Overseas suppliers are quoting a year or more. Here's how to keep a build, retrofit, or panel on schedule.
If you've recently asked for a quote on a current transformer and been told to expect it in 13, 26, or even 52-plus weeks, you're not alone — and it isn't your supplier being difficult. The United States is in the middle of a multi-year electrical-equipment shortage, and current transformers have been swept up in it along with switchgear, breakers, and power transformers.
That's a serious problem when a single CT is the one part standing between you and a finished switchgear line-up, a completed breaker retrofit, or a panel ready to ship. The good news: a long quoted lead time on a current transformer is usually a solvable problem, not a dead end. Here's how to think about it.
Several pressures have stacked up at once. Demand for electrical infrastructure has surged — driven heavily by data center construction, grid expansion, and reshoring of manufacturing — while a large share of components are produced overseas and shipped in. Add ocean freight timelines, customs, tariff uncertainty, and high minimum-order requirements from volume producers, and the result is the long quotes you're seeing now.
The key insight: most of that lead time is not manufacturing time. It's queue time, freight time, and logistics. A current transformer is not a fundamentally slow thing to build — it's a slow thing to get when it's coming from the other side of the world through a crowded supply chain.
Many current transformers are variations on well-established designs. A domestic manufacturer with a large design library can often start from a proven design rather than engineering from scratch, which removes much of the front-end delay. Before you accept a year-long quote, it's worth asking a U.S. manufacturer whether your spec — or something close enough to adapt — is already on file.
If you need 500 units but only 20 are blocking an immediate shipment, you don't have to solve the whole problem at once. A manufacturer with no minimum-order requirement can build the urgent handful quickly while a larger run follows. High overseas minimums often force buyers into all-or-nothing timing they don't actually need.
You don't have to abandon an existing supplier to protect a deadline. Many buyers keep their primary source and add a domestic manufacturer as a parallel, quick-turn option for exactly the moments when an overseas order slips. Having that relationship established before the emergency is what turns a crisis into a phone call.
Sometimes the lead-time problem is really an availability problem — the original CT is discontinued and no one is quoting it at any lead time. In that case the path forward is reverse engineering: a manufacturer rebuilds the unit from a drawing, a sample, or even just the obsolete part number. We cover that in detail in our guide on reverse-engineering an obsolete current transformer.
You'll get a meaningful answer fastest if you can provide whatever you have on the part: a drawing or datasheet, the ratio and accuracy class, the burden, the physical dimensions and mounting, and an existing or obsolete part number. Even a single one of those is often enough for an experienced manufacturer to tell you quickly whether they can help and roughly when.
A 40-week quote on a current transformer reflects where the part is coming from and how it's getting to you — not an unchangeable law of physics. Building current transformers in the United States removes the freight, the customs, and the queue that make up most of that timeline. When a deadline is on the line, a domestic, quick-turn manufacturer is very often the difference between shipping on schedule and explaining a delay.
Magnetics & Controls builds current transformers in Easton, Pennsylvania — quick-turn, no minimums, with more than 14,000 designs on file. If a lead time is threatening a deadline, send us the spec or part number and we'll tell you quickly whether we can help, and when.
Send us your spec, drawing, or part number. We'll tell you quickly whether we can build it in the USA — and when it ships.
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