What a Bathroom and Kitchen Really Cost in Europe - and How to Price a Fair Bid

The hardest question in any renovation is not “what do I want?” It is “is this quote fair?” You are handed a number with several zeros for work you have never bought before, in a market you may not know, and asked to commit. This guide gives you the two things that turn that number from a leap of faith into a judgement: a sense of what a bathroom and a kitchen actually cost across Europe, and a method for reading a contractor’s bid line by line so you can tell a fair price from a trap.

What a bathroom and a kitchen cost across Europe

The first thing to understand is that there is no European price - there is a five-fold spread. The same mid-range bathroom that costs around €3,800 in Latvia costs around €25,000 in Switzerland, and the gap is almost entirely labour, not materials. The chart below shows typical mid-range costs - a roughly 4-6 m² bathroom and a 10-12 m² kitchen, labour and materials included - pulled from local cost-guide and quote-aggregator sources in each country.

Two patterns are worth pulling out. First, the Alpine and Nordic countries - Switzerland, Norway, Denmark - sit at the top on labour cost alone, and it is their bathrooms, the more labour-intensive of the two rooms, that push highest. Second, a kitchen usually costs more than a bathroom, because cabinetry and appliances dominate the bill - except exactly where labour is most expensive, which is why Norway and Denmark invert the usual order.

Why the same job costs five times more in Zurich than in Riga

Across mid-range work, labour is roughly two-thirds of the total and materials one-third. Tiles, taps and cabinets cost broadly similar amounts across Europe - they move on the same global markets - but the hours to fit them are billed at the local wage, and that is what fans the price out from the Baltics to the Alps. Knowing the local trade rate is therefore the single most useful sanity check on a quote.

Find the true cost of materials before you read a single bid

The most common place a quote quietly inflates is the materials allowance - a sum the contractor pencils in for items you have not chosen yet, such as tiles or sanitaryware. Set low, it makes the headline bid look competitive; then you pick real products, blow through the allowance, and top up the difference at cost plus margin. The defence is simple: price the materials yourself before you compare bids.

• For each to-be-chosen item - tiles, taps, a toilet, worktops - pick what you would actually buy and get the real retail price from two suppliers.
• Add 10-15% for waste on anything cut to fit, tiles especially.
• Compare your real number against the allowance line in the quote. A tile allowance of €25/m² when the tiles you want retail at €45/m² is not a cheap bid, it is an unfinished one.
• Expect a modest markup over your retail price - trade ordering, delivery, returns - but be suspicious of an allowance set below realistic retail.

How to read a contractor’s quote

A single bottom-line number is the clearest red flag in the whole process: it cannot be checked, and it is the leading cause of disputes. A quote you can actually judge is itemised, and it contains all of the following:

• The full scope of works - and, just as important, an explicit list of what is excluded.
• Labour broken out by trade or phase, with rates.
• Materials with quantities and unit prices, not a single lump.
• Subcontractor and plant/equipment costs.
• Preliminaries - permits, surveys, skips, site protection, surface prep.
• Margin (overhead and profit) and VAT shown as separate lines.
• A payment schedule tied to completed milestones, plus warranty and timeline.

Unit pricing: the trick that makes two bids comparable

Two quotes with different bottom lines are impossible to compare until you break them into rate × quantity. Reduced to unit prices, you can see exactly which line differs - and, more revealingly, which line one contractor left out entirely. This is what a formal Bill of Quantities does; you can do a rough version at your kitchen table.

• Per m²: tiling, flooring, plastering.
• Per point or circuit: electrical.
• Per linear metre: cabinetry and worktops.
• Per item: sanitaryware, doors, radiators.

The low bid that costs the most

A bid that comes in 25% or more below the others should prompt questions, not celebration. The lowest number is frequently the most expensive once the missing scope reappears as change orders. The usual hiding places:

• Undersized allowances - placeholder sums for to-be-chosen items pitched unrealistically low.
• Exclusions - work the others included, quietly omitted (demolition, electrical rough-in, permits, the skip). A quote listing no exclusions at all is itself a warning.
• Provisional and prime-cost sums - placeholders for work not yet priceable, replaced with the real, higher cost later.
• Omitted “making good” - the surface prep and reinstatement (re-plastering, repainting, tidying floor edges) that a complete quote includes.
• Front-loaded payments - 40-50% or more upfront. A 10-30% deposit is normal; more than that quietly transfers your leverage to the contractor.

The fix for all of it is the same: normalise every bid to the same scope before you compare the numbers. Once three quotes describe identical work, the price finally means something.

A fair price is a checkable price

Notice what every technique above has in common: it turns a quote from a number you have to trust into a document you can verify. That is the whole game. The contractor who itemises willingly, prices materials transparently, and shows their margin as a line is telling you something about how they will behave when the job hits a snag - which it will.

Finding that kind of contractor is the harder half. Every general contractor listed on Veted is checked against the relevant national registry and its real review history before it appears, so the shortlist you gather bids from is already filtered for the businesses most likely to hand you a quote you can actually read.