Where the calculator constants came from

Three labels, and what each one promises

The distinction is not decorative. A sourced row can be checked against the source; a derived row can be recomputed; an assumed row can only be judged, which is why every one of them is exposed as a control rather than buried in the arithmetic.

The four numbers this site deliberately does not have

A kitchen cost calculator is expected to open with a national average price, a cost per square foot, a cabinet price per linear foot and a countertop price per square foot. This one has none of them, and the reason is the same in all four cases: we could not retrieve any of those figures from a source that publishes its methodology and permits a machine to read it.

• A national average kitchen remodel price. The widely-quoted figures trace back to industry surveys behind registration walls or to secondary sites republishing each other without a year or a scope definition attached.
• A dollar-per-square-foot anchor. Kitchens do not scale with floor area — they scale with cabinet runs, appliance count and how many services move. A per-square-foot figure would be arithmetic performed on the wrong variable even if we had a source for it.
• A cabinet price per linear foot. The relevant producer price indexes are published and are used on this site, but an index measures change, not level. It cannot tell you what a foot of cabinet costs.
• A resale recoup percentage. Discussed in full on the break-even page, which does the arithmetic without one.

In each case the site asks you for your own local figure instead. That is a worse experience and a better answer, and the trade is deliberate: a fabricated cost anchor is more damaging than a missing one, because it looks like knowledge.

Sourced figures (33)

All of these come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics public API. Wage figures are from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme; index figures are from the Producer Price Index programme. Series titles are copied verbatim from the BLS dictionary files rather than paraphrased by us, because a paraphrased series title is how a wrong series gets used with a right-sounding name.

Derived figures (11)

Each row below is arithmetic on the sourced rows above, and the operation is printed in the last column so you can perform it yourself. Note what is not here: no index level is ever divided by a different index level. Those series carry different base periods and the ratio between two of them means nothing.

Assumed figures (14)

These are ours. No agency publishes a national residential-remodelling burden multiplier or a national hours-per-cabinet-box figure, and we did not find one, so these are estimates presented as estimates. Every one of them is an editable control on the page that uses it, so a visitor who knows better can replace it and watch the answer move.

What we could not retrieve, and what we did about it

Model code text

Several tools on this site depend on requirements set by building, plumbing and electrical codes: the fall a drain needs per foot, the safe zone for boring a joist, the spacing between countertop receptacles, the number of small-appliance branch circuits. We attempted to retrieve those provisions from the code publisher directly. The request returns HTTP 200 and the body is a JavaScript shell with no section text in it, so we never read the provisions.

Rather than print a code requirement from memory and attach a citation to it, every one of those values is a CONTROL the visitor sets from what their own jurisdiction enforces. This is also more correct than a constant would have been: jurisdictions adopt different editions and amend them, so there is no single national value to print even in principle.

Regional cost variation

Labour wages on this site are national. Wages vary substantially by metropolitan area and the BLS publishes that variation, but a national figure is what this site uses and you should treat the labour output as a national-median shape rather than a local price. The unit prices you enter are local by construction, so the material side of every result already reflects where you are.

Freshness

Every figure carries a retrieval date and a six-month horizon. The whole set was retrieved on 2026-08-06. Producer price indexes are published monthly and the wage series annually, so the escalation figures on this site age faster than the wage figures do.

Reproducing this yourself

1. Every address in the tables above is a live API endpoint that returns JSON. No key is required for these requests.
2. The BLS dictionary files that supply the series titles are published as plain text under download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/. That server requires a User-Agent carrying a contact address, which is why an ordinary browser request to it is refused.
3. The derived rows are pure arithmetic on the sourced rows and need nothing but a calculator.
4. If a value here disagrees with what the API returns today, the API is right and this page is stale. The retrieval date in the table tells you how stale.