How Much Does It Cost to Renovate a House in 2026?

How much it costs to renovate a house depends almost entirely on one thing: how far back you strip it. A cosmetic refresh runs at around £230 per square metre of existing floor area. A back-to-brick renovation runs at £1,950. That is an eight-fold difference on the same house, and it is why a single average figure for house renovation cost is close to useless.

On a typical three bedroom semi of 90 square metres, those two extremes work out at roughly £36,000 and £309,000 including VAT, fees and contingency. Everything people actually mean by “renovating” sits between them.

I had a quantity surveyor price the whole thing properly in September 2026, so the rates below are his rather than mine. They are at Midlands and Wales levels, exclude VAT and professional fees, and include the builder’s preliminaries and margin.

HOUSE RENOVATION COST BY HOW FAR YOU GO

Renovation does not come in one size, so our QS priced it in four bands. These are per square metre of the floor area you already have, not of anything new you add. Each band has a cautious figure, a most likely figure, and a figure for when it goes against you.

• Band 1, cosmetic refresh: £140 to £390, most likely £230. Decoration, floor coverings, minor joinery repairs. The kitchen and bathrooms stay. No services work and no walls moved.
• Band 2, moderate refurbishment: £500 to £1,100, most likely £750. New kitchen and bathrooms, partial rewire and replumb, some non-structural walls moved, patch plastering, redecoration throughout.
• Band 3, heavy refurbishment: £850 to £1,750, most likely £1,200. Full rewire and replumb, new heating, structural alterations and openings, most plaster replaced, new floors, some windows.
• Band 4, back to brick: £1,450 to £2,800, most likely £1,950. Stripped to structure. Everything in band 3 plus the roof, all the windows, new floor structure where needed, insulation and a full replaster.

Most people arrive believing they are in band 2 and end up in band 3. The reason is almost always the same: once the plaster comes off and the floors come up, the wiring and the pipework are visible for the first time in forty years, and nobody rewires half a house.

Our Renovation Cost Calculator runs these same rates against your own house, your own region and your own band.

RENOVATION COSTS FOR A THREE BEDROOM HOUSE

Take a 1930s three bedroom semi of 90 square metres, at Midlands and Wales prices, with the owners moved out for the duration, drawings for planning and building regulations only, and the usual consultants. Including VAT, the four bands come out as follows.

• Band 1, cosmetic refresh: £22,000 to £61,000, most likely £36,000
• Band 2, moderate refurbishment: £74,000 to £166,000, most likely £112,000
• Band 3, heavy refurbishment: £130,000 to £270,000, most likely £184,000
• Band 4, back to brick: £229,000 to £445,000, most likely £309,000

Look at the width of those ranges rather than the middle of them. On the heavy refurbishment the cautious figure and the against-you figure are £140,000 apart, on the same house, at the same specification. That is not sloppy pricing. It is an honest statement about a job that is being priced before anyone has opened a wall.

Small projects can often take a turn. You start redecorating, you want to take a wall down, and suddenly you need to rewire the house! Plan things out and don’t get carried away.

WHOLE HOUSE RENOVATION COST: WHAT ACTUALLY MOVES THE NUMBER

Four things move it, and three of them you cannot change.

Where the house is. Renovation is more labour-heavy than new build, so regional differences bite harder here than they do on a self build. On that same band 3 job: around £166,000 in Scotland and the North, £184,000 in the Midlands and Wales, £211,000 in the South and South West, and £247,000 in London and the South East.

Age is the second, and a pre-1919 solid wall house costs around 15% more to renovate than something built after 1980. Lime rather than cement, breathability to respect, no cavity to insulate, and a structure that is rarely square. Every trade takes longer, and on the band 3 job that is the difference between £171,000 and £196,000.

Access is the third. A terrace with no side or rear route to the back means every brick, every bag of plaster and every skip load goes through the hallway, and a builder charges for that.

The fourth is whether you live in the house while the work happens, and that one is a choice. It is also the one people get wrong most often, so it deserves its own heading.

STAYING IN THE HOUSE WILL USUALLY COST YOU MONEY

The logic seems obvious. Move out and you pay rent on top of the build; stay put and you save it.

On the band 3 job above, staying in the house adds about £18,000. That is what a builder charges to work around a family: dust protection, temporary kitchens, no clear run at anything, and a programme that stretches because three trades cannot work in the same room as your children.

Against that, six months of rent on a three bedroom house in most of the country is less. Not everywhere, and not for everyone, but the sum is worth doing properly rather than assuming. The projects I see go worst are usually the ones where a family stayed in a band 3 or band 4 job to save money and the works ran twice as long as planned.

PERIOD PROPERTY RENOVATION COST, AND WHEN THE RULES CHANGE

A period house carries the age uplift above. Protection adds to it.

A conservation area adds roughly 6%, and in practice it bites on the external envelope only: windows, roof, render and anything visible from the street. Listed status is a different matter. Our figure is 20%, and I would treat that as the floor rather than the answer, because on a listed building the consent drives the specification and the specification drives the cost. That chain runs through your conservation officer, not through a calculator.

There is also a category where the honest answer is a refusal. No-fines concrete, PRC, steel frame and other system-built houses get no multiplier from us at all, because a percentage uplift would answer the wrong question. What you need to know first is whether the work is viable and whether you can get a mortgage on the house afterwards. Get a structural survey from someone who knows that specific system before you budget anything.

Basements are the same. Lowering an existing cellar or digging out a new one is underpinning work, and the cost is set by what is under your walls and what the water table is doing. Neither is knowable from a floor area, so our calculator declines to price it rather than inventing a number. People have committed to buying a house on the back of a basement figure off a website.

VAT ON RENOVATIONS: THE 5% RATE MOST PEOPLE MISS

This is the single piece of renovation knowledge that most often saves someone real money, and almost nobody arrives knowing it.

Renovation and repair work to a house that is in use is standard rated at 20%. That is the default and it is what most people pay. But three situations drop the rate on the building work to 5%, and on the band 3 job above that is a saving of about £21,000.

The house has not been lived in for two years or more. Renovating a dwelling that was empty for the two years immediately before the work starts qualifies for the reduced rate on the contractor’s labour and the materials they supply. Occasional use, such as a second home, does not count as empty. You need evidence, and HMRC will accept electoral roll or council tax records, utility records, or a letter from the council’s empty property officer, which on its own is enough.

There is a second route into that same relief, and it fits the most common renovation story of all: you have bought a long-empty house and you want to move in rather than wait. If the house was empty for two years before you acquired it, no renovation was done in the two years before that, the work is supplied to you as the occupier, and it takes place within one year of acquisition, the reduced rate can still apply. Miss that one-year window and it is gone.

The third situation is changing what the building is. Converting a non-residential building into a home qualifies, as does changing the number of dwellings, one house into two flats or two back into one.

Two warnings on all of this. The contractor has to charge the right rate at the time, and it cannot be fixed afterwards, so get the position confirmed in writing before the job starts. And on the empty-house routes, a subcontractor working for you directly under the second rule has to charge the standard rate, which catches people who are managing their own trades.

Separately, installing energy-saving materials in a home is zero rated until 31 March 2027, after which it goes to 5%. That covers insulation, heat pumps, solar panels, batteries, heating controls and draught stripping, among others. The relief is on the installation, so buying insulation off the shelf and fitting it yourself is standard rated while having it installed is not.

HMRC Notice 708 is the authority on the renovation rates and Notice 708/6 on the energy-saving ones. I am an architect rather than an accountant, so take the figures as a reason to ask the question properly.

IF YOU ARE RENOVATING IN SCOTLAND

The system differs in a way that catches people out, and it matters more on a renovation than on a new build because the work often starts sooner. You need a building warrant rather than building regulations approval, and it has to be granted before any work begins. Starting without one is a criminal offence rather than a paperwork problem you can tidy up later, and a renovation can reach the point of stripping out very quickly.

Warrant fees are set by each council rather than nationally, so an England figure tells you nothing about what yours will be. You will also need a completion certificate at the end, and your house is difficult to sell without one.

WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY GOES

The 1930s three bedroom semi above, 90 square metres, band 3 heavy refurbishment, Midlands and Wales, owners moved out:

• Building work, 90 m² at £1,200 adjusted for the age of the house: £116,640
• Contingency at 20%: £23,328
• Construction cost: £139,968
• Drawings for planning and building regulations, 7%: £9,798
• Measured survey of the existing house: £1,200
• Structural engineer: £1,600
• Building control: £1,100
• Total excluding VAT: £153,666
• VAT on the building work at 20%: £27,994
• VAT on professional fees at 20%: £2,740

Total: £184,400

That is £1,707 per square metre excluding VAT and £2,049 including it, against a headline band rate of £1,200.

The measured survey is the line people query, and it is the one I would never cut. Most people renovating have no drawings of the house they already own. Until somebody measures it, every price you receive is based on a guess about what is there.

On the contingency, 20% on a heavy refurbishment is the realistic figure rather than a gloomy one. Our QS looked at the back-to-brick band and said they would expect 25% or more. A new build is drawn before it is priced; a renovation is priced before anyone has opened a wall.

WHAT THE RATES DO NOT COVER

A rate per square metre of floor area describes a type of work, not your particular house. Five things sit outside it.

The abnormals are the big one. Asbestos, damp, structural movement or underpinning, wall tie replacement, failed lintels, dry rot, woodworm, Japanese knotweed, collapsed drainage, lead pipework. Any one can add five figures and none is visible from a floor area. This is what the contingency is for.

Work priced by the element rather than by the floor sits outside too. Re-roofing, wall insulation, repointing and window replacement are rates per square metre of roof, wall or window. They are inside the bands at a typical level, but if your roof alone is the job, a floor-area tool is the wrong shape for the question.

Deep retrofit is a third. The uplift to reach a genuine fabric-first standard, EnerPHit certification, or whole-house mechanical ventilation with heat recovery is set by the specification, which is why our QS declined to price it per square metre.

Then there are the fittings you choose. The bands assume sensible middle-of-the-road kitchens, bathrooms, flooring and lighting. A £40,000 kitchen is a £40,000 kitchen in any band.

And finally the cost of not living there: rent, storage, removals out and back. Where you cannot stay, this is often the second biggest line in the project, and it never appears in a builder’s quote.

Grants can offset some of the energy work, and the schemes change often enough that any figure printed here would be wrong within months. Check the current position on GOV.UK rather than budgeting on a grant you have not been awarded.

WORK OUT YOUR OWN NUMBER

The bands will get you to the right order of magnitude, which is usually what you need before you commit to anything. What they cannot do is account for your region, the age of your house, whether you are staying put and which VAT position you are in. On a job this size those are worth tens of thousands between them.

Our Renovation Cost Calculator runs the same quantity surveyor’s rates against your own project and gives you a cautious, likely and against-you figure, with a breakdown showing where each pound goes. It covers an extension alongside the renovation, and the Extension Cost Calculator handles one on its own. Both are free and neither asks for anything to use.

I have seen and heard of too many occasions where the cheapest quote was definitely not the best one. Major items left out, or cheap prices based on the wrong specification, with the changes during the build then costed at three times the going rate. Always get competitive quotes, and get someone competent to do a tender review. Quantity surveying and build costs are what Tim Phillips covers as one of our Resident Mentors.

All the rates here were priced in September 2026 at Midlands and Wales levels. The statutory fees are the England figures from 1 April 2026. We review them annually, and planning fees in particular move most Aprils.

COMMON QUESTIONS

How much does it cost to renovate a 3 bedroom house? On a 90 square metre three bedroom semi at Midlands and Wales prices, including VAT and fees: around £36,000 for a cosmetic refresh, £112,000 for a moderate refurbishment with a new kitchen and bathrooms, £184,000 for a heavy refurbishment with a full rewire and structural alterations, and £309,000 to take it back to brick. Add roughly 15% in the South and 35% in London and the South East.

Is £40,000 enough to renovate a house in the UK? On a three bedroom house it buys you a cosmetic refresh with very little room to spare: decoration, floor coverings and minor repairs, with the kitchen, bathrooms and services left as they are. It does not reach a moderate refurbishment, which starts at about £74,000 on the same house even at the cautious end. If the wiring is original, assume £40,000 is not the budget for this job.

How much does it cost to fully renovate a house? A full back-to-brick renovation runs at £1,450 to £2,800 per square metre of existing floor area, most likely £1,950, before VAT, fees and contingency. On a 90 square metre house that is roughly £229,000 to £445,000 all in, and it needs a 25% contingency rather than the 10% a cosmetic job can live with.

Can I pay 5% VAT on my renovation? Only in specific circumstances: the house has been empty for two years or more, you are converting a non-residential building into a home, or you are changing the number of dwellings. There is also a one-year window after buying a long-empty house. It is worth about £21,000 on a heavy refurbishment of a three bedroom house, so it is worth ten minutes of checking before the contract is signed.

Is it cheaper to renovate or to extend? Per square metre, renovating existing space is cheaper than building new almost every time. A moderate refurbishment runs at about £750 per square metre against £2,700 for a standard single storey extension. The trap is that they are rarely alternatives: most projects that need more space also need the old part of the house brought up to the standard of the new, and a shiny extension bolted onto an unrenovated house is a well-known way to be disappointed. Our guide to house extension costs covers the extension side in detail.

GETTING IT RIGHT BEFORE YOU COMMIT

Most people come to me with a builder’s price in front of them and a decision to make about it. By then the scope is fixed, the quote is what it is, and the useful conversations have already happened without anyone in the room who was on your side.

A Self Build Strategy Session is an hour on your own project: the scope, the budget, the quote you have been given, the VAT position, or a renovation that has already started going wrong. You get the recording, a transcript, and a written summary setting out your biggest risks and what to do about them in what order.

If you are early, before the survey and before the builder, that is the cheapest hour you will ever spend on the project.