Average Kitchen Remodel Cost, 2026

Why published kitchen remodel figures diverge above the minor tier

“Kitchen remodel” covers a wider range of actual work than almost any other home-cost phrase, from swapping cabinet doors to a full gut renovation with a moved wall. The two source types below sample very different slices of that range.

Angi's figure averages every completed kitchen job its surveyed customers reported, which is dominated by lighter refreshes and partial updates — that is why it sits close to Zonda's minor standardized spec ($28,458) rather than its major one. Zonda prices three separate, fixed project specifications (minor midrange, major midrange, major upscale) using professional estimating software across roughly 115–119 US markets and averages each one on its own. It is not one blended average; it is three distinct benchmarks, and most of what circulates online as “the average kitchen remodel cost” picks one of the four figures above without saying which.

A correction to our own numbers

Researching this study, we found our own Kitchen Remodel Cost Breakdown guide stated a “mid-range” figure of $15,000–$55,000 that its own Methodology section claimed came directly from RealCostIQ's published kitchen cost table — but no combination of that table's bounds actually produces either $15,000 or $55,000. We corrected it on August 19, 2026 to $25,000–$50,000, the table's actual midrange scope band, which is what a genuinely mid-range project — good materials, no structural change — costs in our own model. That figure sits between Angi's survey average ($26,941) and Zonda's minor standardized spec ($28,458), which is a reasonable place for it to land: RealCostIQ's “midrange” scope is deliberately broader than either single source's narrowest category.

What you get back at resale

Kitchen remodels are the sharpest illustration in Zonda's entire report of how return on investment falls as scope rises. A minor midrange remodel recoups roughly 113% of its cost at resale on average — genuinely rare, a project that adds more resale value than it costs. A major midrange remodel recoups closer to 51%, and a major upscale remodel recoups only about 36%. Past the minor tier, a kitchen remodel is increasingly a lifestyle purchase rather than an investment, which is a legitimate reason to do it as long as you know that going in.

Methodology

The scope ladder, and where the returns stop

The single most useful thing in the national data is not the average kitchen cost. It is what happens to the return as scope rises. The 2025 Cost vs. Value report prices three standardised kitchen projects across 119 US markets, and the pattern is unambiguous.

A minor kitchen remodel is one of a small number of projects in the entire report that returns more than it costs — 113 percent. Step up to a major midrange remodel and the recovery falls to 51 percent; step up again to upscale and it falls to 36 percent.

Put the two ends together and the arithmetic is stark. The upscale project costs 5.8 times what the minor one does and returns 1.8 times the resale value. Every additional dollar spent above the minor-remodel scope recovers roughly 18 cents at sale. That is not an argument against ever doing a major remodel — it is an argument for being clear about which of two different purchases you are making.

Why the minor remodel does so well

The minor remodel is defined in the report as a cosmetic refresh on the existing footprint: cabinet fronts rather than new cabinets, the existing layout, the existing plumbing. It works because it changes everything a buyer sees while touching almost nothing a buyer cannot see.

A major remodel spends most of its additional budget below that visible surface — moving services, replacing cabinet boxes, structural changes — and an appraiser does not price those separately from a kitchen that simply looks new. The result is that the expensive half of a major remodel is largely bought for the owner's benefit rather than the next buyer's.

What the labour half depends on

Kitchen work is carpentry-led, and carpentry rates vary widely by market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts carpenters (SOC 47-2031) at 670,090 employed nationally as of May 2025, with a mean hourly wage of $31.55 and a mean annual wage of $65,630. The 10th-to-90th-percentile hourly range runs $19.43 to $48.03.

A top rate nearly two and a half times the bottom is most of why a national average is a poor budget for any specific kitchen. It is also why the same scope of work can recover a very different share of its cost in different markets: the resale figures above are national averages, and the local labour market moves the cost side of that ratio far more than it moves the resale side.

What an average kitchen cost conceals

“The average kitchen remodel” is a weaker number than it looks, for a reason worth being explicit about: kitchen projects are not one thing measured with noise around it. They are several different projects that share a name, and their costs differ by an order of magnitude.

A cabinet-front refresh and a down-to-the-studs rebuild both get called a kitchen remodel. The national figures above put the minor project at $28,458 and the upscale one at $164,104 — a 5.8x spread between two things that a survey question cannot reliably separate. Any single average across that population lands somewhere in the middle and describes almost nobody.

This is why the two sources on this page disagree in the way they do rather than being inconsistent. A homeowner survey captures whatever people actually bought, weighted toward smaller and more common jobs, and produces a lower figure with a wide spread. A standardised cost-vs-value specification prices one fixed scope identically in every market, which makes it excellent for comparing markets and years and useless as a prediction of your bill.

There is also no government series to fall back on. No federal statistic measures what Americans spend on kitchen remodels. The closest public data is on the input side rather than the project side — the BLS publishes wages for the trades that do the work, and producer price indexes track cabinet and countertop manufacturing. Neither tells you what a kitchen costs.

The practical consequence: use these figures to judge whether a quote sits in a plausible range for its scope, and to see how the return falls as scope rises. Do not use any of them as a budget. The only number that describes your kitchen is one built from your own measurements, your own scope, and your own local labour market.

Cite this data

This analysis is free to reuse with attribution, under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence. If you publish any figure from this page, please credit RealCostIQ and link back — and please also credit Angi and Zonda as the underlying data sources.