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. Five of the assumed rows are editable controls; the nine hours-per-unit rates are fixed inputs to the whole-project calculator, and the trade-labour page lets you replace the resulting hours directly instead.

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 did not find any of those figures from a source that publishes its method.

• A national average kitchen remodel price. We have not found a national average from a source that publishes its method.
• A dollar-per-square-foot anchor. This site’s formulas scale a kitchen with cabinet runs, appliance count and how many services move, not with floor area, so 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, Bureau of Labor Statistics (33)

All of these come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The wage rows are from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme: each was checked against our saved copy of the BLS public API response of 2026-10-05, which prints the series ID, the year, the period code A01 (labelled Annual) and the value. That response prints no unit and no title. The hourly-wage percentile meaning of each series comes from the data-type code in its series ID (07, 08, 09), recorded from the series-ID format when the registry was first built on 2026-08-06; that designation is our record, not a saved copy of a BLS document. The index rows are from the Producer Price Index programme: each was checked against our saved copy of the BLS data page for its series (2026-10-05), which prints the item title and a year-by-month table, with June 2026 values printed (P), preliminary. The last column gives our own description of each row and the cells recorded from the source; it is not a sentence BLS wrote.

Sourced figures, Bureau of Economic Analysis (8)

These come from Bureau of Economic Analysis news release BEA 26-10 (February 19, 2026). Each value appears in one of the release’s own sentences, shown in the last column, and was checked against our saved copy of the release page of 2026-10-05; the values were first typed in by hand on 2026-09-24, and that copy of the page was not kept. BEA’s own definition of a Regional Price Parity is quoted on the regional cost factors page.

Derived figures (13)

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. We did not find a published national residential-remodelling burden multiplier or a national hours-per-cabinet-box figure, so these are estimates presented as estimates. Five of them — the wage-to-billed multiplier, general conditions, stone waste, daily food cost and reserve weight per unknown — are editable controls on the pages that use them. The nine hours-per-unit rates are fixed inputs to the whole-project calculator and the worked examples; the trade-labour page lets you replace the resulting hours directly instead.

Fixed modelling rules (ours, not sourced)

The tools also contain fixed rules of ours — thresholds, multipliers and factors written into the formulas. They are not registered constants and nothing publishes them; they are listed here so you can see what the results rest on.

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

Model code text

Code text is not quoted on this site. Jurisdictions adopt different editions and amend them, so the values that depend on code are choices you make from what your own inspector enforces: the fall a drain needs per foot (a choice of three values), the spacing between countertop receptacles and the number of small-appliance branch circuits are controls you set. The usable fraction of a joist is a fixed assumption of ours — one third of the depth when boring across joists, 80% when running along a bay — and is labelled as such on the sink page.

Regional cost variation

Labour wages on this site are national; 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 each result already reflects where you are.

Freshness

Each sourced figure carries the date of its saved copy and a six-month horizon. The BLS and BEA rows were checked against saved copies of 2026-10-05; the dates they were first recorded (2026-08-06 for BLS, 2026-09-24 for BEA) are shown as history, because those copies were not kept. Producer price indexes are published monthly and the wage series annually, so the escalation figures change faster than the wage figures do.

Reproducing this yourself

1. The addresses in the BLS wage rows are public API endpoints that return JSON without a key.
2. The addresses in the BLS index rows are BLS data pages that print the whole year-by-month table for the series.
3. The Bureau of Economic Analysis address is a news-release page — open it and read the sentences quoted in the last column of its table above.
4. The derived rows are pure arithmetic on the sourced rows and need nothing but a calculator.
5. If a value here disagrees with what the source returns today, the source is right and this page is stale. The saved-copy date in the table tells you how old the check is.