Kitchen Cabinet Installation Cost Calculator
Kitchen cabinet installation costs about $391 a linear foot supplied and fitted in stock, which for the trade’s reference kitchen — a 10x10, meaning 20 linear feet — is $7,821 in Atlanta. The fitting on its own is $3,021, or $151 a linear foot, which is the answer if you are buying the cabinets yourself. This calculator prices both, and tells you how many 10x10s your kitchen actually is.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost of the cabinets, fitted
$8,295
typical · range $5,739 to $10,852 · 20 linear ft · $415 per linear ft · 54 trade hours
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 63% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from bls.gov Aug 2026epa.gov Aug 2026how every line is sourced
The one input that changes the answer for you.
Standard sizes in three-inch increments, off a shelf or on a short lead time. The commonest choice in America and the one every quote assumes unless told otherwise. Gaps get filled with fillers.
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The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
Your kitchen, in the unit the trade quotes in
Cabinets are sold and fitted by the linear foot, and the industry compares prices against a kitchen that does not exist: the 10x10.
- Base run
- 10 linear ft
- Wall run
- 10 linear ft
- Total
- 20 linear ft
- As 10x10 kitchens
- 1×
A “10x10” is 20 linear feet — 10 of base cabinets and 10 of wall cabinets. No real kitchen is one. It exists so two quotes can be laid side by side, and it is the number every cabinet advertisement is secretly quoting. Yours is 1 of them, so multiply any advertised 10x10 price by that to see where you stand before anybody visits.
What the labour alone costs, and why
- Carpenters, national median wage
- $29.12/h
- Adjusted to the national average
- ×1.000
- Benefits, taxes and insurance
- ×1.4582
- Overhead and profit
- ×1.33–1.43
- Billed rate
- $57–$61/h
Tick “labour only” below to price fitting cabinets you buy yourself. Base cabinets take 1.4 hours a linear foot and wall cabinets 1.9, and that difference is not a markup: wall units go up overhead, on temporary supports, and every one has to hit a stud.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Take out the old cabinets0.5 labourer hours per linear foot where the old ones come out | 10hour | $440–$473 | sourced |
| Skip and disposal1 where the old ones come out | 1job | $180–$520 | estimated±49% |
| Stock, assembled cabinetslinear feet where the grade is stock and the cabinets are supplied | 20linear ft | $2,300–$5,800 | estimated±43% |
| Carpenter: set and level the base cabinets1.4 carpenter hours per linear foot of base run | 14hour | $792–$850 | sourced |
| Carpenter: hang the wall cabinets1.9 carpenter hours per linear foot of wall run | 19hour | $1,074–$1,154 | sourced |
| Crown moulding and light railwall run where moulding is supplied | 10linear ft | $100–$320 | estimated±52% |
| Cut and fit the moulding0.35 carpenter hours per linear foot of moulding | 3.5hour | $198–$213 | sourced |
| Knobs and pullsone per handle where the cabinets are supplied | 24piece | $168–$912 | estimated±69% |
| Drill and fit the handles0.12 carpenter hours per handle | 2.9hour | $164–$176 | sourced |
| Adjust doors, fill and touch up1 per job | 1job | $40–$130 | estimated±53% |
| Final adjustment hours3 h + 0.1 h per linear foot | 5hour | $283–$304 | sourced |
| Total | $5,739–$10,852 | ±31% |
Where these numbers come from
- Where the 10x10 comes from, and why it is useful anyway
- It is a fiction: a square kitchen with 10 linear feet of base cabinets and 10 of wall cabinets along two ten-foot walls. No real kitchen is one, and that is not the point. It exists so a manufacturer’s price and a retailer’s price can be laid side by side, and almost every advertised cabinet price in America is quoting it whether or not it says so. Measure your own runs, divide by 20, and any advertised figure becomes comparable before anyone visits.
- Why flat pack saves less than it looks
- Ready-to-assemble cabinets are much cheaper to buy and they come to $7,106 on this kitchen against $7,821 for assembled stock — a saving of $715, or about 9%. The reason it is so much smaller than the price difference on the boxes is that somebody has to build them: about 16 extra hours on this job. That work does not vanish, it moves — onto a bill or onto your weekend. Building the boxes yourself and paying a carpenter only to hang them is the one real middle option here.
- Labour rates by area
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for carpenters and labourers, adjusted to your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Carpenters are published for 526 of the 530 areas in our index, so this page is one of the few here where the wage is almost always that trade’s own figure rather than a fallback. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. The hours per linear foot are our estimate.
- What the grades actually buy
- On the same 20 linear feet: $7,106 flat pack, $7,821 assembled stock, $12,071 semi-custom and $23,471 custom — a spread of more than three to one for cabinets that all hold plates. What the money buys as you go up is fit rather than function: sizes that suit your walls instead of walls filled out with strips, and lead times that go from a shelf to two months. If your kitchen is a plain rectangle, stock sizes fit it and the step up is mostly appearance.
- The two regulated things
- Cabinet boxes are usually particleboard or MDF, which are composite wood products under the 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 is labelled. And taking out old painted cabinetry in a house built before 1978 is well above the threshold in EPA, Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Program, so paid work has to be done by a certified firm. Cutting and sanding timber also produces wood dust, which OSHA, Wood dust hazards records as classified by the NTP as a known human carcinogen. Both retrieved 2026-08-23.
- The order things have to happen in
- Appliances are chosen before cabinets, because their dimensions decide the cabinet sizes around them. Cabinets go in before the countertop, because the top cannot be templated until they are set and level. And the sink is chosen before the top is cut, because the cutout is made to it. Every one of those is a fortnight of delay if it happens in the wrong order, and none of them costs anything to get right.
- 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
- Countertops
- Cabinets and countertops are bought, made and fitted separately, and the countertop cannot be templated until the cabinets are in and level. There is a separate calculator for it on this site.
- Appliances, sink and tap
- Bought separately and chosen before the cabinets are ordered, because their dimensions decide the cabinet sizes around them. Only the matching panels are priced here.
- Moving plumbing, gas or electrical
- A new layout means moving a waste, a supply, a gas line or a circuit, and each is a different trade. Fitting cabinets where the services already are is what this page prices.
- Walls, floors and ceilings
- Cabinets go onto whatever is there. Levelling a floor, straightening a wall or repairing the ceiling after old wall units come down are separate jobs, and the last one is more common than people expect.
- Lead and asbestos in older houses
- Removing painted cabinetry and disturbing the wall behind it in pre-1978 housing is above the federal lead threshold, and floor coverings from before the eighties can contain asbestos. Testing comes first and neither is priced here.
Questions people actually ask
How much does it cost to install 25 linear feet of cabinets?
About $9,429 in Atlanta for stock cabinets supplied and fitted, or $3,574 for the fitting alone if you buy the cabinets yourself — $143 a linear foot of labour. One thing to check before comparing that with a quote: 25 linear feet of what. Cabinets are measured along the wall, and base and wall runs are counted separately, so a kitchen with 13 feet of base and 12 of wall is 25 linear feet while a kitchen with 25 feet of base and 25 of wall is 50. That is a doubling, and it is the commonest misunderstanding in this trade.
What is the typical labor cost for installing kitchen cabinets?
$151 a linear foot in Atlanta, which for a 20-foot kitchen is $3,021 and about 54 trade hours. Here is where that comes from rather than the number alone: the BLS median wage for carpenters is 29.12 an hour nationally, ×0.837 for this metropolitan area, ×1.46 for benefits, payroll taxes and insurance, and ×1.33 to 1.43 for overhead and profit — a billed rate of $47 to $51 an hour. Base cabinets take 1.4 hours a linear foot and wall cabinets 1.9, because wall units go up overhead on temporary supports and every one has to hit a stud.
How much does Home Depot charge to install kitchen cabinets?
We do not publish other companies' prices and would be guessing if we did. What is worth knowing is the shape of a big-box installation quote, because it explains why comparing one against a local carpenter is harder than it looks. A retailer's price is usually a package: their cabinets, their subcontracted installer and a flat per-linear-foot fitting rate, quoted as one figure. That makes it easy to accept and hard to take apart, and the questions that take it apart are the useful ones — what grade are the boxes, is the crown moulding included, are the handles included and drilled, and is taking out the old kitchen in the price. Our model puts a 20-foot stock kitchen at $7,821 all in and the fitting alone at $3,021, so those two numbers are what any package price should sit between.
How much does Lowes charge to install kitchen cabinets?
The same answer and for the same reason: their prices are theirs to publish, not ours to guess at. The useful comparison is not retailer against retailer but package against parts. Take any quoted figure, ask what the cabinets alone cost, and see what is left for the labour — then set that against $151 a linear foot, which is what the fitting works out at in Atlanta on BLS wage data. If the implied labour is far below that, something is being left out of the scope rather than done more cheaply, and it is usually the moulding, the handles or the removal of the old kitchen.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 23 August 2026, not invented.
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