Cabinet takeoff
How many linear feet of cabinet does your kitchen actually hold
Cabinets are sold by the linear foot and installed by the box. This page turns your wall lengths into both numbers, after taking out what the appliances, the doorways and the corners consume.
Measure the walls, get the schedule
Derived cabinet linear feet
35.0 ft
16.5 base, 18.5 wall, 0.0 tall.
The box schedule
A cabinet quote is a list of boxes, not a length. Here is a greedy widest-first fill of standard widths, which keeps the box count down; in this tool each box carries its own install labour.
| Position | Box width | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 36 in | 5 |
| Base | 18 in | 1 |
| Wall | 36 in | 6 |
This tool fills runs from these widths: 36, 33, 30, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, 9 inches. Ask your supplier which widths its line offers; a shop that builds to the opening can arrive at a different cabinet count for the same walls.
- A ceiling at 9.0 feet is tall enough to stack a second row of wall cabinets or run a taller single box; both add cabinet cost and neither adds usable counter.
What eats a run before the cabinets get to it
Appliance openings
A freestanding range takes its full width out of both the base run and the wall run. A refrigerator takes its width out of both as well; this tool does not add extra clearance for it, so ask your supplier what the unit needs. A dishwasher takes base cabinet but not counter, since the counter runs straight over it. A cooktop keeps the counter running over it, so it takes no counter; this tool still removes its width from both the base run and the wall run, treating the cabinet beneath it and the hood bay above it as separate items rather than standard boxes.
Blind corners
Where two base runs meet, this tool counts 24 inches of one leg as lost behind the other (a fixed rule of ours). A corner mechanism can recover some of that space at an added cost — ask for it as a priced line on the cabinet quote; leaving it as a blind cabinet adds nothing to the quote and loses the storage. Either is a defensible choice, and neither should be a surprise.
Filler
Runs do not divide neatly into standard widths, so the remainder becomes filler strip. A small amount is normal and invisible. A large amount concentrated in one place is a design decision that should have been discussed, and it can leave a drawer stack narrower than the one beside it.
Doors, windows and radiators
Anything on the wall that is not moving takes its width out of the run before cabinets are counted. The field above asks for those inches directly rather than assuming a clean wall.
Stock and custom cabinets are two separate BLS price series
The box schedule above assumes stock widths. The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps separate producer price series for the two kinds of cabinetwork; the item titles printed on its data pages are Stock wood kitchen cabinets, related cabinetwork and countertops (series WPU08210102) and Custom wood kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and related cabinetwork (series WPU08210105).
Stock wood kitchen cabinets, related cabinetwork and countertops — series WPU08210102, 2026 row, Jun column of the BLS data table: 123.166 (printed "(P)": preliminary)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity data, not seasonally adjusted) — BLS data page, series WPU08210102; original retrieval recorded 2026-08-06; that copy was not retained; checked against our saved copy of 2026-10-05; the June 2026 value is marked preliminary by BLS.
What it means for your kitchen The stock-cabinet series’ item title also names countertops; it does not separate them out.
Custom wood kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and related cabinetwork — series WPU08210105, 2026 row, Jun column of the BLS data table: 172.568 (printed "(P)": preliminary)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity data, not seasonally adjusted) — BLS data page, series WPU08210105; original retrieval recorded 2026-08-06; that copy was not retained; checked against our saved copy of 2026-10-05; the June 2026 value is marked preliminary by BLS.
What it means for your kitchen Custom cabinetwork has its own series, and over the twelve months to June 2026 (preliminary) the two moved differently — the subject of the escalation page.
What these series cannot tell you, and it is the thing you want
An index measures CHANGE in a price, not the price. Neither of those two series can be turned into a dollar figure per linear foot, per box or per kitchen, no matter how carefully it is handled, because an index level is only meaningful against another period of the same series. This is exactly why this page derives a quantity and stops. The quantity is knowable from your walls; the price is knowable only from your own market, and we would rather ask you for it than invent a national number that would look authoritative and be wrong on your street.
It is also why the per-linear-foot figure you compute from your own quote is the one to use: it comes from a real quote for your kitchen, a sample size of one but a relevant one.
Using this to check a quote
Divide the cabinet line on any quote by the linear feet above. That gives an implied cost per linear foot you can put to each bidder. Two bids with very different totals can be much closer per linear foot, because the difference can be in what else is in the box.
- Ask what the box is made of: plywood, furniture-grade particle board, or thermally fused laminate over the same.
- Ask whether drawers run on undermount soft-close slides or on side-mount rollers, and what the weight rating is.
- Ask whether the price includes finished ends where the run stops, or whether those are extra.
- Ask whether toe kick, crown, light rail and filler are in the linear-foot number or listed separately.
- Ask what the warranty covers and for how long, because a lifetime box warranty with a five-year finish warranty is two different promises.
Once you have a real per-foot number, the bid comparison tool will normalise several quotes against each other, and the escalation tool will roll an older quote forward at producer-price rates.
Sources for this page
The takeoff itself is geometry and cites nothing: it is your wall lengths, standard box widths and the deductions listed above. The two commodity series below are cited because the section on stock versus custom rests on them.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity data, not seasonally adjusted)Stock wood kitchen cabinets, related cabinetwork and countertops (item title as printed by BLS); June 2023, June 2025 and June 2026. The June 2026 value is marked preliminary by BLS.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity data, not seasonally adjusted)Custom wood kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and related cabinetwork (item title as printed by BLS); June 2023, June 2025 and June 2026. The June 2026 value is marked preliminary by BLS.