How much does home network wiring cost in 2026?

A single professionally installed ethernet drop in a finished home runs $125 to $350, with $150 to $300 the realistic planning range. That price covers the cable run, the keystone jack, the faceplate, termination at both ends and a continuity and speed test. Cost per drop falls as you add more in one visit, because the setup, the trip and the time spent finding a route are shared across all of them — running four drops is nowhere near four times the price of one.

A brand-new coax outlet costs $150 to $485, with roughly $210 typical. Replacing an existing outlet is as little as $60, and extending from one that already exists runs $60 to $150. The gap is entirely about the cable path: if there is already a run to the room, the work is a faceplate and a termination. If there is not, someone has to get cable from the distribution point to that wall, and the distance and route are what you are paying for.

A hardwired wi-fi access point installed runs $265 to $644 each, which sounds expensive next to a plug-in extender until you look at what it buys. An access point is fed by its own ethernet run, so it delivers full speed at the far end; an extender halves throughput because it talks to the router over the same air it serves clients with. If a room is dead, an access point on a wired drop fixes it properly. If the problem is one weak corner, an extender may be enough.

Cat6 cable is $0.20 to $1.00 per foot, so the material in a 60-foot run is under a pound of copper and a few dollars. Labour is 60 to 70 percent of the bill, because the work is drilling, fishing cable through finished walls, working around fire blocks and insulation, then terminating and testing. This is why quotes vary so much between houses that look identical from the street: a single-storey home with an accessible attic is a fundamentally easier job than a two-storey with a finished basement, and no amount of cheaper cable closes that gap.

The cheapest time to wire a house is before the drywall goes up — new build or a room already opened for a remodel. Running cable then costs a fraction of the same work later, so if walls are open for any reason, add the drops even if you do not need them yet. As DIY, terminating a keystone jack is genuinely learnable and the tools are inexpensive. Fishing cable through finished walls is the part that goes wrong: it is slow, it is easy to damage something you cannot see, and a run that tests badly has to come out and go back in.