The usual margins of accuracy aside, general rules of thumb for renovating a kitchen are as follows:

Facelift to Sell: If you’re sprucing up the kitchen to sell your home, you should budget about 5% of the overall value of the home. So, for a $300,000 home, that’s about $15,000. What can you do for that?

• Replace countertops. Maybe you want to update plastic laminate and go for engineered stone like quartz ($45-90/SF) or something like concrete ($80-100/SF).
• Replace fixtures and appliances. A new sink, faucet, dishwasher, microwave, range, cooktop, fridge and oven could easily run anywhere from$5,000 up for all of them.
• Paint. Paint is the cheapest way to improve any room in your home, including the kitchen. Under $200 buys 4 $40/gallon cans.
• Cabinet hardware. You could change out knobs and drawer pulls for $100 +/-, depending on how many you have. As an example, figure about $5-6 each if you go with stainless. Prices vary wildly, just remember you get what you pay for and it looks like it.
• Lighting. Replace any burned out bulbs, and make sure there is plenty of light. You can update a light fixture or two for anywhere from $100 up. Again, you get what you pay for, and even though it looks semi-ok to you, a discriminating buyer will definitely notice.

Staying 5 years or more: If you’re going to stick around – say, you love the neighborhood, the neighbors, the location, and you are just a s happy to stay, you can spend up to 25% of the overall home value. So for that same $300,000, that’s a whopping $75,000. That’s a very nice budget for a kitchen, & you could pretty much update everything, including flooring and backsplash tiles if you wanted.

What’s the Return on Investment?

This one is tougher to gauge, and depends on many variables. You probably won’t get your project money back if you put $30,000 into a kitchen renovation in a $100,000 home. Depending on other factors like location and comparables in the area, you can recover anywhere from 75 – 100% of the project cost. In other cases, a kitchen renovation can add up to 15% to the total home value.

A kitchen update can make or break a deal: a buyer might come in & fall in love with it and that’s what they want. Then again, someone could come in and open the cabinet to look at the construction, and see that there are new doors on the cabinets but the boxes are unchanged. Or, maybe it’s too dark or cramped. Those all scream “money pit”. And though it can be a negotiation point for the price, it probably means work for the buyer sooner rather than later. Moving is work enough without having to jump right in to a construction project.

Bottom line, for folks who want to update and stay, the average kitchen renovations can run between about $19,000 and $50,000.