What It Really Costs to Build a Kitchen Cabinet
Ask ten joiners what a base unit costs to build and you will get ten numbers, most of them a per-carcass figure someone landed on years ago and has been nudging upward ever since. It usually works. It also hides the jobs where it does not, and those are the ones that quietly fund themselves out of your margin.
What goes into the cost of a kitchen cabinet?
A kitchen cabinet costs you five things: sheet material, edging, hardware, labour, and the waste that never becomes a part. Most shops price the first four and absorb the fifth. Sheet material is the carcass itself, usually 18mm for the box and something thinner for the back. Edging is the banding on every exposed edge, sold by the metre and easy to forget until it runs out. Hardware is hinges, runners, feet and fixings. Labour is your time cutting, assembling and fitting.
Waste is the awkward one because it is real money that produces nothing. Every carcass carries a share of the board that ended up as offcuts and sawdust, and if your unit price was built from the parts’ bare area rather than the sheets you actually bought, that share is coming out of your pocket.
How do you work out the material cost per carcass?
Price from whole sheets and the number of carcasses they yield, not from the square metres of the parts. A standard 2440 x 1220 sheet is what you buy and what you pay for, so the honest sum is the sheet price divided by how many carcasses that sheet actually produces once the parts are laid out with kerf and grain accounted for. If a sheet yields three carcasses, your board cost is a third of the sheet, including the bits that became offcuts.
Doing it the other way round is where the leak starts. Add up the finished part sizes, convert to square metres, multiply by a rate, and you will land maybe ten to twenty per cent under what the job costs, because sheets do not come in the shapes your parts need. The gap looks small on one unit and turns into a whole sheet across a kitchen.
What do shops usually forget to price?
The lines that get missed are edging, the back panel, consumables and the fitting time. Edge banding is metres, not units: a run of drawer fronts eats a surprising amount of it, and at a couple of pounds a metre it is not a rounding error across twelve carcasses. Back panels get skipped because they are thin and cheap, but they are still board you buy.
Consumables (glue, screws, abrasives, blade wear) rarely appear on a quote and always appear on the bank statement. So does the time nobody logs: setting out, edging, cleaning up, loading the van, and the second trip because a hinge was wrong. You do not need a line for every screw. You do need a labour figure honest enough to cover the hours the job really takes, rather than the hours the building of it takes.
How do you turn a per-carcass cost into a quote that holds?
Build the price from the real cut list once, then reuse it. Lay the actual parts out, get the real sheet count for the job, price those sheets at what you currently pay, add edging by the metre, hardware per unit, and your labour hours at your rate. Apply your markup to the goods, add tax, and the number you send is one you can defend line by line if the customer asks.
This is the part Cutzilla’s Pro plan is built for: you enter the parts, it lays them out and tells you how many boards the job needs, then you add your prices, labour, markup and tax and it produces a branded PDF for the customer. The cabinet quoting walkthrough shows the whole flow, and the pricing page covers what is in each tier, including the 14-day trial every new account gets.
What should you do with your own numbers?
Take your current per-carcass figure and test it against one real job. Pick a kitchen you have already built, work out what the board, edging, hardware and hours actually came to, and compare it with what your rule of thumb would have charged. If the two match, you have earned some confidence in the shorthand. If they do not, you have just found the jobs that have been costing you money, and you will know which way to move the number.
Try it free. Cutzilla turns your cut list into a real sheet count in the browser. Start free. Want the branded quote? That is the Pro plan, and every new account gets 14 days of it free.