Cable Standard Cross-Reference: GB/T vs IEC, BS, UL and NEC

01Why a standard number is not a product code

Ask three different people what "IEC 60502-1 cable" means and you get three answers: a buyer means a construction, an engineer means a test regime, and a factory means a type code that may or may not be called the same thing in Chinese. Procurement fails at exactly this seam. A quotation comes back with a GB/T 12706.1 cable against an IEC 60502-1 enquiry, and it is approved because the two standard numbers look interchangeable.

They are not interchangeable as codes. Chinese practice separates three layers that English-language enquiry documents usually merge into one string:

• The standard — what the finished cable is tested against. GB/T 12706.1-2020 IEC 60502-1:2004
• The type code — what the cable is called on a drum and a quotation. YJV THHN H07RN-F
• The certification — who has actually verified it. CCC UL CE

The rest of this page supplies the three layers as tables you can look up: the standard families, the adoption relationships, and the letter systems that generate the codes.

02Eight standard families, and which one is the parent

Almost every cable specification in the world traces back to one of eight bodies. Four of them are adopters rather than authors; three — the North American UL and NEC pair, Canada's CSA system and the Australian/New Zealand AS/NZS system — stand outside IEC altogether and generate their own type codes. Getting the parent right tells you which document to check first when two specifications disagree.

The "role" column is the only part that matters for translation work. An adopter's document can be diffed against the parent; an independent system's document cannot.

03IDT, MOD and NEQ: the three ways a national standard adopts IEC

Chinese practice labels the relationship explicitly on the cover of the standard. There are three labels, and they are not a quality ranking — they describe how much of the parent document survives.

The distinction between IDT and MOD is the highest-value sentence on this page. Sales teams get burned by treating a MOD pair as if it were IDT; engineers get burned by treating an IDT pair as if it were MOD and re-verifying work that did not need it.

04Decoding a Chinese model code

Chinese type codes are not arbitrary strings; they are built from a small alphabet. What follows is split into the two coding systems you will actually see on a Chinese quotation, because they work differently and mixing them is the most common decoding error.

The GB/T 5023 system: two digits after 60227 IEC

The current GB/T 5023 series for PVC-insulated cables up to 450/750 V does not name products with letters at all. Its annex on the designation method states the rule in one line: every cable type in the series is designated by a two-digit number placed after "60227 IEC", where the first digit is the basic classification and the second is the specific variant within it.

Columns 3 and 4 are the two sides of the comparison table in the standard's informative Annex B, which pairs each current two-digit designation with the letter code used by the 1985/1986 editions. Ten of the eighteen rows are shown here.

Reading the letters that survive

Where letter codes are still used — in the older GB 5023 editions, in JB/T 8734 today, and throughout the power-cable and control-cable families — the letters follow a fixed logic. The standard's annex groups them by function rather than by position:

• By use: B fixed wiring · R flexible cord · T lift cable · S decorative lighting cord
• By material: V PVC insulation or sheath · VY oil-resistant PVC sheath · YJ XLPE insulation
• By construction: B flat · S twisted pair · P screened · R flexible stranding
• By heat rating: 70 °C is omitted; 90 marks the 90 °C version

So BVR reads as fixed-wiring, PVC, flexible conductor; RVV as flexible cord, PVC insulation, PVC sheath; RVVYP as the oil-resistant, screened version of the same cord.

The GB/T 12706 family: power cables

Power cables use the same letter logic applied to a thicker construction. The most common low-voltage code you will meet from a Chinese supplier is YJV: XLPE insulation, PVC sheath, copper conductor, for fixed installation. Change one letter and you change one material:

• YJV — copper conductor, XLPE insulation, PVC sheath. The default for trays, ducts and conduit indoors.
• YJLV — the same, with an aluminium conductor.
• YJV22 — steel-tape armour added, for direct burial where mechanical protection is needed.
• YJV32 / YJV42 — fine or coarse round steel wire armour, for shafts and routes under tensile load.
• YJY / YJLY — the PE-sheathed variant, where a lighter or lower-smoke sheath is wanted.

The construction logic here is standard across the GB/T 12706 series and is the same logic you will see on the YJV / YJLV 0.6/1 kV XLPE power cable page, which also states the series' relationship to IEC 60502-1 explicitly.

The GB/T 9330 family: control cables

Control cables have their own declared alphabet, and unlike the other two families it is written out in a numbered clause. The series code is K; everything after it is material and construction:

Read the digits as a pair, not a number: in KVV22 the first 2 is the armour and the second 2 is the oversheath. The standard's own worked examples include KVV, KYJVP2, KVV22, ZB-KVVRP and KYJY33.

05Decoding a North American type code

North American building-wire codes are the hardest to translate because they encode ratings, not materials. Each letter is a claim about performance, and the claims are cumulative. The convention runs left to right:

Letter conventions and the temperature/location ratings follow the type-letter system used with NEC Article 310; per-type construction is cross-checked against manufacturer construction sheets.

Applying the table: THHN is thermoplastic, high-heat, nylon-jacketed — a 90 °C dry conductor under UL 83. THWN-2 adds the wet rating and the "-2", becoming 90 °C wet and dry. XHHW-2 is cross-linked, high-heat, wet-rated, and the "-2" makes it 90 °C in both states under UL 44; some manufacturers hold listings under both UL 44 and UL 83, which is why the standard reference on a data sheet can differ between makers. USE-2 is the underground service-entrance type under UL 854.

The practical consequence for a Chinese supplier is blunt: there is no GB/T code that means THHN. A GB/T 12706.1 power cable and a UL 83 building wire can be compared on conductor, insulation material, temperature rating and voltage, and nothing more. For the type-by-type comparison, the THHN / UL 83 building wire guide walks through one family in detail.

06Decoding a European HAR code

European harmonised designations solve the same problem the other way round: instead of letters that claim ratings, the code is positional and each field states a fact. The format is H + voltage + insulation + sheath + "-" + conductor.

Field meanings are consistent across the manufacturer and industrial-wiring references listed in Sources. HD 361's own text was not obtained for this article, so no clause numbers are quoted here.

So H07RN-F reads as harmonised, 450/750 V, rubber insulation, polychloroprene sheath, extra-flexible conductor — the heavy portable rubber cable that appears on European jobsites. H07V-K is the single-core, PVC, fine-wire panel wire at the same voltage, and it is the closest European analogue of the Chinese BVR family and of UL 1015 / MTW on the American side. British practice keeps a parallel numeric designation: 6491X covers the 450/750 V H07V-U and H07V-R constructions, while 2491X is the flexible Class 5 name — the 300/500 V H05V-K at 0.5–1.0 mm² and the 450/750 V H07V-K at 1.5 mm² and above.

07The cross-reference table, product family by product family

This is the table to bookmark. It maps every naming system this site covers, product family by product family — China, IEC, Europe and the UK, North America, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand — and it deliberately leaves cells blank where no genuine equivalent exists. A blank is information: it tells you the comparison has to be made on ratings rather than on names.

Blank cells mark a genuine gap, not a missing lookup. The control-cable row carries a scope-level observation: IEC 60227's structure list is organised around PVC-insulated cable types rather than around "control cable" as a category, which is why the IEC column is empty rather than filled with an equivalent series number. The two right-hand columns follow the same rule. The Canadian column stays blank wherever a construction has no published CSA type of its own, because Canada's parts are written around native types rather than as translations of IEC families. The Australian column lists two part numbers for the building-wire row on purpose: whether AS/NZS 5000.1 or 5000.2 governs a given building cable turns on the voltage marking printed on the cable itself, so the two are named together rather than resolved here.

Mining and trailing cable is the row that shows why a blank column is not a gap in the table: the Australian standard appears under Australia/New Zealand because that is the system that publishes it, and the Europe / UK cell is empty for the same reason the Canadian cell is empty elsewhere — no European document of this kind exists to write there.

The naming systems behind these columns are each worked through in full on this site. The British pair in the Europe column is worked through in the BS 5467 vs BS 6724 comparison; the North American letter system, in the THHN, THWN-2 and XHHW-2 comparison; the harmonized documents behind the European column, in HD 603 S1 and HD 620 S2; the German column, in DIN VDE 0250 vs 0276; the Canadian column, in CSA C22.2 No. 38 vs No. 131; and the two right-hand columns, in AS/NZS 5000.1 vs AS/NZS 3013. The PV row is developed in the IEC 62930 vs EN 50618 comparison and, on the Chinese side, in the H1Z2Z2-K vs PV1-F selection piece; the shipboard layer that sits between the power-cable row and the control row is opened out in IEC 60092 shipboard cable; and the fire-testing systems behind the circuit-integrity row are set side by side in BS 6387 vs IEC 60331.

08What does not translate

Four things survive a standard cross-reference as false friends. Each one has a specific failure mode attached to it.

1. Certification does not travel with the standard

A cable can be built to a standard and hold no certification, and the certification bodies recognise each other only where they have said so. CCC, CE marking and UL listing are separate systems with separate scopes. A CE declaration does not make a cable acceptable on a project that requires CCC, and a CCC certificate does not substitute for a UL listing in a North American inspection. Certification scope is also construction-specific — a certificate for one conductor material, screen type and cross-section range does not cover a different build. Where a project turns on mutual recognition, that question belongs to the accepting authority, and we say so rather than answer it ourselves.

2. Flame and smoke classes do not convert

China's flame-retardant and fire-resistant scheme is a national classification; Europe's CPR scheme is a construction-product classification with its own letter grades; IEC's flame tests are test methods, not classes. The three are not on a common scale, and a conversion table claiming to map a Chinese class onto a CPR Euroclass should be treated with suspicion. Match the underlying test method instead — for the halogen and smoke acid tests that separate LSZH from ordinary PVC, the XLPE vs LSZH insulation-versus-sheath comparison follows the test family in detail.

3. Cross-sectional area and AWG are two scales, not a conversion

Metric cross-section and AWG are both nominal designations, and the "nearest" AWG to a metric size is not electrically identical — strand count, conductor class and the resulting current rating can differ even where the physical area is close. When a project specifies one scale and the supply is in the other, convert on current rating and voltage drop, not on area alone.

4. Voltage notation means different things

Chinese and IEC practice writes the rating as U₀/U — the phase-to-earth and phase-to-phase values, with U_m reserved for the maximum system voltage. North American practice writes a single number, such as 600 V. The two are not a straight translation, and a system's nominal voltage is not the same as its maximum equipment voltage; treating them as the same figure is how a cable ends up specified for a voltage class it does not cover.

Reading a cable's own marking is the ground truth these tables are checked against, and the cable markings decoder works through what each layer of print on a drum does and does not prove.

09What this page publishes, and what it will not

The tables above are built from standard documents and standard records, and the adoption labels — IDT, MOD, NEQ — are taken from the standards themselves rather than inferred. Where a document was not available, the page says so and stops at the standard name: HD 361's text was not obtained, so the European table gives field meanings without clause numbers, and the IEC column for control cables is left blank rather than filled with an assumed equivalent.

The two right-hand columns follow the same discipline. Both are built from the scope statements of the standards themselves and from the type designations those standards and their users publish, and both stop at the standard name wherever a document could not be obtained: no Australian or Canadian entry appears here that is not carried by the standard's own text or by a manufacturer's published type list, and the Canadian cells are limited to the CSA parts whose own scope names the type directly. A cell is left blank rather than filled with a type that merely looks similar.

What this page does not do is decide a project. It will not tell you that a particular GB/T cable satisfies a particular IEC or UL requirement on your job, because that depends on the build, the certificate scope and the accepting authority. Bring us the two specifications and the site conditions, and we will work the comparison against what we actually manufacture.