Last updated: August 31, 2026
New Orleans Electrical Services connects homeowners and businesses with licensed electrical contractors who rewire older homes across New Orleans and Orleans Parish. House rewiring in New Orleans is rarely a clean sheet: it is almost always the removal of one or more obsolete wiring systems from a building that people are still living in, with plaster, heart pine and original trim that nobody wants opened up. The scope, the sequencing, and the price all follow from what is actually in the walls, which is why the first visit is a survey rather than a quote.
What we do on the first visit
Every house rewiring job starts the same way: we look before we quote. You get the cause in writing, a price that does not move once work begins, and the permit filed by us rather than by you.
- Survey what is really there. Attic, under-house, panel, and a sample of boxes. Most houses here have two or three eras of wiring at once.
- Scope it in tiers. Safety-critical first, then capacity, then convenience. You see prices for each tier and choose the line.
- Rewire in zones. We work a zone at a time so you keep power in the rest of the house. Most families stay in place throughout.
- Inspect, patch, and hand over. Parish inspection, then plaster and paint made good. You get a labelled directory and the permit record.
Three wiring eras, usually in the same house
The typical pre-war New Orleans house has been wired three times, and none of the old work was removed. Knob-and-tube from the 1920s still feeds the original bedrooms. A 1960s kitchen renovation added a run of early NM cable. Somebody in the 1990s put a modern circuit into the back addition. The panel is a patchwork of all three and there is no directory.
Knob-and-tube is the layer that most concerns insurers and most concerns us. It was used from roughly the 1880s to the 1940s, and the problem is not the ceramic hardware, which is durable, but the rubber-and-cloth insulation on the conductor. It embrittles with age, and heat and humidity accelerate that. It also has no equipment grounding conductor at all, which is why every outlet on it is two-prong, and why nothing with a metal case is safely grounded anywhere in that part of the house.
Aluminum branch circuits are the layer people miss. Aluminum was widely substituted for copper in branch wiring between roughly 1965 and 1975 when copper prices spiked. It is a perfectly good conductor; the failure is at the terminations. Aluminum has a higher coefficient of thermal expansion than copper, so every heating and cooling cycle works the screw terminal slightly looser. Over decades the connection becomes resistive, and a resistive connection carrying load becomes a hot connection inside a wall box.
What humidity and salt air do to conductor here
Gulf Coast conditions change the maintenance picture in ways that generic rewiring advice does not cover. Junction boxes in a raised-cottage under-house or a vented attic spend the summer in high humidity, and where salt air reaches them, particularly in Lakeview, Gentilly and the eastern parishes, the terminations corrode. Corroded terminations are resistive terminations. It is the same failure mechanism as loose aluminum, arrived at by a different route.
This is why we survey the under-house and the attic before quoting rather than pricing off square footage alone. What we are looking for is green or white oxidation at splices, conductors sagging out of their staples, splices made outside a box, and any point where a run has been extended with a twist and tape. In houses that have flooded, we are also looking at whether the water line reached any device box; conductor that has been submerged wicks moisture up inside the insulation and corrodes well above the visible line.
The practical result is that rewiring a house here is frequently more urgent than its age alone suggests, and occasionally less. We have surveyed 1930s houses with surprisingly sound 1970s copper throughout, and 1990s houses with a flooded crawlspace full of corroded splices.
Rewiring a house you are living in, without gutting it
The question everyone actually wants answered is how much of the house gets opened up. In a raised cottage or shotgun with attic access above and a walkable space below, the answer is surprisingly little: most runs drop down from the attic or up from below inside the wall cavity, and the openings are at device boxes you were going to replace anyway. Plaster medallions, picture rails and original millwork generally survive untouched.
The harder cases are slab-on-grade construction with no under-house, low-clearance attics over an addition, and balloon-framed walls with fire blocking. There we fish where we can, use surface raceway in utility spaces where it is honest to do so, and cut and patch where there is no alternative. We show you where those openings will be before we start, not after.
Sequencing keeps you in the house. We rewire in zones, typically two or three rooms at a time, so the rest of the house stays energized. A whole-house rewire on a 1,400 square foot shotgun usually runs one to two weeks of working days. Kitchen and bath circuits get scheduled around your actual life rather than left dead over a weekend.
What is included
- Room-by-room survey of what wiring systems are actually present
- Written scope splitting must-do from can-wait, with prices for each
- New NM-B (Romex) or MC cable on properly sized circuits
- Grounded receptacles throughout, replacing two-prong devices
- AFCI and GFCI protection per NEC 210.12 and 210.8
- Dedicated circuits for kitchen, laundry, and fixed appliances
- Old knob-and-tube de-energized and removed, not just abandoned live
- Permit, inspection, and patching of every opening we make
What you should expect to pay
2026 whole-house rewire market data of $4-$15 per square foot. A 1,400 sq ft New Orleans shotgun lands around $7,000-$19,600; a 2,000 sq ft raised cottage around $10,000-$28,000.
| Job | Range |
|---|---|
| Whole-house rewire | $5 - $14 per square foot |
| Panel replacement, same amperage | $1,200 - $2,400 |
| Electrical permit | $50 - $300 |
The spread is driven by access more than by square footage. A raised cottage with a walkable under-house and a full attic sits at the low end. A slab-on-grade double with plaster walls, no attic clearance and original millwork sits at the high end because every run has to be fished and every opening patched.
Run the cost estimator for a range against your own situation, or call 504-336-6748 and describe the job.
