Countertop Cost Calculator
A countertop costs about $103 a square foot installed in quartz and $111 in granite, which for a 20-foot run in Atlanta is $5,074 and $5,467. The catch is the unit: you measure in linear feet and you are quoted in square feet, and at a standard 25.5-inch depth 20 linear feet is 42.5 square feet. This calculator does that conversion, then tells you how many slabs and seams the job needs.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost of the countertop, installed
$5,326
typical · range $3,699 to $6,953 · 49.2 sq ft of material · $108 per sq ft · $266 per linear foot
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 62% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from bls.gov Aug 2026osha.gov Aug 2026and 1 more, all listed below
The one input that changes the answer for you.
Ground stone in resin, so it is consistent slab to slab and needs no sealing. ⚠️ It is also up to 95% crystalline silica, which is a serious hazard for whoever cuts it — not for you afterwards.
The edge every fabricator includes: square, with the arris taken off. It is the strongest profile and the least likely to chip.
A strip of the same material along the back. It hides the wall joint and it is the classic look on laminate and granite alike.
The cut edge is exposed, so it has to be polished by hand after cutting. That polishing is the whole reason this cutout costs more than a drop-in one.
1 / 5
The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
You measured linear feet. You will be quoted square feet.
They are not the same number and the difference is your countertop depth.
- Counter run, 20 ft × 25.5 in deep
- 42.5 sq ft
- Matching splash, 4 in
- 6.7 sq ft
- Material to buy
- 49.2 sq ft
At 49.2 square feet this needs 2 slabs — each yields about 44.1 usable square feet, and 39 would be left over. More than one slab means at least one seam, and where it falls is a decision to make with the fabricator over the drawing rather than on delivery day. Ask to see the seam layout before you sign.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Take out the old countertop3 h + 0.1 h per sq ft where the old top comes out | 7.9hour | $348–$373 | sourced |
| Haulage and disposal1 where the old top comes out | 1job | $150–$460 | estimated±51% |
| Plumber: disconnect and reconnect the sink3 plumber hours where there is a sink | 3hour | $179–$192 | sourced |
| Quartz, suppliedtotal area where the material is quartz (slab price / 44.1 sq ft of yield) | 49.2sq ft | $1,279–$3,444 | estimated±46% |
| Template, cut, polish and install the stonetotal area × 0.55 hours per sq ft for stone | 27.1hour | $1,409–$1,513 | sourced |
| Undermount sink cutout, polished1 where the sink is undermounted | 1cutout | $190–$520 | estimated±46% |
| Cooktop cutout1 where there is a cooktop | 1cutout | $100–$300 | estimated±50% |
| Sealing, silicone and final polish1 per job | 1job | $45–$150 | estimated±54% |
| Total | $3,699–$6,953 | ±31% |
Where these numbers come from
- Why the advertised price per square foot is never the invoice
- Stripped to material, fabrication and installation, granite comes to $84 a square foot in this model — close to the figures that get advertised. The same job with the old top taken out, the plumber in twice either side of the template, an undermount sink cutout polished by hand, a cooktop cutout and the sealing is $111. Neither number is dishonest; they are answers to different questions, and the useful thing to ask any fabricator is which of those five items is inside their rate.
- The one that is about people rather than money
- CDC NIOSH, Silica and countertop work states that some engineered stone products are made of up to 95% crystalline silica, and names countertop work as a primary exposure concern for workers. Quartz is engineered stone. Cutting it dry produces respirable silica dust, which is regulated under OSHA 1926.1153, Respirable crystalline silica and covered further on OSHA, Crystalline Silica. None of this is a hazard to you once the top is installed, and none of it changes the price on this page. It is a reason to ask a fabricator whether they cut wet and extract, and to think twice about the quote that is well below everyone else’s. Retrieved 2026-08-23.
- Labour rates by area
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for tile and stone setters on the stone options, carpenters on the sheet materials, plumbers for the sink and labourers for the strip-out, all adjusted to your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. ⚠️ Tile and stone setters are published for only 141 of the 530 areas in our index, so on granite, quartz and marble that hour is often priced from the broader construction group for the same area.
- Where the slab prices come from, and what a slab yields
- The per-square-foot bands for stone are the fabricator’s own arithmetic rather than ours: a granite slab of roughly 110 by 65 inches yields about 37.8 usable square feet, and a jumbo quartz slab of about 126 by 63 yields 44.1. Divide the slab price by the yield and you have the rate. The slab sizes and yields are our estimate of the usual case, not a published standard, and they vary by quarry and by fabricator. The reason they are here at all is the seam: a run that will not come out of one slab has a joint in it, and where that joint falls is a decision to make over the drawing.
- The one regulated thing about the cheap materials
- Laminate and most butcher-block substrates are composite wood products, which fall under the emission standards the EPA administers following the Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act of 2010 — EPA, Formaldehyde Emission Standards for Composite Wood Products. Compliant material carries a label. It is a thing to check rather than a thing to worry about, and it costs nothing to ask. Retrieved 2026-08-23.
- What the cheapest option actually costs
- Laminate on the same 20-foot run is $3,041 against $5,467 for granite and $7,031 for marble — roughly 1.8 times cheaper than stone. It is the only material here a competent amateur can fit, it comes in patterns that imitate the others convincingly at arm’s length, and it has no seam problem because it is not sold in slabs. What it does not do is take a hot pan or survive a cut edge getting wet.
- Material prices
- Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.
Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-23.
What this figure does not include
- The sink, the tap and the appliances
- This prices the countertop, its fabrication and its cutouts. The sink itself, the tap, the waste disposal and the cooktop are bought separately and vary more than the stone does.
- Cabinets, and whether they can carry it
- A stone top weighs roughly 18 to 22 pounds a square foot, so a normal kitchen carries several hundred pounds of it. Sound cabinets take that without complaint; old or water-damaged ones may need levelling or replacing first, and that is a different job. Our cabinet calculators price it.
- Backsplash tiling
- A matching slab splash is priced here because it comes off the same slab. A tiled splashback is separate work by a different trade and is not included.
- Electrical and plumbing changes
- Moving a sink, adding an outlet in an island or running a gas line to a new cooktop are all separate trades. Only disconnecting and reconnecting an existing sink in the same position is priced here.
- Remnant and offcut pricing
- A small vanity top or a bar can often be cut from somebody else's leftover slab for far less than a whole one, and fabricators keep a remnant yard for exactly that. It is genuinely worth asking about below roughly 20 square feet, and this model does not attempt to price it.
Questions people actually ask
How much is 20 square feet of granite?
About $2,963 in Atlanta, installed, which works out at $148 a square foot — far above the $84 a square foot the same granite costs on a normal kitchen. Small jobs carry the whole of the templating trip, the delivery and the install visit over very little area. It is also worth knowing what 20 square feet is: at a standard 25.5-inch depth it is only 9.4 linear feet of counter, which is a single short run or a small island rather than a kitchen. Below roughly this size, ask the fabricator about remnants — a piece cut from somebody else's leftover slab can cost a fraction of a new one, and every fabricator keeps a remnant yard.
How much is a 10 ft piece of granite countertop?
About $3,073 in Atlanta installed, with no splash. The conversion is the part worth carrying away: 10 linear feet at a standard 25.5-inch depth is 21.3 square feet of material, not 10. Almost every advertised granite price is per square foot and almost every homeowner measures in linear feet, and that gap of roughly two-and-a-bit to one is where most of the confusion in this trade lives. Multiply your linear feet by 2.13 and you have the number a fabricator will quote against.
Is quartz usually cheaper than granite?
On a typical kitchen they land within a few percent of each other: this model puts a 20-foot run at $5,074 in quartz and $5,467 in granite. The real difference is the shape of the range rather than its middle. Quartz is manufactured, so its price band is narrow and predictable and you pay more only for pattern complexity. Granite is graded by rarity, so it starts a little cheaper at the common end and runs much further upward — a rare book-matched slab can be three times a plain speckled grey while doing exactly the same job. Two practical differences that are not price: quartz never needs sealing, and granite takes a hot pan without a mark.
How much should I budget for quartz countertops?
About $103 a square foot all in for a 20-foot run in Atlanta, which is $5,074 — but budget against the whole job rather than the headline rate, because the advertised figure is the bare one. Stripping out the old top, the plumber's two visits either side, the sink and cooktop cutouts and the sealing take this model from $84 a square foot to $111. Add an island and it is $6,628, partly because of the extra area and partly because it pushes the job onto a second slab. The three questions that move a quote most are the edge profile, whether the splash is slab or tile, and how many cutouts there are.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 23 August 2026, not invented.
Other cost calculators
The first of these are the jobs closest to this one — the ones that turn up in the same quote, or instead of it.
- Kitchen remodel cost
Prices a whole kitchen line by line, shows where the money actually goes in five groups, and answers what a $10,000 and a $25,000 kitchen each get you.
- Range hood cost
A flat install price is for a like-for-like swap. Prices the four jobs that share the name, and the 400 CFM step the hob decides.
- Bathroom remodel cost
Prices a whole bathroom line by line and answers the question people actually ask: what a $5,000, a $10,000 and a $20,000 bathroom each get you.
- Room addition cost
Separates what builds the new room from what the new room costs the old house, and shows why the small addition is the expensive one per square foot.
- The full countertop cost dataset
Every unit price, every quantity rule and the reasoning behind each estimate, as a plain table.
- How we calculate
The formula, the sources, and an honest account of which parts of the model are weak.