Remodel Budget Planner

For the default scope (kitchen, two full baths, a powder room and a 1,240 sq ft living refresh), $50,000 doesn't cover the $71,294 midrange plan, so every room scales to 70¢ on the dollar: about $18,936 to the kitchen, $14,728 to the two full baths, $2,630 to the powder room and $10,436 to the living areas, plus the 7% permits-and-design line. No room falls below its cosmetic floor at that level, but the margin is thin — the same scope flags its first room (the living refresh, against its paint-and-lighting floor) just under $36,000, and below roughly $32,000 every room is flagged. That's the signal to defer a room to phase two rather than do all of them badly.

In the default whole-home plan the kitchen takes about 38% — the single largest room line, which matches why Angi pegs the average kitchen remodel at $27,000 against a $52,000 whole-house average. HomeGuide's kitchen budget breakdown explains where it goes: cabinets ~25%, appliances ~15%, counters ~10%, flooring ~7%, lighting ~5% of the kitchen's own budget.

Hold 10–20% of the budget, per HomeGuide's budgeting guidance — closer to 20% for older homes where plumbing, wiring or water damage lurk (Angi lists water-damage repair at $1,400–$6,400 and old-plumbing replacement at $1,500–$15,000 as common mid-project surprises). This planner never spends your leftover: at the default $75,000 budget the plan leaves $3,706 unallocated and tells you whether that reserve is thick enough.

Protect the kitchen first — Angi's 2026 recoup table puts kitchen remodels at 96% of cost returned, bathrooms at 73%, and living-room remodels at just 50%. Interior paint is the outlier at 107%, which is why the planner's advice when cutting is to shrink the living refresh down to paint-and-lighting before you drop a bathroom.

All at once is usually cheaper per room: one mobilization of the crew, one round of permits and design fees, dumpsters and seal-offs shared across the job, and every wall opened just once. The tradeoff is cash and chaos — you live in a construction site for months and your contingency has to cover every room's surprises from one pot. Room by room costs more in mobilization but lets each phase's reserve fund the next decision; if you phase it, run this planner once per phase and roll each phase's leftover into the next phase's reserve — the failure mode is one thin contingency stretched across five simultaneous surprises.

Yes — the planner adds a soft-cost line worth about 7% of construction on top of the room allocations, drawn from HomeGuide's figures: design fees run 5–10% of a kitchen or bath budget, kitchen permits $500–$1,500 and bath permits $150–$600. Structural changes, additions or ADU-scale work need their own design budget — those have dedicated calculators.

Three reasons: allowances (quotes assume budget-grade fixtures, then you upgrade mid-build), change orders, and what the walls reveal. Angi also notes labor is 40–60% of any remodel budget in high-wage markets, so the same scope prices very differently by state. This planner's whole job is to hold a reserve — 10–20% — so the first surprise is a budget event, not a project killer.

Materially. The default $71,294 national plan scales to about $103,376 in Hawaii (labor ×1.45, materials ×1.45) and about $60,943 in Mississippi (labor ×0.80, materials ×0.91) — a swing of roughly $42,433. Labor-heavy scopes like kitchens move the most because they carry the larger labor share.