In this paper, a recursive least squares (RLS)-based demodulator is proposed for Electrical Tomography (ET) that employs sinusoidal excitation. The new demodulator can output preliminary demodulation results on amplitude and phase of a sinusoidal signal by processing the first two sampling data, and the demodulation precision and signal-to-noise ratio can be further improved by involving more sampling data in a recursive way. Thus trade-off between the speed and precision in demodulation of electrical parameters can be flexibly made according to specific requirement of an ET system. The RLS-based demodulator is suitable to be implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Numerical simulation was carried out to prove its feasibility and optimize the relevant parameters for hardware implementation, e.g., the precision of the fixed-point parameters, sampling rate, and resolution of the analog to digital convertor. A FPGA-based capacitance measurement circuit for electrical capacitance tomography was constructed to implement and validate the RLS-based demodulator. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed demodulator is valid and capable of making trade-off between demodulation speed and precision and brings more flexibility to the hardware design of ET systems.