Every other job on this site has a natural unit. A roof has an area. A water heater has a capacity. A remodel has neither — "kitchen remodel" describes anything from new worktops and paint to moving the plumbing and taking out a wall. That is why remodel quotes vary more than any other category, and why a single national average for them is close to useless.

Three jobs wearing the same name

It is worth being blunt about which one you are actually buying:

  • A cosmetic refresh. Surfaces, hardware, paint, possibly appliances. Nothing moves. This is a fraction of the cost of the other two and it is often the honest answer.
  • A full replacement in place. New cabinets, worktops, floor and appliances, same layout. The trades come in sequence and the job runs for weeks.
  • A layout change. Plumbing and electrics move; sometimes a wall does too. This is the version that generates the eye-watering numbers, and it is a different project from the one above even though both get called a remodel.

Our calculators separate these explicitly rather than averaging across them, because averaging across them produces a figure that describes nobody's project.

Cabinets are the largest line, and the least standardised

In a full kitchen remodel, cabinetry is usually the biggest single item, and it spans a wider price range than anything else in the room. Refacing existing carcasses, stock units, semi-custom and fully bespoke are four different products, and a quote that just says "cabinets" has not told you which.

Materials on the surrounding work do move. Plumbing fixtures and fittings have risen +4.9% in the twelve months to July 2026, and the broad construction materials index has risen +10.5% in the twelve months to July 2026. Roughly 45% of a kitchen and 50% of a bathroom is on-site labour, so in a high-wage metro, where labour runs $45.42 an hour, the trades bill is a larger share of the total than the fittings you spent the weekend choosing.

Bathrooms: small room, maximum trade density

A bathroom is the most trade-dense space in a house. Plumbing, electrics, tiling, waterproofing and ventilation all happen inside a few square metres, in sequence, with each trade waiting on the last. That is why bathroom costs per square foot look absurd next to any other room, and why moving fixtures even a short distance costs so much more than it appears it should.

Make quotes comparable. Write a fixture schedule — the actual model of every sink, tap, tile and appliance — and give the same one to every contractor. Without it you are comparing someone's allowance for a tap against someone else's, and the cheapest quote is usually just the one with the lowest allowances.

What is not in the quote

Two things are routinely missing and both are expensive. The first is what is behind the wall — old plumbing, failed waterproofing, wiring that no longer meets code — which is discovered on day three. The second is what the disruption costs you: a kitchen out of use for six weeks has a real price even though nobody invoices for it.

We do not publish a sourced baseline for remodel work. The material trends above are real; the totals are not something any free dataset provides, and given how much the same job title can cover, a single figure would mislead more than it helped.