Six Canadian pages, six different answers to the same question. $30,944. $35,000 to $45,000. $69,850. One New Brunswick page manages two answers on its own screen: $69,850 in the headline and $34,400 four paragraphs down.
None of them cites a source you can check. That is the actual state of kitchen renovation cost content in this country, and it is why this page does not open with an average. It opens with a method, and with the one line of your budget that can be priced to the dollar this afternoon.
TL;DR – Quick Summary
There is no honest single answer, and the guides that offer one are quoting each other.
- The useful move is to sort your budget into three groups: the lines you can price exactly today before anyone visits, the lines that can only be banded once somebody measures, and the lines nobody can know until the old kitchen comes out.
- Cabinets sit in the first group and are usually the largest single item, which means the biggest number in the whole project is also the most knowable one.
- We sell cabinets and nothing else on that list, so treat this as a method rather than a quote, and add New Brunswick’s 15 percent HST, which appears on none of the guides you have been reading.
Ignore Every Average You Have Read
I spent a day in August 2026 reading the Canadian kitchen cost guides a homeowner would actually find, and the exercise was depressing.
The figures at the top of this page are real quotations from those guides. They sit here as evidence that the category disagrees with itself, and none of them belongs in your budget. What is behind them:
- One of the most-copied Canadian guides footnotes its numbers as “cost information provided by our home service partner network.” No sample size, no collection window, no method. Its dollar figures also decompose almost perfectly into round American numbers multiplied by 1.30. Its budget breakdown is borrowed from an American trade association with no study named and no year, then applied to Canadian dollars.
- The return-on-investment figure that nearly every one of those guides repeats is attributed to a Canadian appraisal body, always without a report title, a year, or a link. Follow it far enough, and one page cites another page, which hedges it as “widely quoted”. The body’s own live consumer page argues something closer to the opposite. So that figure does not appear anywhere here.
- The one New Brunswick cost page I could find does cite Statistics Canada, which looks rigorous until you check which table. Its citation points to a new construction price index, used as a one percent multiplier on a baseline that is itself unsourced. The same page tells you New Brunswick labour runs one percent above the national average in one box and 14 percent below it in the prose two paragraphs up, and its budget breakdown table sums to 49 percent.
- A good share of what you will find is also published by businesses that have never installed a kitchen. Contractor-matching services, a mortgage broker, a real-estate brokerage. Useful to know when you are weighing how much authority a number carries.
We sell cabinets, which is its own bias, and you should have it now rather than at the bottom. What follows is the part we can be useful about.
Sort Your Budget Into Three Buckets
A kitchen budget looks like one number and behaves like three. Sorting the lines by how knowable each one is turns an intimidating question into a list of errands.
- Group one, priceable to the dollar today. These need no site visit and no contractor. You can have real figures for all of them inside a week, from your own measurements.
- Group two, bandable once somebody measures. Labour lines. You cannot price these yourself, but a tradesperson can give you a firm number after a walkthrough, and the band narrows fast once they have seen the room.
- Group three, unknowable until the old kitchen comes out. What is behind the drywall and under the floor. Nobody can price these in advance with any confidence, and contingency money is what covers them.
Run group one first, because it usually accounts for most of the money, and it is the part nobody can obscure from you. Walk into your first contractor meeting with those figures already in hand and the conversation changes shape entirely.
| Budget line | Which group | How to get the number |
|---|---|---|
| Cabinets | One | Measure your linear feet and your run, then price against a published cabinet list. This is usually the largest single line, and it is fully knowable. |
| Countertop material | One | Work out your square footage, then get a slab price from a local fabricator. Ask what the waste factor and the template fee add. |
| Appliances | One | Pick actual models and read the actual price. This line is the easiest to overshoot and the easiest to check. |
| Flooring | One | Area times price per square foot, plus underlay and transitions. |
| Sink, faucet, hardware | One | Real products, real prices. Small lines that quietly add up on a big kitchen. |
| Cabinet installation | Two | Hours, and an installer can only quote it after seeing the room and the layout drawing. |
| Countertop template and fabrication | Two | Usually quoted with the slab, sometimes separately. Ask which. |
| Electrical and plumbing | Two, sometimes three | A firm number if nothing moves. If you are relocating a sink or adding circuits, it can jump into group three. |
| Demolition, disposal, subfloor, wiring behind the boxes | Three | Contingency. Hold real money against it. |
Price the One Line You Can Price Exactly
Time to draw the line before I make the pitch, because this is where we come in and also where we stop.
BluePrint sells cabinets. We do not install them, we do not run renovations, we do not supply countertops, and we do not employ trades. One line of the nine above is ours. Everything else on this page is us telling you how to go and price somebody else’s work.
On that one line, here is a real anchor rather than a range. A $10,000 budget typically buys 18 to 24 linear feet of cabinetry plus a functional island of roughly 5′ x 2′, in plywood boxes with:
- solid wood face frames,
- solid wood drawer boxes,
- finished interiors, and
- soft-close hinges and slides as standard.
What that figure does not include is a large pantry wall, full-height stacked uppers, decorative glass cabinets, or any modification to an individual cabinet. Prices are MSRP, cabinets ship flat-packed, installation is not included, and HST is extra. The six layouts we publish each carry their dimensions, so you can find the one nearest your room instead of interpolating from a range.
For a whole-project figure with a real face on it, Patrick gutted his own 30-year-old Fredericton kitchen before this company existed. His cabinet package was $14,550, and the total landed in the $20,000 to $25,000 range once the countertops were in. One kitchen, published in full, with the trade-offs he made and the things he cut. The whole project is written up, and one kitchen with its layout attached is worth more to you than an average across a country.
A note on the percentage rule you will meet everywhere. Cabinets are widely quoted as 30 to 40 percent of a kitchen budget. Chase that figure and it has no source: the versions in circulation run from a quarter of the budget to half, none of the pages publishing them cite anything, and Statistics Canada publishes renovation weights only at a level far above kitchens. Do not build a budget on it. A kitchen with a pantry wall and uppers to the ceiling sits at a completely different share than a galley with four base cabinets, which is exactly the variation a single percentage hides.
Add the 15 Percent Nobody Puts in the Table
Here is the line missing from every kitchen renovation cost guide I read.
In New Brunswick, the Harmonized Sales Tax is 15 percent, made up of the 5 percent federal portion and a 10 percent provincial portion, and it applies to the same base of goods and services as the federal GST. That is the Province’s own wording.
Put it against a real project. Patrick’s kitchen, further down this page, came in between $20,000 and $25,000 before tax. HST on that is $3,000 to $3,750, which is most of a countertop. Not one of the guides I read names the line at all.
Three things worth knowing about it:
- Tax lands on labour as well as materials, so a saving anywhere in the project reduces the tax on that saving too. Trim $3,000 off a pre-tax quote, and you have actually saved about $3,450.
- Comparing quotes gets harder because of it. One arrives tax-included, and the next does not, and 15 percent is enough to reverse a ranking. The federal Office of Consumer Affairs says an estimate should list all costs including applicable taxes, alongside a contract carrying the contractor’s business or GST and HST number. Ask for every quote the same way, tax-included, from the first conversation.
- Somebody may offer you a cash price with no tax on it. The same federal guidance is blunt about what you are buying: no warranty and no recourse for poor workmanship. That matters here, because FCNB states plainly that it does not license, oversee, or regulate builders and renovators, and that no provincial regulatory body for them exists in New Brunswick. Individual trades like electricians and plumbers are licensed with the Department of Public Safety. The person coordinating your kitchen is not.
Use the One Canadian Number That Is Real
There is exactly one dated, methodologically transparent, kitchen-specific Canadian cost measure, and none of the guides I read had found it.
Statistics Canada publishes a Residential Renovation Price Index covering 37 individual renovation projects across 15 census metropolitan areas, quarterly.
- One of those projects is a kitchen remodel.
- One of those 15 areas is Moncton, the only New Brunswick city in the series.
- Prices come predominantly from a survey of construction contractors, supplemented with administrative data, and cover materials, labour, equipment, overhead, and profit.
Moncton, kitchen remodel, second quarter of 2026: 104.2 against a 2023 base of 100. Contractor prices for a kitchen remodel in this province have moved about four percent in total since 2023, and roughly half a percent over the past year. The release came out on 7 August 2026.
Now the honest part, because an index is easy to misread:
- That figure tracks how fast contractor prices are moving.
- It tells you nothing about what a kitchen costs, and there is no dollar figure anywhere behind it.
- Statistics Canada also excludes sales tax and design costs from the calculation, which are two of the things this article has just told you to budget for.
- Renovators themselves push back on the index: in the Canadian Home Builders’ Association’s autumn 2025 renovation survey, 55 percent of renovators said its annual growth rate was too low for the areas they work in.
What it is genuinely good for is a reality check on a quote that arrived a year after your last one. Low single digits over twelve months, even allowing for the renovators who say the index runs light. If somebody explains a much larger jump as “prices have gone up”, that is the number to put in front of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Five budget questions we get asked more than any others.
Do I pay HST on cabinets I buy and assemble myself?
How much should I hold back for surprises?
Is a per-square-foot figure any use for a kitchen?
My contractor quoted one number for the whole job. Is that normal?
Does BluePrint handle the whole renovation?
Run the Numbers Before the First Quote
Take an afternoon and price group one. Measure the run in linear feet, count the boxes, work out the countertop square footage, choose actual appliance models, and price the flooring by area. Add the 15 percent. You will have most of your project costed, and you will not have spoken to anyone yet. Then get your quotes for group two, tax-included and itemized, and hold real money against group three.
That is the whole method, and the reason it works is that it inverts the usual order. Most people go and collect three quotes and then try to work out whether the numbers are fair. Build your own number first, and the quotes become something you can check rather than something you have to trust.