Abstract The increasing demand for the high-capacity power transmission in areas with limited construction spaces has led to the inevitable application of multi-circuit high voltage underground cable systems. However, this solution can result in the occurrence of elevated sheath voltages together with increased power losses and it may potentially compromise the operational safety and efficiency of the systems. This study presents a detailed analysis using EMTP-RV software to compute the steady-state induced voltage on metal sheaths of multi-circuit underground cable systems. In addition, the sheath induced voltage influencing parameters such as the arrangement of cables and the configuration of sheath bounding strategies are verified through typical computation results. Moreover, a performance evaluation of sheath induced voltage mitigations is then carried out for a practical high voltage double circuit power cable system. The evaluation results show that the phase arrangement solution can be the suitable one to reduce the sheath induced voltage effectively without any additional cost while the power loss in the system is restrained at a reasonable level.