Cabinets dominate. Granite vs quartz is not the swing. Keeping the layout vs moving the sink is. Survey defaults from HomeGuide, every line editable. A budget range, never a quote.
$160–$380per linear ft, stock / semi-custom cabinetsHomeGuide, “How Much Does a Kitchen Remodel Cost?”, retrieved 23 August 2026 (page dated 31 December 2025). Custom cabinetry on the same page runs up to $1,000 per linear foot. A full same-layout remodel is $150–$250 per square foot or $15,000–$50,000.
On the defaults — 20 linear feet of stock/semi-custom cabinets, HomeGuide counters and demo, $5,000 appliances, layout kept, 10% contingency — the budget is $11,220 to $23,210. Type a wet-work extra if the sink, range or stack is moving; that line is how two “same size” kitchens stop being comparable. Hold contingency yourself, outside the contract.
Cabinets first, then the sink
Survey defaults, or type the rate off a bid. Nothing is emailed.
—Budget range
—Cabinets
—Wet-work
—Contingency
What this assumed—
A budget range, never a quote. Garage conversion and ADU cost live on those sites. HyreRemodel does not remodel kitchens.
The sink is the budget
Homeowners deliberate for weeks over granite against quartz. That choice is worth a few thousand dollars. Whether the sink moves is worth considerably more, and it is usually decided in an afternoon.
A same-layout kitchen is a sequence of replacements. Old cabinets out, new cabinets in, worktops templated and fitted, appliances connected where appliances already were, floor laid, walls painted. Every service stays where it is. It is disruptive and expensive but it is predictable, and a competent contractor can price it accurately from a measured drawing.
Move the sink and it becomes a different project. Drainage has to fall correctly to reach the stack, which may mean opening the floor. The vent has to be reworked. Supply lines move. If the range moves, you are into gas or a new circuit and a new extraction route through an exterior wall or up through the structure. Each of those is a trade, a schedule dependency and an inspection.
The national evidence for this is unusually clean. Zonda’s Cost vs. Value report prices the two projects separately. The minor, same-layout kitchen recouped 112.9% — $28,458 spent against $32,141 in estimated added resale value, 5th out of 28 projects and the only interior job in the top five. A major kitchen remodel, which is the same room with the layout changed, appears nowhere near it.
Which is not an instruction to keep your layout. If the kitchen does not work — if two people cannot be in it, if the fridge door blocks the only walkway — then fix it, and enjoy it for the years you live there. Just do it knowing that you are buying use rather than resale, and put the wet-work line in the tool above so the number in front of you is honest.
Where a kitchen budget actually goes
Cabinets dominate every kitchen budget, which is why the tool above prices them by the linear foot rather than burying them in a per-square-foot rate.
Illustrative. Cabinets are roughly a third before anything moves — which is why cabinet tier, not worktop material, is the decision to spend time on.
Why linear feet and not square feet. Cabinets are priced along the run — the wall length they occupy — because that is how they are manufactured and sold. A long galley kitchen and a square kitchen of identical floor area can need very different amounts of cabinetry. Quoting a kitchen at dollars per square foot of floor is convenient for an article and misleading for a budget.
Measure the run properly. Base cabinets and wall cabinets are separate runs. Measure along the wall at counter height, ignore the floor entirely, and count the tall units separately because they price differently. Fifteen minutes with a tape gives you the single most important input on this page.
The tier decision inside cabinets. Stock is made in fixed sizes and filled out with filler strips. Semi-custom is stock sizes with more finishes and some modifications. Custom is built to your dimensions. The jump from stock to custom is the largest single price step available in a kitchen, and it buys you fit in awkward rooms, not durability — a good stock carcass and a good custom carcass are frequently made of the same material.
The line everyone forgets. Not on the chart because it is not construction: eating for six weeks without a kitchen. The remodeling timeline planner is where to work out how many weeks that actually is, because cabinet lead times own the calendar more than the trades do. Budget it honestly. It is real money and it arrives exactly when everything else is also arriving.
Eight decisions, ranked by what they actually do to the number
HyreRemodel framework. The ordering is the point — homeowner attention runs almost exactly in the opposite direction to cost impact.
The two largest bars point in opposite directions and are the same decision seen from either side.
Decision
Effect on cost
How much attention it usually gets
The honest advice
Does the sink or range move?
Very large
Little — often decided casually during design
Price it as its own line before you commit. If the layout works, keeping it is the cheapest good decision available.
Cabinet tier: stock, semi-custom, custom
Large
Moderate
Custom buys fit, not quality. In a square room with standard dimensions, stock and semi-custom do the same job for less.
Is a wall coming out?
Large, and unpredictable
Moderate
If it is load-bearing you need an engineer, a beam, and a permit. Find out which it is before you draw a plan around it.
Is the house pre-1978?
Moderate to large
Almost none
The EPA lead rule changes who may do the work and how. See below — it is the most commonly omitted line in kitchen budgeting.
Appliance specification
Moderate, and entirely elective
High
The easiest line to control and the one most likely to drift upward during the project. Set it early and separately.
Electrical: is the panel adequate?
Moderate, occasionally very large
Little
A modern kitchen wants several dedicated circuits. On an older panel that is a service upgrade, which is a different order of cost.
Countertop material
Small to moderate
Very high
The decision people agonise over. Real, but a fraction of the cabinet line. Choose what you like, then use the countertop calculator, because stone is bought by the slab and not by the square foot you installed.
Cabinet hardware and paint colour
Small
Very high
Costs almost nothing and changes how the room feels more than most of the lines above it. Genuinely good value for the deliberation.
If the house was built before 1978, a federal rule applies
The federal lead-safe renovation rule is the most consequential line missing from almost every kitchen cost guide on the internet, and it is not optional.
The rule. Under the EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting programme (40 CFR Part 745, Subpart E), Anyone paid to perform work that disturbs painted surfaces in homes, childcare facilities and preschools built before 1978 must be a certified firm using certified renovators. That includes sole proprietors.
The exemption, and its limits. Minor repair and maintenance — including minor HVAC, electrical and plumbing work — disturbing 6 sq ft or less of painted surface per room inside, or 20 sq ft or less outside, is outside the rule, provided none of the prohibited work practices are used. A kitchen remodel is not going to fit inside six square feet of disturbed paint. Removing cabinets off plastered walls, taking out a window, opening a wall for plumbing — any of those exceeds it immediately.
Two details that catch people out. First: Replacing a window is a renovation regardless of its size. Even a window smaller than six square feet does not qualify as minor repair and maintenance. Second, and more often abused: Jobs other than emergency renovations performed in the same room within the same 30 days must be counted as one job when deciding whether the work is minor repair and maintenance. Splitting a job across three visits to stay under six square feet does not work.
Doing it yourself. Homeowners working on their own pre-1978 home are generally outside the rule — unless they rent the property, run a childcare facility in it, or buy and resell homes for profit. That is a genuine exemption from the certification requirement, and it is not an exemption from lead being dangerous. Pre-1978 paint dust is a hazard to children in the house regardless of who created it.
What it does to your budget. Containment, HEPA extraction, controlled demolition and cleaning verification take time, and time is the cost. Ask any contractor bidding a pre-1978 house whether they are an EPA lead-safe certified firm and how the lead-safe work practices are priced in the bid. A contractor who has not mentioned it on a 1950s house has either not noticed the age of the building or is not planning to comply, and neither is a good sign.
Reading a kitchen quote
Kitchen bids are long documents that are still frequently missing the things that matter. Nine checks.
The cabinet specification is a specification
Manufacturer, line, construction (plywood or particleboard carcass), drawer box construction, hinge and runner brand, and finish. "Custom cabinets" is a price tier, not a product.
It states clearly whether any service is relocated
Sink, dishwasher, range, extraction, and any circuit. This is the swing line and it should be visible, not folded into a general allowance.
There is an allowance structure you understand
Kitchen bids are full of allowances — tile, hardware, lighting, worktops. Ask what happens when you exceed one, and whether an underspend is credited back. Both answers should be in the contract.
Appliances are named, and it says who buys them
Contractor-supplied and owner-supplied are both normal. What is not normal is discovering on install day that the aperture does not suit the fridge you bought.
The lead-safe position is stated on a pre-1978 house
Whether the firm is EPA lead-safe certified, and how lead-safe work practices are accounted for in the price.
Electrical scope names the circuits
How many new circuits, whether the panel has capacity, and what happens if it does not. A service upgrade discovered mid-project is one of the largest change orders in kitchen work.
The schedule names the cabinet lead time
Cabinets are the long pole. A quote with a start date and no cabinet lead time is a quote with an invisible dependency, and the demolition should not begin before the boxes are in the country.
The change-order procedure is in writing
A rate, and a requirement that variations are agreed in writing before work proceeds. On a project with this many discoveries, this clause matters more than the headline number.
Payment is tied to milestones, not to dates
Progress payments against completed stages, with a meaningful final payment retained until the work is finished and inspected. Large deposits up front are the single biggest financial risk in remodeling.
The order a kitchen actually happens in
Knowing the sequence tells you when to worry. Most kitchen disasters are sequencing failures rather than workmanship failures.
1
Design and measure — twice
Cabinets are made to a drawing. If the drawing is wrong, the boxes are wrong and the lead time starts again. A final check measure after demolition, before the order is released, is normal practice and worth insisting on where the walls are old and out of square.
2
Order the cabinets, then wait
This is the long pole and everything else schedules around it. Demolition should not start because the crew has a free week; it should start because the cabinets have a delivery date.
3
Permit, if services are moving
Plumbing and electrical alterations are permitted work almost everywhere. Pull it before demolition, not after an inspector drives past.
4
Demolition — with lead containment where it applies
The point at which the house is opened up and the surprises appear: rot behind the sink base, a wall that turns out to be bearing, wiring that is not what anyone expected.
5
Rough-in: plumbing, electrical, framing
All the work that gets covered up. It is inspected before it is closed, and drywalling ahead of that inspection means opening it again at your cost.
6
Insulation, drywall, paint the first coat
The room becomes a room again. Ordinary work, and a good moment to confirm that the cabinet delivery is still on the date it was on.
7
Flooring, then cabinets
Usually in that order, so the floor runs under the units, though there are legitimate reasons to reverse it. Ask which your contractor is doing and why — it affects how a future floor replacement works.
8
Template the worktops — only after cabinets are set
Worktops are templated against the installed cabinets, not against a drawing. This is a hard two-to-three week gap in the middle of the project that surprises people every single time, and no amount of planning removes it.
9
Worktops in, then plumbing and appliances connected
The sink cannot be connected until the worktop it sits in exists. This is why the kitchen appears finished and unusable for a fortnight.
10
Tiling, trim, final paint, final inspection, snag list
Walk it with the contractor, write the list, and hold the final payment until it is done. The snag list is far easier to resolve before the final payment than after it.
The market you are buying into
Context for any figure you read anywhere, including here.
About $523 billion a year by early 2027 — but growing at only 0.5%, which is below inflation.
The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University projects roughly $523 billion in annual owner improvement and repair spending by early 2027, growing 0.5% year-over-year by the first quarter of 2027 — a pace that remains positive in nominal terms but is less than overall inflation.
Remodeling permits and retail spending on building products have both been flat recently. That is a market where volume is soft and prices are not.
What it means practically. Contractor availability is better than it was at the peak and there is more room to negotiate schedule and scope than there was. But the underlying cost of the work has not fallen, so a budget assembled from an article written a few years ago will be wrong in the expensive direction. Check the retrieval date on every figure you use, including the ones on this site.
What this calculator cannot see
Your walls. Out-of-square walls, a floor that is not level, and a ceiling that drops two inches across the room all cost money in scribing, filler and time. They are found with a level, not from here.
Whether that wall is holding the house up. The difference between a partition and a bearing wall is the difference between a day and an engineer, a beam, a permit and an inspection.
Your panel. Whether the electrical service can carry a modern kitchen is a photograph away from being answered and is not answerable here.
Lead time. Cabinets can ship in three weeks or sixteen. It is not a cost line but it determines whether the project takes two months or five.
Your market. The survey bands behind the defaults pool responses nationally. Labour in a dense metro and labour in a rural county are different numbers and the band does not separate them.
Us. HyreRemodel does not remodel kitchens, does not rank contractors and holds no dataset of completed projects. Every figure here belongs to a named third party and is dated.
Questions this calculator answers
How much does a kitchen remodel cost?
HomeGuide’s average full remodel is $15,000 to $50,000, or $150 to $250 per square foot, for a same-layout update. Cabinets are the largest line. This tool builds the number from linear feet and extras rather than a single $/sf, because that is how bids are actually written.
What is the cheapest design decision?
Keep the layout. Relocating plumbing and adding circuits is what moves the price unexpectedly — the homepage already says so.
Is this a quote?
No. It cannot see out-of-square walls, lead-safe work in a pre-1978 house, or a cabinet that ships in 16 weeks. Use it to tell whether a bid is in the neighbourhood.
Sources and methodology
Figures dated 23 August 2026. Last reviewed .
Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) Program (US Environmental Protection Agency, retrieved 2026-09-05. 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E. Firms paid to disturb painted surfaces in pre-1978 homes must be certified. The minor repair exemption (40 CFR §745.83) covers 6 sq ft or less per room inside and 20 sq ft outside; window replacement is never exempt, and jobs in the same room within 30 days count as one.)
Cost vs. Value Report 2025 (Zonda, retrieved 2026-09-05. Minor (same-layout) kitchen remodel $28,458 cost, $32,141 estimated resale, 112.9% recouped, 5th of 28 projects. Resale values are estimated by surveyed real-estate professionals, not observed sales.)
How Much Does a Kitchen Remodel Cost? (HomeGuide, retrieved 2026-08-23. Average full remodel $15,000–$50,000 or $150–$250/sf; basic $60–$150/sf; cabinets $160–$380/lf, custom up to $1,000/lf; counters $1,500–$6,000; demolition $500–$2,500. Member-reported quotes, not a census of completed jobs.)