The load varies periodically, but the peak current of power cable is controlled by its continuous ampacity in China, resulting in the highest conductor temperature is much lower than90℃, the permitted long-term working temperature of XLPE. If the cable load is controlled by its cyclic ampacity, the cable transmission capacity could be used sufficiently. To study the 10 kV XLPE cable cyclic ampacity and its factor, a three-core cable cyclic ampacity calculation software is developed and the cyclic ampacity experiments of direct buried cable are undertaken in this paper. Experiments and research shows that the software calculation is correct and the circuit numbers and daily load factor have an important impact on the cyclic ampacity factor. The cyclic ampacity factor of 0.7 daily load factor is 1.20, which means the peak current is the 1.2 times of continuous ampacity. If the continuous ampacity is instead by the cyclic ampacity to control the cable load, the transmission capacity of the cable can be improved greatly without additional investment.