Kitchen Cabinet Installation Cost Calculator

How this calculator sizes a cabinet job

The calculator does not ask for a room dimension. It asks for a kitchen size band — small, medium, large, or extra-large — and converts that band into three numbers behind the scenes: linear feet of cabinetry, a door count, and a base-cabinet count. A medium kitchen is fixed at 20 linear feet, 26 doors, and 7 base cabinets; large steps up to 28 linear feet, 36 doors, 10 bases. Every dollar figure on the page is built by multiplying a per-linear-foot rate against that footage.

Four rates get multiplied by the same linear-foot number: cabinet material cost (which varies by both cabinet type and door material — stock laminate starts at $60/LF, custom solid wood tops out at $1,200/LF), hardware, and labor, which itself depends on whether the job is a replacement, a new install, or an addition to existing cabinetry. Replacement carries the widest labor band because it bundles demolition of what's already there.

Switch that same kitchen to a replacement instead of a new install, and a demolition line of $500–$1,000 gets added automatically — the calculator's demo-and-disposal cost table is keyed to kitchen size (small $300–$600 up to extra-large $900–$1,500), not to cabinet grade, because tearing out 20 linear feet of stock laminate takes the same crew-hours as tearing out 20 feet of custom solid wood.

Who installs cabinets, and what they're paid

Cabinet installation is carpentry work, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts national employment of carpenters (SOC 47-2031) at 670,090 as of May 2025, with a mean hourly wage of $31.55 and a mean annual wage of $65,630 — almost exactly in line with the $65,360 mean across all construction and extraction occupations. Carpentry is not an underpaid trade relative to the rest of the industry the way some finish trades are.

The percentile spread is the more useful number for pricing a specific job: carpenters range from $19.43 an hour at the 10th percentile to $48.03 at the 90th — a spread of nearly 2.5x. That range is a large share of why the labor line in the worked example above spans $1,000–$1,700 for the exact same 20 linear feet: it is not primarily a materials story, it is a wage-market story, and the low and high ends of the calculator's labor band roughly track the low and high ends of the wage distribution.

Why cabinet grade matters more to resale than to the room

This page's own notes put cabinets at 30–40 percent of a full kitchen remodel budget — the single largest line item in most kitchens. That makes the cabinet-grade decision the one most worth thinking about before signing a contract, and the 2025 Cost vs. Value report gives a concrete reason why: a midrange minor kitchen remodel — the kind that swaps cabinet fronts and hardware rather than gutting the room — costs $28,458 nationally and recoups 113 percent of that at resale, more than it costs. A major midrange remodel costs $82,793 and recoups only 51 percent; go upscale and $164,104 recoups just 36 percent. Spending 5.8 times more on the full project buys about 1.8 times more resale value.

That does not mean custom cabinets are a bad idea — it means the resale case for upgrading cabinet grade weakens fast past a certain point, while the case for a clean, well-installed stock or semi-custom kitchen stays strong. If resale is a consideration at all, this calculator's stock and semi-custom bands are the ones with the better cost-to-value math behind them, per the report above.

What's happening to cabinet material prices

The Producer Price Index for wood kitchen cabinet and countertop manufacturing stood at 288.048 in July 2026 (index base June 1984 = 100), tracking factory-gate prices for the cabinet boxes this calculator prices. That index only measures direction and magnitude of change within its own series — it cannot be compared to price indexes for other materials, which use different base years — but a rising trend in that series is a leading indicator that the material side of the cabinet-cost bands above will drift upward before the labor side does, since cabinet manufacturing responds to input costs faster than local labor markets reprice.

How to read a cabinet quote against this estimate

Two questions catch most quote problems. First: does the quote separate cabinet material, hardware, and labor, or is it one lump figure? A lump quote hides which lever is driving the price — grade or crew rate — and makes it impossible to negotiate the right one. Second: for a replacement job, is demolition and disposal itemized separately, or silently folded into the install labor line? If a replacement quote's labor number looks unusually close to this calculator's new-install band rather than its replacement band, ask whether demo is actually included.

IKEA and other ready-to-assemble cabinets sit at the low end of the stock range with one caveat this page's own lead-time note flags: assembly is a separate task from installation, adding 1–3 days before a carpenter can even start hanging boxes. A quote that skips a line for assembly time on an RTA job is quoting installation only, not the full job.