Price drivers
What drives the price, in the order it tends to surprise people
Four things move a kitchen budget more than anything else you will pick out at a showroom: which trades your scope actually employs, which percentile of each trade shows up on your job, whether your cabinets are stock or custom, and the scope tier your decisions land you in. This page walks through each one with the sourced numbers behind it, in the order they tend to surprise people.
Whether your cabinets are stock or custom is a price driver before a single foot is measured
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks stock and custom cabinetry as two separate commodities in its Producer Price Index, and the two series have not moved together. That is not a curiosity — it means an old quote for custom cabinetry and an old quote for stock cabinetry go stale at different rates, and a showroom price you remember from a stock kitchen tells you very little about what a custom shop would charge for the same runs.
172.568 / 159 - 1 = +0.0853 over the twelve months ending June 2026 (PPI WPU08210105)
Derived on this site from the BLS rows above — this site's methodology page, custom-cabinet escalation arithmetic
What it means for your kitchen Custom cabinetry moved roughly 8.5% over the twelve months this site measured, against roughly 0.2% for stock. The escalation tool applies this to a real quote so you can see what an offer from last year is actually worth today, by category rather than as one blended guess.
The grade decision is also a labour decision: custom cabinetry usually means more site visits, more fitting time and a longer lead time, all of which the schedule tool prices in hours and weeks rather than leaving it as a vague "it depends."
The scope tier is the biggest driver of all, and it is not a menu choice
This site does not ask you to pick a budget tier. The whole-project calculator derives one from your actual decisions: does a fixture move, do three or more new circuits get pulled, do the walls open to the studs. Each of those answers pushes a real quantity — plumber hours, electrician hours, drywall square footage — and the tier is just the name for where those quantities land you.
| Decision | What it changes | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| A fixture moves | Plumber hours for rough-in, not just trim-out | Labour subtotal, tier |
| Three or more new circuits | Electrician rough-in hours, panel capacity | Labour subtotal, tier |
| Walls open to the studs | Demolition hours run 1.7x, a new drywall-finishing task appears | Labour only — this scope switch adds no materials line |
| A wall comes out | Structural review, and the tier moves to gut-and-relocate outright | Tier, permits, schedule |
Cabinet grade is a separate lever from all four of those: marking a scope "custom" changes the caveat sentence the calculator prints about that tier, but it does not multiply anything on its own — the materials subtotal only moves when you also change the cabinet unit price you enter, which is exactly the point of the stock-versus-custom section above.
Two worked examples on this site run the identical formula against two different real-shaped scopes so you can see this mechanism produce two very different totals from the same arithmetic, with nothing hidden in a tier menu.
Where you live is a real driver, and this site’s own wage data does not carry it yet
Every wage above is a national figure — and a state-level version of the same Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey genuinely exists (its State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates cover all six trades this site prices). This site has not yet retrieved and verified that state-by-state series into its own data, so the regional cost factors page uses a broader, already-sourced federal cost-of-living index instead, states plainly what that substitute does and does not measure, and explains how to use it alongside your own local quotes rather than in place of them.
Sources for this page
- Derived on this site from the BLS rows aboveHourly wage percentile spread, electricians — the widest of the six trades this site sources.
The scope-tier table above cites nothing because it describes this site's own formula, printed in full on the methodology page.