The cable tension plays an important role in the construction, assessment and long-term health monitoring of cable structures. The cable vibration equation is nonlinear if cable sag and bending stiffness are included. The engineering implementation of a vibration-based cable tension evaluation is mostly carried out by the simple taut string theory. However, the simple theory may cause unacceptable errors in many applications since the cable sag and bending stiffness are ignored. From the practical point of view, it is necessary to have empirical formulas if they are simple and yet accurate. Based on the solutions by means of energy method and fitting the exact solutions of cable vibration equations where the cable sag and bending stiffness are respectively taken into account, the empirical formulas are proposed in the paper to estimate cable tension based on the cable fundamental frequency only. The applicability of the proposed formulas is verified by comparing the results with those reported in the literatures and with the experimental results carried out on the stay cables in the laboratory. The proposed formulas are straightforward and they are convenient for practical engineers to fast estimate the cable tension by the cable fundamental frequency.