Kitchen, bathroom, roof, whole-home: free calculators that turn square footage and finish level into a real working budget. Punch in the numbers. Walk into every bid with your eyes open.
Your estimated renovation cost
Honest cost ranges, not contractor sales pitches.
Whole-home remodel cost by area and finish level, with contingency buffer.
See my numbers →Kitchen renovation cost from a minor update to a full gut and layout change.
See my numbers →Bathroom renovation cost from a cosmetic refresh to a custom tile gut.
See my numbers →Roof cost by size, pitch, and material: shingles, metal, or cedar shake.
See my numbers →Complete guide to budgeting a renovation, including what to ask contractors.
Read guide →See how renovation labor and material costs compare across all 50 states.
Browse by state →Every tool here runs the same cost formulas used by professional estimators, translated into plain inputs you already know: square footage, scope, and finish level. No account required, no email, and your numbers never leave your browser.
Three things decide most of the spread between a cheap remodel and an expensive one: square footage, finish level, and how much of the plumbing or electrical layout you disturb.
Square footage sets the floor. A whole-home refresh on this site runs from $60 per square foot for a cosmetic pass to $220 or more per square foot for a high-end gut, and that range holds regardless of which room you start in. Finish level is what pushes a project from one end of that range to the other: stock cabinets and laminate counters versus semi-custom cabinetry and stone, builder-grade fixtures versus a rain shower and heated floors. Layout is the wildcard. Keeping the kitchen sink, the bathroom drain, or the load-bearing wall where it already sits keeps a budget predictable. Moving any of them adds new supply lines, new wiring runs, and inspection time that a flat square-footage number does not capture on its own.
Material choice matters more in some rooms than others. On a roof, the per-square-foot material rate more than doubles going from three-tab asphalt shingles to standing-seam metal, and roughly quadruples going all the way to cedar shake, which is why the roof calculator treats material as its own line rather than folding it into a single average. In a kitchen, cabinets and counters together typically account for 40 to 60 percent of the total, so scope tier matters more than square footage once the kitchen is a normal size.
Here is what the renovation calculator actually does with a number, step by step, so the total on screen is not a black box.
Say you are planning a mid-range full remodel on a 1,200 square foot home. The calculator multiplies area by a per-square-foot rate set by project type: $60/sqft for a whole-home refresh, $110/sqft for a mid-range full remodel, $220/sqft for a high-end remodel. At the mid-range rate, 1,200 sqft times $110 gives a base cost of $132,000. Add the default 15 percent contingency (a 1.15 multiplier) and the estimated total comes to $151,800, or about $126 per square foot once the buffer is included.
Run the same area at the whole-home refresh rate instead and the base cost drops to $72,000 before contingency, $82,800 after it. That is the entire spread the calculator exists to show: the same 1,200 square feet can cost roughly twice as much depending on finish tier alone, before anyone touches a wall. The kitchen and bathroom tools work the same way, just with scope tiers (cosmetic, mid-range, full gut) in place of a per-square-foot rate, and the roof calculator multiplies footprint by a pitch factor first to get true roof area before pricing the material.
These tools are built to get you to a working number before you talk to anyone, not to replace the conversation.
Bring in a contractor once you have a real scope in mind, not just a budget range. That usually means after you have picked a finish tier and decided whether the layout is changing. A contractor can tell you things a formula cannot: whether your electrical panel has capacity for a new kitchen, whether the wall you want to remove is load-bearing, what permits your city actually requires, and how the local labor market compares to the national figures behind these estimates.
Get at least three bids before signing anything, and treat a bid that comes in far below the others with more suspicion than relief. Ask each contractor to itemize labor, material, and their own contingency assumption so you are comparing the same scope, not three different projects wearing the same total. If a bid does not mention permits, plumbing or electrical inspection, or a completion timeline, ask why before you ask for a lower number.
A calculator also cannot see your house. It does not know that your panel is original to a 1962 build, that the floor joists under your kitchen are undersized for a stone counter, or that your city requires a separate permit for anything touching a load-bearing wall. Those are the details that turn a clean estimate into a change order three weeks into demo. The fix is not a better formula, it is a contractor who has opened up a wall like yours before and can tell you what is probably back there.
Talk to a pro before you commit to a scope, not after. A half-hour walkthrough with a licensed contractor is the cheapest insurance you can buy against a budget that blows up once the walls open.
Is the price per square foot the same for every room? No. The whole-home calculator uses a flat per-square-foot rate because it is averaging across an entire house, but the kitchen and bathroom tools switch to scope tiers instead, since a 120 square foot bathroom and a 120 square foot bedroom cost nothing alike to renovate.
Does the 15 percent contingency cover a surprise like rot or bad wiring? It covers the ordinary overruns that show up on most jobs, extra trips, minor change orders, a finish that costs more than expected. Structural surprises behind a wall can exceed 15 percent, which is one more reason to get an inspection before demo starts on an older house.
Why does my state page show a different number than the calculator? The calculator uses national baseline rates. The state pages apply a regional labor adjustment on top of that baseline, so a project in a high-labor-cost state will run higher than the flat national figure.
More on budgeting a renovation and which upgrades actually pay off: the full cost guide, how to build a budget that survives a contractor, and which improvements return money at resale.