What Should You Charge Per Cabinet?

What Should You Charge Per Cabinet?

The market answer depends on cabinet type and your positioning tier. Per [Bob Vila's kitchen cabinet cost guide](https://www.bobvila.com/articles/cost-of-kitchen-cabinets/), custom-built cabinetry sells at $500–$1,200 per linear foot; semi-custom runs $150–$650; and stock or RTA (ready-to-assemble) starts around $100–$300 per linear foot. These are what buyers pay at retail — they are not instructions for where your specific floor sits.

| Cabinet type | Typical retail range | What it includes | |---|---|---| | Custom | $500–$1,200/LF | Built to spec, full finish control | | Semi-custom | $150–$650/LF | Standard boxes with modified dimensions and finishes | | Stock / RTA | $100–$300/LF | Pre-built, standard sizes, fastest lead time |

Your floor — the minimum you can quote and still run a real business — is a different calculation entirely. The retail ranges above tell you what the market will bear. Your floor tells you what you cannot go below. Shops that confuse the two are the ones quoting against HomeAdvisor leads for three years and wondering where the money went.

The [stock, semi-custom, and custom cabinet taxonomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_cabinet) is the same framework buyers use when shopping — the tier you primarily serve sets your labor intensity and the margin target you can realistically defend.

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How Do You Build a Cabinet Price From the Cost Floor?

Four inputs. Every quote, every time:

1. Materials and hardware. The actual lumber, plywood, MDF, hardware, finishing materials, and consumables for the job. This is usually the easiest number to calculate accurately — shops with good purchasing systems know it within a few percent.

2. Labor at your loaded rate. Not the wage you pay your crew. Your loaded rate covers the wage plus employer payroll taxes (7.65% FICA minimum), workers' compensation, benefits if applicable, and — critically — the non-billable hours those workers spend on anything other than production: machine setup, cleanup, quoting, shop maintenance. A cabinet maker earning $21.44 per hour (PayScale, May 2026, 260 profiles) costs a shop substantially more than $21.44 per hour to deploy productively. The full breakdown of how that number scales to a loaded shop rate is covered in [what cabinet makers charge per hour](/what-do-cabinet-makers-charge-per-hour).

3. Overhead allocation. Every job must carry a portion of your fixed costs: rent or mortgage on the shop, machinery leases or depreciation, software subscriptions, insurance, utilities, and administrative time. A common method is to calculate monthly overhead, divide by monthly labor hours, and add that overhead rate per hour to every job. Most shops that chronically underprice skip this step — they treat overhead as a business-level cost rather than a job-level one, which makes every job look more profitable than it is.

4. Target margin. Once you have a real total cost (materials + loaded labor + overhead), you add your target net margin. If you want a 12% net margin on a job that costs $8,000 to produce and deliver, your floor quote is $8,000 / (1 - 0.12) = $9,091. Not $8,000 plus 12% (that gives you a lower number than you think — a common math error).

The formula: Floor price = (materials + loaded labor + overhead) / (1 - target margin %)

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What Margin Should You Build In?

Industry data sets the benchmarks, and they are worth knowing before you set your price target.

Cabinet-industry practitioner discussions, including active threads among cabinet shop owners, cite the average net margin for cabinet makers at approximately 7.9%. The Architectural Woodwork Institute's own surveys find top-quartile performers at around 12%. Experienced operators on WOODWEB who have run shops for 10+ years report that consistent margins of 20%+ are achievable — but only with disciplined job costing, a good close rate, and control over [what a cabinet lead actually costs](/knowledge/cabinet-lead-cost/).

If your margin is consistently below the 7.9% average, the most common root cause is underpriced labor or untracked overhead — not production inefficiency. The fix is in the formula, not the shop floor.

[Book a free strategy call](/booking/) to see what margin and lead-cost benchmarks look like for cabinet shops in your specific market — we run the numbers before we talk about anything else.

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Does Your Job Quote Include the Marketing Cost That Won It?

Your margin is not just a profit target — it is also the ceiling on what you can afford to spend acquiring customers. A $1,000 marketing spend needs to generate enough revenue to cover itself — the right benchmark uses gross margin (contribution before fixed overhead and taxes), not net margin. Net margin is what remains after marketing costs are already deducted; using it to calculate a marketing break-even double-counts the cost. At a ~40% gross margin (illustrative; actual rates vary by product mix and labor efficiency — your own figure belongs in this slot), a $1,000 marketing spend needs roughly $2,500 in revenue to pay for itself. The 7.9% net margin figure tells a different story: it shows how thin the cushion is. At that margin, $1,000 in wasted ad spend — campaigns that generate clicks but no closed jobs — consumes more than 12% of the net profit on $100,000 in revenue ($7,900 profit, minus $1,000 waste = 12.7% of profit erased). The fix is almost always in pricing and campaign accountability, not in cutting marketing budgets — because cutting marketing creates a worse problem: empty pipelines.

This is the input that most cabinet pricing guides, WOODWEB threads, and manufacturer cost sheets omit entirely.

Every closed job came from somewhere. A referral. A Google search. A Facebook ad. Whatever channel delivered that customer to your showroom had a cost — and that cost belongs in your overhead calculation the same way rent does.

The math is direct. A widely cited rule of thumb for businesses under $5M revenue is to budget 7–8% of gross revenue for marketing. At $500K in annual revenue, that is $35,000 per year — approximately $2,917 per month. CabinetBoost's working benchmarks across 7+ years of cabinet campaigns put the effective range at $2,500–$5,000 per month at the $500K revenue tier and $4,000–$8,000 at $1M.

Now run that through job volume. If you close 5 jobs per month at an average of $10,000 per job (a realistic semi-custom kitchen ticket at the $8,000–$15,000 range stated above), your marketing cost per closed job is $2,500 to $5,000 / 5 = $500 to $1,000 per job. That $500 to $1,000 is overhead. It needs to be in your cost floor, not discovered as a surprise at month-end.

The industry data on paid lead costs makes this concrete. [WordStream's home services advertising benchmarks](https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/09/22/advertising-benchmarks-home-services-2021) show home services cost-per-lead ranging from $29 to over $100 depending on category and market. Bienal Closets came to CabinetBoost paying $234 per lead on shared traffic. After campaign restructuring, their cost-per-lead dropped to $47 — still a real cost that belongs in every job's overhead line. Whether your lead costs $47 or $234, that number is overhead. Quote accordingly.

For how showroom staff should handle inquiries where the budget doesn't match the scope, see [how to qualify a $10K kitchen budget inquiry](/qualify-10000-kitchen-budget-inquiry).

For cabinet businesses running Google Ads, see [how CabinetBoost structures campaigns for cabinet showrooms](/services/google-ads).

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What Cabinet Makers Earn Per Hour, and What That Means for Your Pricing

PayScale's May 2026 data (260 profiles) puts the average cabinet maker's hourly wage at $21.44 as an employee. That figure is the starting point, not the number you plug into a job cost sheet.

• The $21.44 wage itself
• Employer [FICA taxes](https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751): 7.65% of wages = ~$1.64/hr (Social Security 6.2% + Medicare 1.45%)
• State unemployment insurance and workers' compensation (varies by state; typically 3–8% of wages)
• Non-billable time recovery: if a worker is on your payroll 40 hours/week but productively builds cabinets 32 hours, you pay 40 hours to get 32 hours of production — the non-billable 8 hours still cost you wage

Add machinery depreciation and overhead allocation on top of that, and the true cost to produce one billable hour of cabinet work is meaningfully higher than $21.44. Shops that quote from the PayScale number without adding these layers are pricing from a floor that does not reflect their actual cost.

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Where Does Your Cabinet Shop Pricing Stand?

If your cabinet pricing is tight and your pipeline isn't filling fast enough to justify it, the problem usually traces back to a cost floor missing real overhead, a marketing spend not tracked against closed revenue, or both. [Book a free strategy call](/booking/) and we'll run a custom market analysis for your area — no pitch until you've seen your actual numbers.

If you want to see where your current pricing and lead cost sit relative to cabinet shops in your market, [request a free marketing audit](/free-audit/) — we pull real campaign data before any conversation about services.

For more on how marketing costs connect to these ranges, see [how much cabinet marketing actually costs](/how-much-does-cabinet-marketing-cost/). For the step-by-step formula behind your cost floor, see [how to calculate cabinet price](/how-to-calculate-cabinet-price).

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