The accurate determination of cable tension is important to the monitoring of the condition of a cable-stayed bridge. When applying a vibration-based formula to identify the tension of a real cable under sag, stiffness and boundary conditions, the resulting error must not be overlooked. In this work, by resolving the implicit frequency function of a real cable under the above conditions numerically, indirect methods of determining the cable force and a method to calculate the corresponding cable mode frequency are investigated. The error in the tension is studied by numerical simulation, and an empirical error correction formula is presented by fitting the relationship between the cable force error and cable parameters ${lambda}^2$ and ${xi}$. A case study on two real cables of the Shanghai Changjiang Bridge shows that employing the method proposed in this paper can increase the accuracy of the determined cable force and reduce the computing time relative to the time required for the finite element model.