There is very little publicly available data about the building cost of inland ships, especially for ships that have dimensions that differ significantly from those of common ships. Also, no methods to determine the building cost of inland ships are described in literature. In this paper, a method to estimate the building cost of inland ships is presented. Furthermore, the method is used to develop rules of thumb for the cost of inland ships as a function of their length, beam and draught. All material that is presented in this paper is based on or taken from Hekkenberg [2013].