How to Budget for a Kitchen Renovation in Great Britain

Showrooms are designed to move your ceiling upwards, so fix it beforehand. Run the calculator with your floor area and an honest scope, look at the range it returns for your region, and decide what you can actually commit — including VAT, which most consumer-facing quotes include but trade quotes sometimes leave off.

It helps to know where other British households have landed before you name a number. B&Q puts a new kitchen installation at £5,000 to £25,000 or more, with £7,000 to £10,000 the typical spend. The HomeOwners Alliance reports an average kitchen renovation budget of £10,300, with 22% of homeowners spending £5,000 to £10,000, 27% spending £10,000 to £20,000 and 18% spending over £35,000. That last figure is the one worth sitting with: roughly one household in five is running a project several times the size of that £10,300 average, which is why an unqualified 'average kitchen' number is nearly useless as a ceiling. Homebuilding & Renovating, describing the market by specification rather than by survey, puts a mid-range kitchen — made-to-order units, better carcass materials, a showroom design service — at £10,000 to £20,000, which is the same band the largest group of the Alliance's homeowners actually reported paying.

A kitchen also has a sensible relationship to the value of the house: spectacular bespoke joinery in a modest terrace rarely pays its way at sale, while a tired kitchen in an otherwise good home costs more in buyer perception than a mid-range refit would have.

Units and fitting labour are usually the largest slices of a kitchen budget, with appliances, worktops, flooring, and services work behind them. Checkatrade's own kitchen job estimator puts numbers on that shape, carrying per-project averages of £3,000 for units, £3,000 for installation, £2,000 for appliances, £1,000 for worktops, £750 for flooring, £500 for electrics and £300 for plumbing. It is a useful skeleton rather than a quote: the two £3,000 lines confirm that units and labour really are the twin peaks, and that the services most homeowners worry about are the smallest lines on the list until the layout moves.

The practical discipline is to allocate before you select: decide what share goes to units, what to worktops, what to appliances, and what is reserved for the fitting and services, then choose products that fit the allocation rather than letting one beautiful worktop quietly eat the appliance budget. Spend where hands and eyes land daily — hinges, drawer runners, the worktop, the tap — and economise where nobody looks, like carcass interiors and the inside of an end panel.

The cheapest kitchen decision in Britain is keeping the existing layout: leaving the sink, hob, and appliance positions alone keeps plumbers and electricians in second-fix territory and avoids a chunk of notifiable work. Which? reaches the same conclusion from its own research and puts it first among its money-saving steps, adding that keeping appliances that still work saves the best part of £1,000 — a more conservative figure than the £2,000 the Checkatrade estimator sets aside for an appliance package, and a useful reminder that what you save by keeping appliances is what you would have spent, not what a package costs on average. After that, the big levers are the supply route — flat-pack units cost less than rigid, and big-retailer sales come around predictably. The third lever is choosing laminate over stone for this round of the kitchen's life, and it is the most measurable of the three: a five-metre worktop run averages £500 in laminate against £850 in granite, and the fitting labour runs £40 to £60 per square metre for laminate against £120 to £180 for granite. A refresh scope, refacing the units and replacing the worktops, delivers most of the visual change for a fraction of the disruption.

Be wary of false economies. A bargain fitter who leaves the Part P notification unhandled, or a gas hob connected by anyone other than a Gas Safe registered engineer, creates problems that surface at survey when you sell. Paying properly for compliance is part of the budget, not an optional extra.

Hold back a slice of the total for what the strip-out reveals: perished pipework, undersized circuits, damp behind the old units, floors that need levelling compound before anything sits straight. Checkatrade's advice on budgeting accurately is to obtain detailed quotes and include a contingency fund of 10-20%, set against an average full renovation at a budget specification of £11,500. Kitchen design manager Charlotte Butler, quoted in Homebuilding & Renovating, independently lands in the same territory from the designer's side of the table — around 10% of total project value, and weighted higher in older properties where problems emerge once floors or walls are opened up. That £11,500 prices a fuller job than the £5,000 to £10,000 installation band on the pillar page, which is why it sits above it rather than contradicting it. If the contingency survives the project, it buys the splashback upgrade at the end.

Watch the payment schedule too: deposits to secure units are normal, but stage payments should track work completed, and a fitter asking for the bulk of the labour money up front is a warning sign, not a convenience. The HomeOwners Alliance suggests paying at least £100 of any deposit by credit card, because Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act protects anything you buy costing between £100 and £30,000 irrespective of bankruptcy, damage, or trouble with the supplier — a band that covers the great majority of British kitchen projects, and costs nothing to arrange.