How to price a kitchen remodel, line by line
There is no per-square-foot number for a kitchen. There is a method, and it starts by refusing to price the room as a whole.
Why a per-square-foot kitchen number is useless
Two kitchens of identical floor area can differ by a factor of four, because almost nothing expensive in a kitchen scales with floor area. Cabinets are linear feet of run. Counters are square feet of top. Appliances are a count. Plumbing and electrical are about how far things move, not how big the room is.
A square-foot figure is a way of pricing the one thing in the room that costs the least.
Break it into quantities first
| What | Unit | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Floor | sq ft | The floor outline, including under the toe kicks |
| Wall face | sq ft | Perimeter × height, less openings — including behind cabinets |
| Ceiling | sq ft | Follows the floor |
| Base and trim | lf | Perimeter less doors and cased openings, less cabinet runs |
| Cabinet run | lf | Measured along the wall, base and upper separately |
| Counter | sq ft | Top area, plus a separate count of edges and cut-outs |
| Backsplash | sq ft | Run × height, which is not the wall face |
| Doors, windows, openings | ea | Counted |
| Appliances | ea | Counted, with who supplies each one written down |
Board goes behind cabinets, so wall face does not get reduced by the cabinet run — but base does, because base stops at a cabinet. This is one of the places a takeoff most reliably goes wrong.
The things that are only true of kitchens
- Moving a sink, a stack or a gas line is the single biggest swing in the price, and it is invisible until somebody opens a wall.
- Electrical in a kitchen is code-driven — circuits, GFCI, appliance loads — rather than driven by room size.
- A soffit above the uppers is either coming out or staying, and the two answers price very differently.
- The floor under the appliances and the toe kicks is floor, and it is missed constantly.
- Counter cut-outs and edge profiles are priced per item, not per square foot.
Pricing the unknowns honestly
A kitchen has more behind-the-wall risk than any other room in a house. The way to price that is not to pad the number invisibly — it is to name it.
Exclude what you cannot see, in the proposal, in plain words: anything behind a wall nobody has opened, any existing plumbing or wiring that turns out not to be to code, any rot or damage found on demolition. Then, when one turns up, it is a change order against an exclusion you already wrote rather than a fight.
Then it is multiplication
Quantities from the room, rates from your own book, and the arithmetic in the open so a client can follow it. Every line a number you set times a number the room measured — and both defensible on their own.
Questions people ask
- How much does a kitchen remodel cost per square foot?
- This is the wrong unit and any figure quoted against it will be wrong. Almost nothing expensive in a kitchen scales with floor area — cabinets are linear feet, counters are top area, appliances are a count, and moving plumbing is the biggest single swing. Price the quantities, not the room.
- Do you deduct cabinet runs from wall square footage?
- No — board goes behind the cabinets. You do deduct cabinet runs from base and trim, because base stops at a cabinet. Getting these two the wrong way round is a common takeoff error.
- What is the biggest risk in a kitchen estimate?
- Anything behind a wall: moving a sink or a stack, wiring that is not to code, rot found on demolition. Exclude it explicitly in the proposal rather than padding for it invisibly, so a discovery becomes a change order rather than an argument.
Where this fits with Trueline
Trueline is an iPhone app that measures a room, takes it off, prices it from your own rate book and turns it into a proposal — with every length carrying whether it was scanned, drawn or measured, right onto the document a client reads. See how it works, or take the free templates and use them with whatever you already have.