We compute the minimal energy cost for extracting entanglement from the ground state of a bosonic or fermionic quadratic system. Specifically, we find the minimal energy increase in the system resulting from replacing an entangled pair of modes, sharing entanglement entropy ∆S, by a product state, and we show how to construct modes achieving this minimal energy cost. Thus, we obtain a protocol independent lower bound on the extraction of pure state entanglement from quadratic systems. Due to their generality, our results apply to a large range of physical systems, as we discuss with examples.A ⊕ B, we have the unique decompositionwhere the projections P A : V → A and P B : V → B with P A + P B = 1 provide the unique decomposition of a vector v = a + b into its part inGiven such a decomposition, the spectrum of J 2 A and J 2 B is the same except for the number of eigenvalues equal to −1. Put differently, given an eigenvalue λ of J 2 A , we have λ = −1 or J 2 B also has λ as eigenvalue.Proof. We write J 2 = −1 in blocks to find