DIN VDE 0250 vs DIN VDE 0276: Reading German Cable Type Codes Correctly

01One code, two standard families

German cable names are construction descriptions, not product names. NYCWY 3 × 120 SM/70 0,6/1 kV is a complete specification in twelve characters: it tells you the conductor material, the insulation compound, the presence of a concentric copper screen in wave form, the conductor shape, the core count, the cross-sections and the voltage basis. That density is why the German code survives in tenders written outside Germany, and it is also why it goes wrong so often: the letters are read as a brand or a family, and the two standards that actually contain the requirements are never opened.

Those two standards are the ones in the title of this page. DIN VDE 0250 is titled Isolierte Starkstromleitungen — insulated power wires and cords — and it is a national series. DIN VDE 0276 is titled Starkstromkabel — power cables — and most of its parts are German adoptions of a CENELEC harmonization document, so the requirements originated in Brussels and the German part is one national edition of them. A third family sits alongside both: DIN VDE 0281, the German version of HD 21, and DIN VDE 0282, the German version of HD 22, for the harmonised wires and cords that carry H designations such as H05VV-F and H07RN-F.

The practical consequence is a rule that is worth writing down before reading a data sheet: find out which series the part number belongs to, then read the letters. An installation cable and a power cable can carry codes that look as though they belong to the same family — NYM and NYY differ by one letter — while sitting at different voltages, in different standards and under different duties. The wider mapping against IEC, BS, UL and Chinese GB designations is in the cross-reference hub for this series; this page is the German-specific decoder inside it.

02The letter decoder, position by position

The letters are read from the conductor outward, following the build order of the cable. The first letter is almost always N, which does not describe a material at all: it means the cable is made to a German standard. A bracketed (N) is the opposite claim — the cable is in alignment with the standard rather than made to it, which is a real distinction when a submittal has to demonstrate conformance.

After the conductor and insulation letters come the metallic layers, then the armour, then the outer sheath. The conductor form is appended to the cross-section rather than sitting in the letter string: RE is a round solid conductor, RM round stranded, SE sector solid and SM sector stranded, with V for a compacted conductor and H for a hollow one.

03Reading a power-cable line item

Take the worked example the German reference itself uses: NYCWY 3 × 120 SM/70 0,6/1 kV. Six blocks, in build order.

Two things about that example are easy to miss. The first is that the concentric copper conductor is written into the middle of the letters, between the insulation and the sheath, because that is where it physically sits; a code that puts it at the end is describing a different build. The second is the trailing /70 on the cross-section: the concentric conductor has its own cross-section, and it is sized for the earth-fault duty rather than for the load, which is why it does not simply repeat the phase size.

The same construction travels under different names depending on the naming tradition the supplier was brought up in. A copper conductor with XLPE insulation, steel wire armour and a PVC sheath is N2XRY in German, YJV22 or YJV32 in Chinese GB/T usage and simply “SWA armoured XLPE cable” in British construction language. That is expanded on the cross-reference page for the British armoured pair, BS 5467 vs BS 6724, where the same layer stack is described under two sheath compounds.

04DIN VDE 0276 and the European spine behind it

DIN VDE 0276 is a family of power-cable standards in which almost every part is the German edition of a CENELEC HD document. The part number is German; the requirements were agreed in Brussels. That matters commercially, because it means a German part number and its HD source can be quoted interchangeably in a tender as long as the edition is the same — and it matters for the decoder, because the HD number tells you which document a manufacturer's type test is actually being run against.

Part 603 is the one that appears on almost every German low-voltage data sheet. Its published German edition is the 2010-03 version, 112 pages, carrying the title Starkstromkabel — Teil 603: Energieverteilungskabel mit Nennspannung 0,6/1 kV; Deutsche Fassung HD 603 S1:1994/A3:2007, Teile 0, 1, 3-G und 5-G, and it replaced DIN VDE 0272. Its scope sentence describes cables used in underground power distribution networks, mainly for public distribution. The full HV 603 S1 story, and the corresponding HD 620 S1 story for medium voltage, is on the HD 603 / HD 620 cross-reference page; what matters here is that the German part number is a pointer to it.

05DIN VDE 0250: what is actually in the wire series

DIN VDE 0250 is the German national series for insulated power wires, cords and flexible cables. It is not a harmonised series: it never became an HD document, and the types in it are German products rather than European ones. Part 1 carries the general requirements for the whole series; the numbered parts below it each describe one product family.

Two of them carry most of the traffic. Part 204 is the PVC installation cable NYM — the standard German in-wall and in-conduit cable, in the J version with a green-yellow protective conductor and the O version without one. Part 214 is NHXMH, the halogen-free installation cable with improved behaviour in fire, which is what a German project asks for when the specification says “halogen-free” rather than “PVC”. Part 215 covers NHMH, a second halogen-free installation type with special fire properties.

The rest of the series is where the German preference for special-purpose flexible cable shows. Parts 802, 812, 813 and 814 describe rubber-sheathed heavy-duty cables — stage cable, mine and plant cable, hose-type multicore and reeling or trailing cable — and it is this group that made DIN VDE 0250 known outside Germany, because Germany is unusual in publishing detailed design rules for flexible reeling and material-handling cable.

06NYM, NHXMH and (N)YM side by side

All three are 300/500 V installation cables for fixed wiring inside a building, and all three appear in the same tender. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is in the compounds.

NYM is PVC insulated and PVC sheathed, black outside, built to DIN VDE 0250-204. Its conductor is Class 1 solid to IEC 60228 at the smaller sections and Class 2 stranded at the larger ones; the cores are identified to DIN VDE 0293-308; the flame test is the single-wire vertical test to DIN VDE 0482-332-1-2, the German face of EN 60332-1-2; the fixed temperature range runs from −40 °C to +70 °C. NHXMH is the halogen-free answer: XLPE insulation, a halogen-free flame-retardant outer sheath in light grey, built to DIN VDE 0250-214, with the same core identification. Because it is halogen-free it can carry a CPR declaration, and a manufacturer's brochure for its own NHXMH quotes class Dca-s1b,d2,a1.

The distinction that catches people is not the material but the test. The flame test on NYM proves that a single wire does not propagate flame along its own length. The halogen-free claims on NHXMH are separately tested — halogen content, smoke density and acidity — and they are properties of the smoke, not of the circuit. Neither cable promises that the circuit keeps working during a fire; that is a circuit-integrity duty and it belongs to a different family of standards entirely, which is the subject of the fire-test cross-reference page.

07Where the harmonised H designations fit

The H designations — H05VV-F, H07V-R, H07RN-F — come from a different system, agreed across CENELEC rather than nationally. Germany adopted them twice over: first as DIN VDE 0281 for the PVC wires and DIN VDE 0282 for the cross-linked and rubber wires, and today as the DIN EN 50525 series, adopted in German practice as DIN VDE 0285-525-2-xx. A German data sheet for a harmonised wire therefore carries three identities at once: the H designation, the EN 50525 part, and the DIN VDE number.

Germany also kept its own short designations for the same products, and they are still printed. A manufacturer's handbook of the harmonised code lists the pairs directly: NYA and NYAF against H07V-U and H07V-K, NYMHY against H05VV-F, NMHöuNSHöu against H07RN-F, N4GA against H07G-U, and N2GAFU against H05SJ-K. Seeing one of those older codes on a drawing is not evidence of an obsolete cable, but it does mean the drawing and the current standard have to be reconciled before the order goes out.

The important gap is the one the harmonised system never covered. NYM, NHXMH, NSSHÖU and NSHTÖU are German types with no H designation. They are national products, they are specified by their German part number, and there is no H-code substitute that a buyer can simply swap in. The wider harmonised-wire picture, including how the H designations map onto IEC 60227 and IEC 60245, is on the building-wiring cross-reference page.

08The German code against IEC, EN and GB

The type code is German; the cable usually is not. Most 0,6/1 kV cable sold into Europe and Asia is built to the IEC 60502-1 basis and then labelled with whichever national code the customer reads — NYY or N2XY in German terms, VV or YJV in Chinese GB/T terms, or a plain construction phrase such as “XLPE/SWA/PVC” in British usage. The naming traditions were built independently by three national standards bodies, and the shorthand was never agreed internationally even where the underlying construction requirements overlap.

The consequence for procurement is that matching by name fails and matching by standard works. Two cables built to IEC 60502-1 and GB/T 12706 are generally interchangeable even when one is labelled N2XY and the other YJV. The conductor classes line up across IEC 60228 and its Chinese counterpart, and the flame-propagation tests line up across the IEC 60332 series and its Chinese counterpart. What does not line up is the code, so the useful question on any line item is not “which name is this” but “which standard and which construction is this”.

09Writing a line item that cannot be misread

Almost every dispute described on this page starts as a short line in a bill of quantities. The fix is to make the line name four things: the part number, its edition, the object, and the construction. If any one of the four is missing, a supplier who reads the line differently can still be right.

A wording that survives review

• Name the part, not the series. “DIN VDE 0250-204” and “DIN VDE 0276-603” identify one document each. “To VDE” identifies neither.
• Add the edition where conformance has to be demonstrated. A part number without a year is a moving target, and the amendments appended to a title change the requirement.
• Say which object the cable is. A wire to 0250 and a power cable to 0276 sit at different voltages and serve different duties, and no letter code bridges them.
• Write the construction alongside the code. “Cu/XLPE/PVC, 0,6/1 kV, Class 2” survives translation into any naming tradition; N2XY alone does not.
• Ask for the document, not the claim. A test report names the construction, the core count and the section that were tested. Anything broader than that is a type name, and type names travel.

Reviewed by Luo Qiang — Senior Cable Application Engineer, Sorivo
15+ years in industrial and renewable energy cable specification. Experienced in cable specification aligned with IEC standards.

How this was written: every part number, title and figure in this article is checked against the standard index, publication record or manufacturer datasheet listed in Sources before publication. Where a figure comes from a supplier or a manufacturer's own document rather than from the standard itself, it is labelled as such in the text and not presented as a standard value.