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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.
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 labour$11,960
- Total$34,515
§ 02 What Americans actually paid
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
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You are above $14,135, the median for a contractor-done kitchen remodel, and at the top of this band you are into the top fifth of what Americans spend. Note that 72% of contractor-done jobs came in under $25,000, so a 'mid-range' kitchen is already an above-average spend. Worth knowing before you sign. Get three quotes on an identical written scope and check what each one assumes about the layout.
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. 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. 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. The 3.95x gap is not greed; it is payroll tax, workers comp, liability insurance, vehicles, the office, and profit. But it does mean labour 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. 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 labour hours are our estimates. The billed rate of $104 per field hour is the one modelled 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.
Sources: US Census Bureau / HUD, American Housing Survey (2023 national PUF) · Census AHS Table Creator (check us yourself) · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Construction sector · DOE/NREL National Residential Efficiency Measures Database (appliances) · BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (wages, not billed rates) · BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)
How this estimate is calculated
- 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 labour 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 labour, so cut the hours here or you will count the same work twice.
- The labour hours (32 for a refresh, 115 for a mid-range replacement, 280 for a full gut) are our estimates. No federal source publishes labour 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 a firm bills is roughly 3 to 4 times what its workers earn, 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. Every construction producer price index BLS publishes is explicitly for nonresidential work. Anyone citing a 'residential remodeling PPI' at you has invented the series.