rather than size deciding where in that band you land, and a panel at $1,200 to $4,500 on top if the existing one cannot carry the rewired load. Get the survey before the quote: any contractor pricing a rewire off square footage without having been in your attic and under your house is guessing. Call 504-336-6748 to book the survey.