Every renovation quote is really two numbers added together: what it costs to buy the materials, and what it costs to pay someone to install them correctly. How that splits varies a lot by project type, and understanding it is genuinely useful — it tells you where you have real room to make choices, and where trying to save money usually costs more in the long run.
The split varies by project type
- Painting and decorating: heavily labour-weighted. Paint itself is a modest cost; most of the money pays for preparation, multiple coats, and finishing — the parts that separate a good paint job from a mediocre one.
- Kitchen renovation: materials-weighted, often significantly. Units, worktops, and appliances typically dominate the total, with installation labour a smaller (though far from trivial) proportion.
- Bathroom renovation: usually closer to an even split. Waterproofing, tiling, and plumbing are genuinely labour-intensive, while sanitaryware, tiles, and fittings add up quickly on the materials side too.
- Flooring: varies hugely by material — engineered wood and LVT lean materials-heavy; complex patterns (herringbone, for example) shift the balance towards labour because of the extra installation time.
- Extensions: broadly even across the shell (heavily labour and structural-materials driven) and the fit-out (which behaves like a kitchen or bathroom job once the space exists).
These are general patterns, not fixed rules — see what actually moves a quote up or down for the factors that shift any individual project away from the typical split.
Where the split actually matters
Knowing roughly how your project splits helps you focus your decisions where they'll actually move the total. On a kitchen job, agonising over labour rates makes less difference to the final number than the units and worktop you choose. On a decorating job, it's the reverse — the paint brand matters far less than the quality of preparation and the number of coats, which is almost entirely labour.
A worked example: where £10,000 goes on a kitchen fit
Take a mid-range kitchen renovation quoted at roughly £10,000. A typical (not universal — every kitchen differs) split looks something like this:
- Units and worktop: roughly £4,500–£5,500 — usually the single biggest line item, and the one specification level affects most directly.
- Appliances: roughly £1,500–£2,500, depending on how many are being replaced and the tier chosen.
- Installation labour (fitting units, plumbing, electrics first-fix): roughly £2,000–£3,000.
- Flooring, splashback tiling, decoration: roughly £1,000–£1,500, split fairly evenly between materials and labour.
Compare that to a full room repaint, where a £1,000 job might be £150 in paint and £850 in labour — almost entirely the reverse weighting. Knowing which side of this split your project sits on tells you where a specification decision actually moves the total, and where it barely registers.
A quick decision checklist: spend or save
- Materials you choose and can see (tiles, taps, worktop, flooring): reasonable to shop around, upgrade selectively, or source yourself if you're confident on quantities.
- Materials that are invisible once finished (waterproof membrane, subfloor levelling compound, first-fix cabling): not the place to economise — correct, not cheap, is what matters here.
- Labour for finishing work (final decoration, visible joinery, tiling layout): worth paying for genuine skill, since mistakes here are the most visible and the most expensive to redo.
- Labour for straightforward prep (clearing a room, removing old fixtures already being replaced): reasonable to do yourself if you're able to, with the contractor's agreement.
Where you can genuinely save
The lowest-risk savings come from the materials side of jobs where you have real choice — sourcing your own tiles, taps, sanitaryware, ironmongery, or light fittings at a specification you're happy with. This doesn't change how the work is done, only what goes in, so it doesn't create risk on the labour side.
Where trying to save usually backfires
Cutting corners on labour-intensive but invisible work — waterproofing before tiling, correct subfloor preparation before flooring, adequate coats and preparation before painting — rarely saves money once you account for the cost of putting it right. This is the work that determines whether a finish lasts five years or fifteen, and it's genuinely not the place to shop on price alone.
If you're doing any of your own prep work to reduce labour cost, simple and low-risk tasks (clearing a room, removing fixtures being replaced anyway) are reasonable. Anything that needs to be done precisely for the finished work to be sound is usually better left to the trade doing that finished work — see our guide on building a realistic budget for how to plan around this properly rather than guess.
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