Timeline by home size
These are working-day estimates for a two-electrician crew doing a full rewire, including the rough-in, the panel work, trim-out, and the inspection window. A 1,000 square foot home or a small bungalow: 3 to 4 days. A 2,000 square foot family home: 5 to 7 days. A 3,000 square foot two-story: 7 to 10 days. Knob-and-tube removal adds 2 to 3 days to any of these, because the old wiring has to come out or be safely abandoned before the new work starts.
Inspection scheduling adds calendar time on top of working days. The rough-in inspection happens after the wiring is in but before the walls close up, and depending on your jurisdiction it can take 1 to 3 days to get the inspector on site. Good electricians sequence the work around the inspection window so the crew is not standing idle.
Worked example: where the days go on a 2,000 sq ft rewire
Take a 2,000 square foot home with 30 outlets, switches, and fixtures. Budget about 1.25 hours of labor per opening for fishing, rough-in, and termination: 30 openings times 1.25 hours is 37.5 labor-hours of wiring. A two-person crew delivers about 16 labor-hours per working day, so the wiring itself takes roughly 2.3 days. Add a day for the panel rough-in and service work, a day for trim-out (devices, plates, fixtures), and the inspection day, and you land at 5 to 6 working days.
That is the clean case. If the walls are finished on every surface, fishing each run takes longer and the crew cuts more access holes, which pushes the wiring days up. If the attic and basement are open, runs drop straight through and the job can finish a day early.
What slows the job down
Wall access is the master variable. Plaster-and-lath walls are the worst: they crumble when cut, they grab fish tape, and they hide fire blocking that forces new holes. Finished basements remove the easy route for first-floor runs. Homes with no attic or crawl access mean every run is fished through finished walls, which can add 30 to 50 percent to the wiring days.
The other slowdowns are people problems, not wall problems. Change orders mid-job (adding a circuit for the workshop you just decided on) reset the sequencing. Late inspection scheduling parks the crew. And discovering active knob-and-tube or aluminum branch wiring the homeowner did not know about can add days while the plan changes. A thorough pre-job inspection, where the electrician actually opens a few boxes and looks in the attic, is what keeps the timeline honest.
Can you rewire in stages?
Yes, and for budget reasons many homeowners do. The standard staging is the panel upgrade and the highest-risk circuits first (kitchen, bathrooms, anything with known problems), then the remaining circuits floor by floor or room by room. Staging spreads the bill and the disruption across months.
The tradeoff is cost: staging is more expensive in total than doing it all at once. The crew sets up and tears down repeatedly, the permit and inspection process repeats, and the electrician prices each stage as its own small job with its own minimums. As a rule of thumb, expect a staged rewire to cost 15 to 25 percent more overall than a single-pass job. If you can swing the one-week disruption, doing it at once is cheaper.
Living through it
Most homeowners stay in the house. Electricians work circuit by circuit and typically restore power to the finished areas each evening, so the house is livable overnight. The worst day is the panel swap, when power is off for 4 to 8 hours: plan for the fridge, any medical equipment, and working from home that day.
The dust is the part people underestimate. Cutting access holes in drywall and plaster generates fine dust that gets everywhere, even with the crew running containment. Cover furniture, seal the HVAC returns in the work areas, and plan a real cleaning when the crew leaves. It is a week of inconvenience, not a month of chaos, and the crew has done this dance hundreds of times.