How much does a kitchen remodel cost?

Build your kitchen up line by line and see where the money actually goes. Then see where your number lands against what American homeowners really paid, which is a lot less than the internet tells you.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

Scope of the job

A 'kitchen remodel' spans $5k to $80k, so a single average is meaningless. Pick a scope and it fills in the lines below. Change any of them.

Cabinets

Usually the biggest material line, and our estimate rather than a published price. We can be exact about why: the Economic Census does publish what the cabinet industry ships in DOLLARS, across 42 product lines, but it has never collected a QUANTITY on a single one of them, so there is nothing to divide the dollars by and no price per cabinet falls out. Refacing runs $1k to $3k, stock and semi-custom $6k to $15k, custom $20k and up.

Countertops

Laminate is cheap, quartz and granite are not. Stone is nearly always sold fabricated and fitted, so if your quote says 'installed' it already contains its own labor.

Appliances

Quartiles of DOE's product catalogue (fridge, range, dishwasher), in 2025 dollars. Note these are catalogue quartiles, not what the median buyer pays, and DOE's catalogue skews pro-style.

Flooring

Material only. Vinyl plank at the bottom, tile and hardwood at the top. Our estimate.

Fixtures, finishes and permits

Sink, faucet, backsplash, lighting, hardware, paint, and the permit if you are moving anything. Our estimate.

Contractor labor (field hours, at the rate below)

The hours are OUR estimate: about 32 for a refresh, 115 for a mid-range replacement, 280 for a full gut.

We could not find a federal source publishing labor hours for a kitchen. Set this to 0 to see the materials-only, do-it-yourself number.

Contractor billing per field hour

This one is NOT a guess.

The 2022 Economic Census publishes what residential remodelers take in and the field hours they work: $104/hr in 2025 dollars, which is 3.95x the wage the worker earns. Overhead, insurance, vehicles and profit live in that gap.

Estimated cost

$34,515

Typical range $26,922 – $51,427

Cabinets$9,500
Countertops$3,800
Appliances$4,655
Flooring$2,200
Fixtures, finishes and permits$2,400
Contractor labor$11,960
Total$34,515

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Half of American kitchen remodels done by a contractor cost less than $14,135. That is not our estimate. The Census American Housing Survey asks homeowners what they actually paid, and among jobs done by someone other than the household, the median is $14,135 and a quarter come in under $5,481.

The $30,000 to $80,000 range you have read everywhere else is real, but it describes the top quarter to top tenth of what Americans spend, not the middle. We could not open the trade-media report those figures are usually attributed to, so we cannot tell you what is behind them, and we are not going to guess at it. What we can tell you is what the Census asked households directly, which is the whole of this page. So before you accept that a kitchen "costs" $40,000: 72% of hired jobs came in under $25,000, and 38% came in under $10,000.

§ 02 What Americans actually paid

US median, hired out (Census)$14,135

Half of hired jobs land between$5,481 and $27,407

Your materials, if you do the labor$22,555

Your contractor labor line$11,960

AHS costs are self-reported and recalled up to two years later, about 15% are imputed by Census, and 'remodeled kitchen' is whatever the homeowner thought it meant, from new cabinet doors to a full gut. That spread is not noise to be cleaned up. It is the finding, and it is why this page makes you pick a scope.

Where the money goes

Cabinets$9,500

Countertops$3,800

Appliances$4,655

Flooring$2,200

Fixtures, finishes and permits$2,400

Contractor labor$11,960

By the numbers

Census American Housing Survey (2023): the median kitchen remodel done by a contractor cost $14,135 in 2025 dollars, and the mean cost $25,450.
More
The mean is 1.8x the median because a handful of very large jobs drag it up, so the mean is not the typical kitchen and should never be quoted as one.
Census AHS: among homeowners who hired the work out, 74.7 percent paid for their kitchen out of cash from savings.
More
Just 0.3 percent used contractor-arranged financing, which is the option contractors push hardest. Credit cards (4.3 percent) and home equity loans (5.9 percent) barely register next to simply having saved up.
Census AHS: households that did the work themselves reported a median of $4,933, roughly a third of the hired-out median. The survey explicitly excludes the value of your own time, so that is the materials bill, not the true cost of your weekends.
2022 Economic Census: residential remodelers bill about $104 per field hour in 2025 dollars, while the workers on site earn a median wage of $22 to $31 an hour.
More
The 3.95x gap is not greed; it is payroll tax, workers comp, liability insurance, vehicles, the office, and profit. But it does mean labor is usually the single biggest line in a kitchen, bigger than the cabinets.
BLS: appliances are the one part of your kitchen that got cheaper.
More
The CPI for major appliances peaked at 103.1 in 2022 and has fallen to 88.8 in 2025, down about 14 percent. Cabinet and countertop manufacturers' prices went the other way, up 17 percent since 2021.

Which half of this page is a statistic, and which half is ours. Sourced: everything about what Americans actually paid. The median, the quartiles, the do-it-yourself gap and the way people paid all come from the Census American Housing Survey, and our extraction reproduces Census's own published table to the dollar (4,965,489 projects, $83.01bn of spending).

You can re-check it in their Table Creator. Ours: the line items and the three scopes. AHS records one number per job with no scope and no breakdown, so no free source can tell you what a cabinet costs or what "mid-range" means. The cabinet, countertop, flooring and fixture defaults are our estimates, and the labor hours are our estimates. The billed rate of $104 per field hour is the one modeled input that is not a guess: it is measured from the Economic Census. Treat the total as a way to read your quotes, not as a quote.

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau / HUD, American Housing Survey (2023 national PUF)
census.gov
US Census

Census AHS Table Creator (check us yourself)
census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Construction sector
census.gov
DOE/NREL National Residential Efficiency Measures Database (appliances)
data.openei.org
Wage data

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (wages, not billed rates)
bls.gov
BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

WHERE WE LOOKED, AND HOW BIG EACH PLACE IS, AND WHY THIS PARAGRAPH IS SHORTER ON CONFIDENCE THAN IT USED TO BE.

We name the universes rather than wave at them, because a refusal is a claim and we have got eight of them wrong: DOE and NREL's measures database is 93 sheets across two workbooks and we read the sheet list; the American Housing Survey asks the cost of 37 named improvement job types (36 of which occur in the 2023 data) and we read all 37; the Economic Census products file (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD) carries 137,429 US product rows, of which 789 publish a quantity and 669 publish a quantity AND a dollar value, so prices ARE derivable for many building materials. THIS PARAGRAPH USED TO END by telling you that for our material every dollar-or-quantity cell was suppressed. We had not opened the industry we said it about, and when we did, the sentence turned out to be wrong in its detail even though its conclusion held. Wood kitchen cabinet and countertop manufacturing (NAICS 337110) files 42 product lines. Census publishes the DOLLARS on them. What it has never collected is a QUANTITY: all 42 lines carry the flag X on both quantity columns, and X means no unit of measure was ever defined, as against D, which is what Census writes when it holds a number and is withholding it. So there is nothing to divide the dollars by, and no factory-gate price per cabinet can be derived. That is a real refusal and a narrower one than we were making. Alongside it: the Kind of Business file has 96 categories, and the 2022 NAICS index has 20,398 entries. If it is not in those, we have not found it, and that is a fact about us rather than about the world.

The headline total is our model, built line by line. The comparison figures are not: the median, quartiles and do-it-yourself gap are Census American Housing Survey data on what homeowners actually paid, deflated to 2025 dollars, the latest complete year.

Material lines are materials. The labor line is the contractor's field hours to fit all of it, including demolition. If a quote prices your cabinets or countertops 'installed', it already contains its own labor, so cut the hours here or you will count the same work twice.

The labor hours (32 for a refresh, 115 for a mid-range replacement, 280 for a full gut) are our estimates.

We could not find a federal source publishing labor hours for a kitchen. The billing rate of $104 per field hour is not an estimate: it is measured from the 2022 Economic Census as what residential remodelers take in per field hour worked, escalated to 2025.

A wage is not a billed rate, and we never treat one as the other.

BLS says a carpenter earns a median of $29.12 an hour, but BLS also states its survey 'does not cover the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms', which is much of the trades. What the trade bills, in aggregate, is roughly 3 to 4 times what it pays its workers, in aggregate, and that gap is measured here, not assumed.

The low-to-high band is the measured regional spread of AHS kitchen medians: the Midwest and South index at 0.78 of the national median, the West at 1.49.

Be careful with that. Some of the gap is genuinely price and some is scope, because households in expensive metros tend to build bigger kitchens rather than merely pay more for the same one.

Appliance prices are quartiles of DOE's product catalogue, deflated to 2025 with the CPI for major appliances, which has fallen.

They are not sales-weighted, and DOE's catalogue skews toward pro-style equipment, so its median range prices above its median refrigerator. That ordering is an artifact of what DOE chose to catalogue, not of what people buy.

There is no federal price index for residential remodeling, and this one we did enumerate rather than assume.

BLS publishes exactly twelve construction industries in its producer price index, and we read the list: five named nonresidential building types (industrial, warehouse, school, office, health care), two nonresidential roll-ups, nonresidential building maintenance and repair, and four trade-contractor series (concrete, roofing, electrical, plumbing and HVAC) whose titles each carry the words 'nonresidential building work'. Not one covers residential work of any kind. Anyone citing a 'residential remodeling PPI' at you has invented the series.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a kitchen remodel cost?

It depends entirely on scope, which is why a single average is useless. What we can tell you is what Americans actually paid: the Census American Housing Survey puts the median contractor-done kitchen remodel at $14,135 in 2025 dollars, with a quarter under $5,481 and a quarter over $27,407. Build your own scope above. A cosmetic refresh lands near $9,000, a mid-range replacement near $34,500, and a full gut near $73,500.

Why is your number so much lower than every other site?

Because we are measuring a different thing, and we think ours is the honest one. Most kitchen cost figures trace to Zonda's Cost vs Value report, which is construction trade media rather than a statistical agency, and which we could not open to check: it returns a 403 and blocks automated readers. We do not quote numbers we cannot verify. We use the Census American Housing Survey instead, which asks homeowners what they actually paid and publishes the raw data. Those homeowners include everyone who repainted their cabinets and replaced a countertop, because that is genuinely what most people mean when they remodel a kitchen. The expensive figures are not lies, they just describe the top quarter.

What is the biggest cost in a kitchen remodel?

Cabinets are the biggest thing you buy, but labor is usually the biggest thing you pay for. In our mid-range model, contractor labor runs about $11,960 against $9,500 of cabinets. Cabinet showrooms quote you cabinets, they do not quote you the hundred-plus field hours it takes to demolish the old kitchen and fit the new one. That is why quotes come in so much higher than a showroom visit suggests, and it is also why doing your own demolition and painting is where do-it-yourself money is actually saved.

Can I remodel a kitchen for $10,000?

Yes, and lots of people do. Roughly 38 percent of contractor-done kitchen remodels in the Census data came in under $10,000. Keep the layout and the cabinet boxes, keep the appliances, and put the money into countertops, a backsplash and paint. The moment you move plumbing, move a wall, or replace the cabinet boxes, you are into five figures and climbing, because those are the things that consume field hours.

Does a kitchen remodel pay for itself in resale value?

We will not give you a percentage, because we could not verify one. The 'recoups X% at resale' figure that circulates everywhere traces to a single trade-media report produced by and for the remodeling industry, which has an obvious interest in that number being high, and which blocks automated readers so we could not even check what it says. No free government source tracks what a specific kitchen remodel returns at sale, and the honest answer is that it depends on your house, your market and how dated the kitchen was to begin with. Note what the Census data does show: among homeowners who hired the work out, 75% paid for their kitchen out of savings. That is people buying a kitchen they intend to use, not an investment they expect to flip.

Should I take the financing my contractor offers?

Almost nobody does. In the Census data, among homeowners who hired the work out, 74.7 percent paid for their kitchen with cash from savings, and only 0.3 percent used contractor-arranged financing. Home equity loans (5.9 percent) and credit cards (4.3 percent) are both far more common. Contractor financing is the most heavily promoted option and the least used one, which tells you roughly what people conclude when they read the terms.

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