Kitchen Renovation Cost Calculator

What drives kitchen renovation cost

The biggest lever is not the size of the room but the length of the cabinet run. Two kitchens with identical floor area can carry very different numbers of units: a galley in a Victorian terrace works both long walls, while a square kitchen-diner of the same area might have units along one wall and a table in the middle. When you compare quotes, compare the unit schedule — how many base units, wall units, tall units and drawer packs — rather than the floor plan. It is the one number that moves almost every other line.

Below that sits how the units are built. Flat-pack carcasses arrive as boards and are assembled on site, which is cheaper to buy and slower to fit; rigid units arrive already built, cost more, and go in faster, so part of what looks like a saving on materials comes back as fitting hours. The details worth asking about are the ones you cannot change afterwards: carcass board thickness, whether drawer boxes are metal-sided or stapled, and whether soft-close hinges and runners are standard or an upgrade. Doors and handles are the visible part and the easiest thing to swap in ten years; carcasses are not.

Worktops split into two worlds, and the split costs both money and time. Laminate and solid timber are cut, joined and finished on site by the fitter. Quartz, granite and sintered surfaces are made to measure in a workshop from a template taken after your units are standing, which means a second supplier, a separate site visit and a separate delivery. Choosing stone is therefore a programme decision as much as a style one.

Then there is the question of whether anything moves. A same-layout replacement — sink where the sink was, hob where the hob was — needs no new waste runs, no new circuits and no gas work, and it is comfortably the cheapest route to a new kitchen. Moving the sink means new waste pipe with enough fall to drain, usually under the floor. Moving the hob means either a new dedicated circuit for induction or a Gas Safe registered engineer to reroute the gas. Adding an island means bringing services out into the middle of the floor. Each is a small decision on a drawing and a large one on the invoice.

Appliances are mostly a shopping decision rather than a building one, though integrated models need a housing unit and a door, so the same oven can cost noticeably more to install than its freestanding twin. Last, leave room in the budget for whatever the old kitchen is hiding. Nobody knows what the wall behind the units looks like, or how level the floor really is, until strip-out day.

London versus the rest of the UK

The regional figures in the table above are labour indexes, not whole-project multipliers, and the difference matters more than it sounds. London carries the highest fitting rates in Great Britain — roughly a fifth more on the labour element than Yorkshire and the Humber, which sits at the bottom of the table, with the North East and North West just above it. Scotland sits essentially on the national average and Wales a little below.

What that index touches is only the labour half of the job. It is applied to strip-out, fitting, services and decorating; it is not applied to the units, the worktop or the appliances, which you buy at national prices from national suppliers. An oven costs the same in Bradford as in Battersea. So the spread between the most and least expensive regions on a whole kitchen is far narrower than the spread between their day rates — which is why an identical kitchen quoted in Durham and in Islington lands closer together than most people expect, and why the cheapest kitchens are priced almost identically wherever you buy them.

The other surprise in the table is that the South West sits nearly level with London. That is not a story about Bristol. The regional average there is pulled up by a cluster of premium projects rather than by uniformly high rates across the region, so it is better read as a reason to gather more quotes than as a prediction about your own job.

Beyond the hourly rate, London adds costs that have nothing to do with the kitchen itself. A large share of London refits happen in flats, where the lease may require the freeholder's written consent, restrict working hours to weekdays, and rule out weekend deliveries. Materials go up communal stairs or into a booked lift rather than straight off a van at the front door. There is often nowhere to put a skip except the public road, which needs a permit from the borough, and nowhere to leave the van. And extraction has to find a compliant duct route to an external wall — in a flat, that single constraint can decide where the hob goes.

If you are comparing a London price against a regional one, or against a national retailer's fitting charge, check first that they are priced the same way. Supply-and-fit, labour-only, and design-supply-and-project-manage are three different products, and the lowest headline is usually the one that includes the least.

Hidden costs that surface late

The costs that break budgets are rarely the kitchen. They are the things the old kitchen was covering. When the units come off, the wall behind them has never been plastered or painted, the old flooring stops at the plinth line, and the new units almost never land on the old footprint. Plastering, boxing in pipes, new skirting and a full redecoration are separate trades, and plenty of kitchen quotes exclude all of them by design. Read a quote for what it leaves out, not only for what it lists.

Flooring is the usual second surprise. Lifting an old floor can expose levels that need a latex screed before tile or vinyl will sit flat, and in older properties the fall across a kitchen floor can be considerable. Decide early whether the floor runs under the units or stops at them: under costs more material now and saves a great deal of disruption at the next refit.

Electrical work has a legal shape in England and Wales. Installing a new circuit — a dedicated cooker circuit for an induction hob, for instance — or a new consumer unit is notifiable work under the building regulations. The straightforward route is an electrician registered with a competent person scheme, who self-certifies the work and issues the certificate. If your electrician is not registered, the job has to be notified to a building control body before work starts and then inspected, which is both a fee and a date in someone else's diary. One detail catches people out: in Wales the kitchen itself counts as a special location, so even adding an extra socket to an existing circuit is notifiable there, whereas in England that rule covers only the spaces around baths and showers.

Anything gas is narrower still. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 a business must be on the Gas Safe Register to carry out gas work legally, and disconnecting an old hob so the kitchen can be stripped out counts. Ask to see the engineer's registration card and turn it over: the reverse lists the specific categories they are qualified for, and cookers are a separate category from boilers. A Gas Safe logo on a van is not by itself confirmation that the person in front of you is signed off to move your hob.

If the kitchen is being opened into the dining room, the beam is the cheap part. A structural engineer has to size it. The wall under each end usually needs strengthening with padstones so the load does not crush it, and the beam needs a bearing of at least 150mm on each side of the opening. A steel normally has to be boxed in to give it thirty minutes of fire resistance, most often with two or more layers of properly fixed plasterboard. All of it goes through building control, which adds inspection dates to the programme, and all of it has to be made good and decorated before a single unit goes in.

Waste is small money handled badly. A strip-out produces far more than a car boot will hold. Legally the waste your fitter creates is theirs, and the cost of disposing of it belongs inside what they charge for the work — so if it appears as a separate line, that is a pricing choice and entirely fair to question. But the moment you put your own things in their skip, the old table, the previous owner's chest freezer, that waste becomes yours, and householders in England and Wales have a duty to hand waste only to an authorised carrier. Checking takes two minutes: upper-tier carrier registrations begin with CBDU and are searchable on the Environment Agency's public register in England, or Natural Resources Wales' in Wales. Skipping the check is a criminal offence if your waste is later fly-tipped.

Last, check whether the price you are comparing includes VAT at all. A sole trader whose turnover sits below the registration threshold does not charge it; a national kitchen retailer certainly does. Two quotes for the same work can differ by a fifth for that reason alone, before anyone has disagreed about a single unit.

How long a kitchen refit takes

Four to ten weeks is the usual span for a UK kitchen renovation once work starts. Keep the footprint and it can be a few weeks; move the kitchen into another room, add an island, or take on a full renovation and ten to twelve weeks is realistic. That is all before ordering: standard kitchens are commonly two to four weeks from order to delivery, and bespoke ranges longer, so the calendar starts well before the first unit comes off the wall.

It also helps to know that those weeks are not one continuous block of work. The normal order is strip-out, then first-fix plumbing, gas and electrics while the walls are open, then plastering and making good, then flooring, then base and wall units fixed level and square. Only at that point can a made-to-measure worktop be measured at all.

That template visit is the step that surprises people, and it is why stone or quartz lengthens a job in a way laminate does not. The surveyor measures the units as built, so the units have to be finished, level and square first, the walls plastered and dry, the sink physically on site and fixed in its cradle, integrated appliances fitted, socket positions final and pipes boxed in. After templating, the walls cannot change — the slab is being cut to them. Then the worktop is manufactured and brought back to be fitted, usually a week or two later. In that gap you have a kitchen with units but no worktop, no sink and no running water, which is worth knowing before you plan anything around it. Laminate skips the gap entirely, because it is cut on site.

A layout change stretches the programme in three separate places rather than one. The design has to be frozen later, because it depends on structural drawings and, where a wall is coming out, on building control. First-fix services take days rather than hours once the sink and hob move, because new waste runs need fall and new circuits need a route. And inspections have to be booked around other people's availability. None of the three is long on its own; together they are the difference between a five-week job and a twelve-week one.

Two habits save most of the pain. Do not book the worktop template until the units are genuinely in and level — a template taken against a unit that later gets shimmed produces a slab that does not fit. And plan a temporary kitchen for the whole programme rather than for fitting week: a kettle, a microwave and a working sink somewhere else in the house, from strip-out until the splashback goes on.