The paper describes a method of minimising the material cost of small, 3-phase, cage-rotor, induction motors. The quantities which are considered as variables are the turns per coil, the wire diameter and the stack length. The method is considered initially in the context of a typical specification for small induction motors, but the effect of the inclusion of additonal items in the specification is also discussed. The material cost and performance of several standard motors are compared with their optimised equivalents.