Large potential of energy still remains untapped in irrigation canals in central and southern parts of India and other countries. This energy can be utilised to augment the gap between demand and supply. The advantages of low-head canal-based small hydropower (SHP) schemes are that being in a plain area; they are near to the load centres, easily accessible and having assured water availability as canals are running for quite a long time. For decision making in development of any SHP project, economic and financial viability is very important along with technical feasibility. Thus, one needs to know the realistic cost of the project. This needs a lot of efforts in terms of time and money. In the present paper an attempt has been made to determine the correlations for the cost of different components of canal-based SHP schemes. The cost based on the developed correlations, having different head and capacity, has been compared with the available cost data of the existing hydropower stations. It has been found that these correlations can be used reasonably for the estimation of cost of new canal-based SHP schemes. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.