Conduit Bending Calculator

Bending EMT conduit is one of the first skills an electrician learns — and one of the last to truly master. Every bend is a small geometry problem: where to mark the conduit, how much the bend shortens the run (shrink), and how far the bend starts from the mark (take-up). Get any of these wrong and the conduit does not land where the box is. This free calculator handles the math for the six bends you will use every day on the job.

The six bends every electrician uses

• Offset bend — two equal, opposite bends that shift the conduit to clear an obstacle or enter a box at the right height. The workhorse of commercial rough-in.
• 90° stub-up — a single right-angle bend that brings conduit up out of a slab or into a panel at an exact height.
• 3-point saddle — jumps over a small obstacle, like a pipe or a beam, with a center bend and two side bends.
• 4-point saddle — two back-to-back offsets that box around a wide obstruction such as a duct or pipe rack.
• Rolling offset — an offset that changes height and horizontal position at the same time, bent in two planes.
• Kicked 90° — a 90° with a short kick at one end, common for entering panels and boxes.

The three numbers behind every bend

Mark spacing is the distance between bend marks: obstacle height × the multiplier for your bend angle (the multiplier is 1/sin of the angle; at 30° it is exactly 2.0, so a 6" offset needs 12" between marks).

Shrink is the conduit length a bend “eats.” That same 6" offset at 30° shrinks the run by 1.5". Forget shrink and your couplings land in the wrong place — and shrink compounds when a run has more than one bend.

Take-up is how far the bend starts before your mark. For a 90° stub with 1/2" EMT, a standard hand bender takes up 5", so you mark 5" short of the target height. Take-up is a property of the bender head, not a formula.

How to use the calculator

Pick a bend, enter the height and angle (and your bender if you know it), and get mark locations, remaining straight lengths, minimum conduit length, and a feasibility check that warns you before a bend is physically too tight to make. Results display in fractional inches — the way tape measures read — with decimal inches and metric (mm) one tap away.

Field tips that save conduit

• Bend a test piece on scrap whenever you pick up an unfamiliar bender. No two benders bend exactly alike.
• Add up shrink for every bend in the run before you cut.
• Keep all bends of a saddle in the same plane, or the run will dogleg.
• When a bend feels wrong halfway through, stop — re-bending a kinked stick wastes more conduit than starting over.