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, and almost nobody knows either number for their own kitchen. This page turns wall lengths into both, after taking out what the appliances, the doorways and the corners quietly 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 the greedy widest-first fill a designer would draw, because wide boxes cost less per inch than narrow ones and each box carries its own install labour.
| Position | Box width | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 36 in | 5 |
| Base | 18 in | 1 |
| Wall | 36 in | 6 |
The widths available in a stock line are 36, 33, 30, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, 9 inches. Semi-custom lines add three-inch increments and custom shops build to the opening, which is exactly why a custom quote and a stock quote for "the same kitchen" are not describing the same cabinet count.
- 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, and usually more, because a standard-depth unit needs clearance the drawing rarely shows. A dishwasher takes base cabinet but not counter, since the counter runs straight over it. A cooktop takes neither, because there is a cabinet underneath. Those four appliances are treated differently by this tool for exactly that reason.
Blind corners
Where two base runs meet, roughly two feet of one leg disappears behind the other. You buy that cabinet and you reach about half of it. A corner mechanism recovers most of the space and costs several hundred dollars per corner; leaving it as a dead blind cabinet costs nothing 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 is usually the reason a drawer stack ends up 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, because a clean wall is rare in a house older than the person remodelling it.
Stock and custom are two different commodities, and the statistics agency counts them that way
The box schedule above assumes stock widths, and the paragraph under it says a custom quote for the same kitchen is not describing the same cabinet count. That is not our opinion about cabinet shops. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains two separate producer price indexes here, and the titles are the clearest statement of the difference you will read anywhere.
“Stock wood kitchen cabinets, related cabinetwork and countertops” index 123.166 (2026 June)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity) — BLS public API, stock cabinet commodity index
What it means for your kitchen Stock cabinetwork is tracked as one commodity together with countertops, which tells you how the market treats it: a catalogue of fixed widths coming off a production line, priced like a product.
“Custom wood kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and related cabinetwork” index 172.568 (2026 June)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity) — BLS public API, custom cabinet commodity index
What it means for your kitchen Custom cabinetwork is a different commodity with its own index, and over the last twelve months the two moved differently enough to matter to anyone holding an older quote — which is the whole 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 below is worth more than any published one. It is derived from a real quote for a real kitchen in your county, which is a sample size of one but a perfectly 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 every bidder, and it is a far more useful question than asking why one total is higher than another. Two bids that differ by thirty per cent on the total often differ by two per cent per linear foot and by a great deal on 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 tell you what an older quote is worth today.
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)Stock wood kitchen cabinets — the commodity series covering catalogue box widths.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index (commodity)Custom wood kitchen cabinets — the separate series covering shop-built cabinetwork.