Skip to content
True Trade Cost

Cabinet Pricing Calculator: Build a Per-Foot Price From Your Own Shop Hours

Updated

Twenty feet of paint-grade maple Shaker base cabinets, plywood boxes, soft-close hardware and delivery comes to $9,014.81, or $450.74 a linear foot, at a $59 break-even shop rate with 20% profit. Put in your own shop hours, minutes per foot and sheet goods and the foot price and the total change as you type.

This cabinet pricing calculator builds the foot price from the bottom up instead of borrowing one. The defaults are a simplified copy of the 20 ft kitchen in the Cabinet Shop Pricing Calculator spreadsheet, so you can see where every dollar of a per-foot quote comes from.

1. The order

Measured along the wall. Count base and upper runs separately if you price them differently.

hrs

Drawings, cut list, site visits, meetings, sample board, cleanup and paperwork.

min

Cutting, banding, doors, sanding, assembly and finish for one foot of cabinet.

$

Plywood, maple, panels, banding, hinges, slides and paint for one foot.

2. Costs that come with every order

The ones owners leave out most. Put 0 if it doesn't apply.

$
$
$
3. Your rate and profit
$/hr

What each labour hour has to bring in to cover wages and overhead.

%
%

Don't know your break-even rate? Work it out in two minutes with the true hourly rate calculator.

20 feet$9,014.81 · $450.74 each

Twenty-one hours before the first sheet is cut

A kitchen costs the shop a block of time before any plywood goes on the saw. Shop plans and the cut list, the site visits and meetings with the homeowners, the paint sample, the paperwork and cleaning the shop down after: in the example that adds up to 21.25 hours. At $59 that is $1,253.75, or about $63 on every foot of a 20 ft kitchen.

Then each foot of cabinet takes 135 minutes in the shop, from cutting sheet goods to hanging doors and fitting drawers. Those two numbers, once per kitchen and per foot, are the ones to track on your own jobs. Get them from a finished kitchen's timesheets, not from memory.

Vanity at $655 a foot, 45 ft kitchen at $375

The break table runs the same cabinet at 8, 20, 30 and 45 feet. An 8 ft vanity run comes to $655.38 a foot, the 20 ft kitchen to $450.74, 30 ft to $405.27 and 45 ft to $374.95. One foot price for every job either loses money on the small ones or loses the big ones to a cheaper bid.

That is the plain answer when a customer asks why their bathroom costs more per foot than their neighbor's kitchen. The hours at the start do not shrink with the room.

Drawer boxes grow with the kitchen

The three named lines below the materials are a fixed amount per order, so check them when the size changes. The bought-in dovetail drawer boxes are $805 for 20 ft. On a 45 ft kitchen with the same drawer layout they would be about $1,810, and the foot price goes from $374.95 to $401.75 once you update that line.

Crown, fillers and toe kick work the same way: more wall, more trim. The calculator will not guess this for you, so treat those boxes as part of each new quote, not as defaults to leave alone.

How the spreadsheet reaches $489.73 a foot

The quick version has no machine costs for the saw, edge bander and spray booth, no markup on the bought-in drawer boxes and no safety cushion. The spreadsheet adds all three, walks through the cabinet costs owners forget line by line, prints a customer quote with your terms and tracks each kitchen's real hours in a job log. Its version of the same kitchen is $489.73 a foot.

The $59 rate is the example shop's, not yours. See how the sample gets to $58.80 on the cabinet shop hourly rate page, work out your own with the free true hourly rate calculator, and read the custom cabinet pricing guide for the walnut, paint and install questions. The difference between 15% markup and a 15% margin is in the markup vs margin guide.

How the math in the Cabinet Shop calculator is checked

Every version of the cabinet shop spreadsheet goes through an automatic test before it ships. The test rebuilds the file, recalculates it in a separate spreadsheet engine, and fails the release if any of these is off.

  • The example's break-even rate, $58.80 an hour, is worked out a second time outside the spreadsheet and the two have to agree to the cent.
  • At all four quantities on the quote, the price each times the quantity has to equal the order price, the price each may never go up as the quantity goes up, and the customer quote has to show the same four prices.
  • The example quote ($489.73 each (20 pcs)) has to earn more per labour hour than it costs to run the business. It earns $97.10 an hour against the $58.80 break-even.
  • Then the test tries to break it: every yellow box on the quote emptied, nobody on the crew billable, a material price 400 days old, an order of zero. No cell may show an error, and the checks box has to flag the missing customer name and the out-of-date price.
  • The formulas only use functions that work the same way in Excel and Google Sheets.

Last test run: Cabinet Shop passed, along with 39 of the other 39 trades. The example job and the list of easy-to-miss costs come from research into 8 videos of cabinet shop owners explaining how they price. More on how the calculators are built.

Questions owners ask

How do you calculate cabinet cost per linear foot?

Add the hours you spend once on the kitchen to the shop minutes for every foot, price both at your break-even rate, add sheet goods, hardware and bought-in parts, add profit, then divide by the feet. The example 20 ft run of painted Shaker base cabinets comes to $450.74 a foot.

Why does a small vanity cost more per foot than a kitchen?

The plans, visits and sample board take about as long for 8 ft as for 20 ft. In the example an 8 ft run comes to $655.38 a foot, against $450.74 for 20 ft and $374.95 for 45 ft.

Does this cabinet calculator include installation?

No. The example is delivered, not installed. Price the install on its own, either as hours on site at your rate or as a separate line, so the customer can compare it with having their contractor do it.

What markup should a cabinet shop put on plywood and hardware?

The example uses 15% on materials and 20% profit on the whole job. A low materials markup keeps the quote fair on a big order of sheet goods; the profit line is where the shop gets paid for running the business.