EstimatorKitFree bathroom remodel cost calculator
A bathroom is priced by fixture count and plumbing moves
Give the room and the tub or shower alcove and this works out the two tiled areas that actually get ordered — the walls, which are usually the larger of the two, and the floor left once the alcove is taken out. Then it costs the job the way it is built: eleven counted fixtures, a count of wastes that have to be re-run, and the trades, each at a rate you enter. The contingency stays on its own line, and no figure on this page is a regional average, because none is supplied.
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- Wall tile from the alcove
- Drain moves counted
- Contingency on its own line
Wall to wall, as the tape reads it — 7' 11 1/2" is a valid entry and so is 2.4 m.
Prefilled at 60 × 30 in — the alcove bathtub size nearly every US manufacturer builds to, and soaking and freestanding tubs run 66 to 72 in, while the depth runs 30 to 32 in is the usual range. Three walls get tiled: the back and the two returns.
72 in is the starting height because IRC R307.2 — walls of a shower or tub-shower need a nonabsorbent finish 72 in above the drain inlet. Waste starts at 10% for straight lay, square room; a diagonal or offset layout cuts more.
Tiled area, split the way it is bought
96.3 sq ft
- Wall tile, bare
- 60 sq ft
- Wall tile, with waste
- 66 sq ft
- Floor tile, bare
- 27.5 sq ft
- Floor tile, with waste
- 30.3 sq ft
- Waterproofed
- 72.5 sq ft
The walls carry 2.18× the tile the floor does. Ordering to the floor plan is how a bathroom ends up two boxes short at the shower head.
Extraction for this floor area
50 cfm or better. HVI's sizing rule for bathrooms up to 100 ft²: one cfm per square foot of floor, with 50 cfm as the floor. It varies with ceiling height above 8 ft, and jetted tubs, which HVI rates separately, and the inspector working from your local amendments decides, not this box.
Nothing is priced yet. Fill in what your supplier and your trades quoted and the lines appear — the boxes start empty because a bathroom fixture price that is right in Sacramento is wrong in Scranton.
Your prices, line by line
Quantities are worked out from the measurements above; the rates are yours. A row left blank contributes nothing rather than a guess.
Measured by area
Counted, not measured
- Toilet
- Vanity cabinet
- Vanity top and basin
- Basin faucet
- Bathtub
- Shower base or tiled pan
- Shower valve and trim
- Glass door or screen
- Exhaust fan
- Mirror and vanity light
- Bars, hooks and paper holder
- Each relocated drain
- Moving the wet wall or stack
- Strip-out and skip
- Plumber, first fix and second fix
- Electrician: fan, lights, GFCI
- Painting and touch-up
Clearances worth checking before the layout is fixed: 21 in clear in front of a toilet or basin and 15 in from a toilet centerline to the nearest wall or fixture — IRC R307.1 — clear space in front of a water closet or lavatory. Reproduced here as reference; your jurisdiction may amend both.
How to build a bathroom remodel estimate
Measure twice, count once, and price nothing you were not quoted.
Measure the room, then measure the alcove separately
The room gives you the floor and the extraction rate. The tub or shower alcove gives you something the floor plan cannot: three tiled walls, a back and two returns, running up to whatever height you tile to. Those two rectangles are the reason a five by eight bathroom can hold more wall tile than floor tile, and entering them apart is what stops the order arriving short at the shower head.
Count the fixtures and the drains that move
Set a quantity against each fixture — some jobs have two basins, some have no tub at all — and then count separately how many wastes have to be re-run under the floor rather than simply re-trapped. That second number is the one that changes a budget. A toilet moved two feet away from its stack is a different job from a toilet swapped in place, and no amount of square footage tells you which one you are buying.
Put your own rates against the quantities and read the split
Fill in what your tile supplier and your trades quoted; a row left blank stays out of the total instead of being guessed at. The result reports what share of the subtotal is counted work rather than measured work, which on a small bathroom is usually most of it, and the contingency sits below the subtotal as its own line so the figure above it can be checked against a real bid.
Technical specifications
| Wet-wall tile height | Starts at 72 in, the height IRC R307.2 requires a nonabsorbent finish to above the drain inlet |
|---|---|
| Alcove default | 60 × 30 in, tiled on three faces — the back wall plus both returns, 10 linear feet in all |
| Extraction sizing | 1 cfm per square foot of floor with a 50 cfm floor, per HVI and ASHRAE 62.2 |
| Drain sizes | 2 in trap for a shower against 1 1/2 in for a bathtub, from IRC Table P3201.7 |
| Line items | 11 counted fixtures, 5 measured by area, 4 trades, plus a relocated-drain count |
| Tile waste | 10% straight lay by default, printed beside the bare area rather than folded into it |
| Contingency | Its own line below the subtotal at a percentage you set, never a hidden multiplier |
| What is retained | Nothing — fixture prices and trade quotes are multiplied in the tab and gone on reload |
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't a bigger bathroom cost proportionally more?
Because most of the money is counted, not measured. A toilet, a vanity, a valve, a fan and a glass screen cost the same in a 35 square foot room as in a 70 square foot one, and so do the plumber's and the electrician's days. Making the room wider adds floor tile, a little more board and a little more paint. The calculator prints that share explicitly for exactly this reason: once you see that two thirds of the subtotal ignores the floor plan, borrowing a per-square-foot rate from someone else's bathroom stops looking sensible.
How much wall tile does a tub surround actually take?
More than the floor it stands on, usually by two to three times. A 60 by 30 inch alcove has a 5 foot back wall and two 2 foot 6 inch returns — 10 linear feet of wall — and tiling that to 72 inches is 60 square feet before any waste. The floor of a small bathroom, once the tub footprint is taken out, might be 28. Ordering by the floor plan is the single commonest way a bathroom tile order comes up short, and boxes from a second dye lot rarely match the first.
Why is moving a toilet so much dearer than moving a basin?
Pipe size and fall. A basin runs on a 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 inch waste that can be chased through a stud bay; a water closet needs a 3 inch line with a continuous fall to the stack, which means opening the floor and often notching or heading off a joist. In a slab-on-grade house it means saw-cutting and re-pouring concrete. That is why the calculator asks for a count of relocated drains rather than treating plumbing as a percentage of the job.
Is converting a tub to a shower cheaper than replacing the tub?
Not usually, and the drain is why. IRC Table P3201.7 puts a shower on a 2 inch trap where a bathtub takes 1 1/2 inch, so the existing waste has to be enlarged, and a shower drain sits near the middle of the pan rather than at one end, so it also has to be moved. Tick the conversion box and the page drops the tub, adds a base and a screen, and leaves you to price the drain work that follows. Against that, the tiled area barely changes and the waterproofed area goes up.
How big does the extract fan need to be?
One cfm per square foot of floor for a bathroom up to 100 square feet, with 50 cfm as the floor — that is the Home Ventilating Institute's sizing rule, and ASHRAE 62.2 sets the same 50 cfm as the intermittent local exhaust rate. The page computes it from the dimensions you entered. Above 100 square feet the per-foot rule stops applying and fixtures are counted instead. Ceiling height above 8 feet and any jetted tub push it higher, and the figure here is reference rather than sign-off: your inspector holds the local amendments.
Do I tile the floor under the vanity and the tub?
Under the vanity yes, under the tub no. Tiling through under a vanity costs a few square feet and saves the whole floor when the vanity is next replaced, which will happen sooner than the tile fails. A tub or a shower base sits on the subfloor and is set before the finish floor goes down, so the calculator subtracts the alcove footprint from the floor tile quantity by default. If you are setting a freestanding tub instead, put the alcove footprint back to zero.
Can I use this at the tile counter with no signal?
Yes — once the page has loaded it needs no network at all. The arithmetic is JavaScript running in your tab, so a basement supplier with one bar of coverage changes nothing, and the copy button hands you a plain-text list of quantities and priced lines to read off the phone or paste into a message.
About what actually drives a bathroom budget
A bathroom is the densest room in a house. Thirty-five square feet of floor can carry a water closet, a lavatory, a bath, a shower valve, an extract fan, three circuits and four penetrations through the structure, and every one of those is a fixed cost that does not care how wide the room is. Widen it by a foot and you have bought some more floor tile and some more paint. That is the whole reason this page counts things instead of multiplying an area, and why it prints the counted share of the subtotal where you cannot miss it: in a small bathroom that share is routinely two thirds or more, which makes a rate borrowed from any other room a bad guide and a rate borrowed from a bathroom of a different size only slightly better.
The second thing that separates bathrooms from every other remodel is that the walls are wetter than the floor and carry more finish. Code sets the minimum: IRC R307.2 asks for a nonabsorbent surface 72 inches above the drain inlet in a shower or tub-shower, which is six feet of tile on three walls before anyone decides to run it to the ceiling. That alcove alone often exceeds the whole floor. The layout multiplies it further — a diagonal or offset pattern cuts more perimeter tile than a straight lay, which the tile calculator turns into whole boxes, and the joints behind it need their own quantity, which the grout calculator works out from tile size and joint width rather than from a bag-per-room rule of thumb. Behind both sits the board: cement backer on the wet walls, moisture-resistant board elsewhere, and the sheet count for the room is a drywall take-off in its own right.
The last thing worth understanding is where the risk sits. Nothing in a bathroom budget is as volatile as what the strip-out finds. Behind a forty-year-old tub there is a reasonable chance of a soft joist, a failed pan, galvanized supply that will not thread, or a vent that was never there. That is a real allowance, not a padding exercise, and it belongs on its own line where it can be spent or released — which is why the contingency here is shown below a visible subtotal instead of being multiplied quietly into the total. When the job is done and you want to reduce it to a single number to argue about, do that last, on the cost per square foot page, and remember what the counted share already told you about how little that number will travel.
What happens to the fixture prices you enter
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Nothing you type — measurements, quantities, the prices your supplier quoted you — is uploaded, logged or kept, which is also why the calculators carry on working on a site with no signal.
The contractor quotes you type here are never matched against a directory, because there is no directory: this page does not sell leads, does not pass your project to a local pro, and has no form that would let it.