RTA Cabinet Cost Per Linear Foot: A Budgeting Guide

RTA kitchen cabinets at KBF run about $115 to $305 per linear foot for the cabinets alone, depending on the line. A linear foot is one foot of wall with cabinets on it, counted along the floor, and the industry's standard 10 by 10 kitchen is 20 linear feet. So the cabinets for that kitchen cost roughly $2,300 in an entry framed Shaker line, $3,400 in a mid range framed line, $5,300 in a frameless European line and $6,100 in inset or premium framed. These are budgeting averages, since we price each cabinet by its own item number and your real quote comes from the actual cabinet list. Add a prefab quartz counter and install labor and, going by our own invoices, the installed number lands near $370 per foot at the low end and $650 at the high end. RTA means ready to assemble: the cabinets ship flat and you or your installer put the boxes together.

A contractor called on a Tuesday with a client on the other line, and he needed one number: what do your cabinets run per linear foot? He'd already priced a kitchen at a big box store, where the quote came back as a single lump with the counter and install folded in, and his client wanted to know what the cabinets themselves actually cost. I gave him the range, he said "that's it?", and then he asked the better question, which was what makes one end of the range different from the other.

That's the question this post answers. The per foot number is only useful if you know what's inside it, because two kitchens at $115 a foot and $305 a foot can look nearly identical in photos. The difference is in the box, the door, and the hinge, which are exactly the parts you can't see in a listing photo and can absolutely feel ten years in.

The per foot figures below are what we see on average across our current lines, and every single cabinet price is a real KBF price from our current price list, not a national average. We price each cabinet by its own item number, so use the per foot numbers to budget, then get the real quote from your cabinet list. I'd rather you see our actual numbers and compare than read another "$100 to $1,200 per linear foot" article that tells you nothing.

What a linear foot is and how a 10 by 10 kitchen is counted

A linear foot is just a foot of wall measured along the floor where cabinets go. You don't count the height, and you don't count upper and lower cabinets separately. One foot of wall with a base cabinet below and a wall cabinet above is one linear foot. That's the convention, and it's why a price per foot already assumes both rows.

The 10 by 10 kitchen is the industry's sample kitchen: two walls, each 10 feet long, meeting in a corner, with a refrigerator, a range, a sink base and a dishwasher placed along them. Two 10 foot walls make 20 linear feet. Every cabinet line in the country prices its sample kitchen against those 20 feet, so when you see a per foot number, it almost always came from this layout.

Here's the part that trips people up, and it tripped me the first time I ran one: the appliance spots count as linear feet even though you buy no cabinet for them. The 36 inch fridge, the 30 inch range and the 24 inch dishwasher take up 7 1/2 of the 20 feet. The counter runs over the dishwasher and the cabinets run over the range and fridge, so the wall is still "cabineted" in the industry's eyes. A per foot price spreads the cost of the cabinets you do buy across the whole wall, which is why it's a fair way to compare lines and a terrible way to estimate a single cabinet.

RTA cabinet cost per linear foot by tier, KBF prices

I priced the standard 10 by 10 layout in our lines and sorted them into four tiers. These are cabinets only, boxes and doors, at the prices on our site today. No counter, no labor, no assembly, no hardware. The tiers are mine, not the vendors'. The lines don't call themselves anything, so I grouped them by what's actually different in the box.

Almost every line we carry has an all plywood box, in every tier, so you rarely pay extra for a sink base that can survive a slow drip. The jump from entry to mid range buys better slides and more sizes and accessories, which you feel most on a busy cooking wall. The jump from mid range to frameless buys you about two inches of extra drawer width per cabinet, since there's no frame eating the opening, and a more modern look. The jump to inset buys you a look and nothing structural, which is fine if the look is the point.

The same 30 inch base cabinet in seven of our lines

Per foot numbers hide the line to line spread, so here's the same cabinet, a 30 inch base with one drawer and two doors (the SKU is usually B30), in seven of the lines we carry. Same width, same job in the kitchen, and the price almost doubles from top to bottom.

Notice what moves the price and what doesn't. Color barely matters inside a line. The box construction and whether it's framed or frameless matter a lot. Real wood veneer and stained finishes sit at the top because the vendor can't hide a bad panel under paint. If you want the look of the $465 cabinet at closer to $300, a painted slim Shaker in a framed plywood line gets you most of the way there, though you'll give up the full overlay look where the doors nearly touch.

From cabinets only to installed: counters and labor

Cabinets are usually somewhere between a third and half of an installed kitchen, which surprises people who've only seen the lump sum quote. Here's how the rest stacks on top of the per foot cabinet price. These numbers come from our own invoices for kitchens we've done around Orange County and Los Angeles, so your labor number will be different in Ohio, and probably lower.

A prefab quartz counter, meaning a slab that's already been cut to standard counter depths and polished on the front edge, runs about $130 to $160 per linear foot in our kitchens, quartz and fabrication and install together. The labor part of that, cutting the sink hole and faucet holes, seaming and setting, is about $65 to $95 a foot, and we usually price it per slab piece, so a 26 by 110 inch piece (about 9 feet of counter) is one fabrication charge. A full custom slab adds roughly $40 to $60 per foot on top. Cabinet install labor, meaning assembly if you didn't do it, leveling, hanging the uppers, scribing fillers to the wall and setting the toe kick, is where most quotes surprise people. We price it per box, about $150 a cabinet and $300 for a tall pantry, which works out to roughly $125 to $180 per linear foot. Stacked uppers to the ceiling and crown molding push it higher. None of that includes demo, plumbing, electrical or the backsplash, which are their own lines on a real quote.

Stack them and the installed numbers come out near $370 per foot for an entry Shaker kitchen and $575 to $650 per foot for frameless or inset. For the 20 foot sample kitchen that's about $7,400 at the low end and $13,000 at the high end, cabinets, counter and labor, before demo and before anything behind the walls. If a quote comes in far outside that, the extra is usually in the parts the quote didn't itemize, and it's fair to ask for them itemized.

What moves the number up or down

Assembly is the first thing. RTA means the boxes come flat with the hardware in a bag, and our prices assume you assemble. If you'd rather not, most of our lines offer factory assembly for about $50 per box, which on a 15 box kitchen is $750 and is cheaper than paying an installer by the hour to do it on site. I'd assemble a drawer base myself before deciding. It's about 20 minutes with a drill, and either you'll enjoy it or you'll know to pay the $50.

Drawer bases are the second thing. A base with three drawers costs about half again as much as the same width with a door and one drawer, since each drawer is a box, a front and a pair of slides. A kitchen that's mostly drawers down low is a better kitchen to live in and a more expensive kitchen to buy, roughly $20 to $30 more per foot across the whole run. Worth it on the cooking wall, skip it next to the fridge.

Fillers, panels and trim are the third thing, and they're the ones people forget. A frameless kitchen needs a finished end panel anywhere a cabinet side shows, a filler at every wall so the doors can open past the corner, and toe kick to cover the legs. On a 10 by 10 that's usually $150 to $300 in a framed line and a little more in frameless, because the panels are bigger. We'll count them for you if you send a sketch. It's the part of the order I check twice.

Then there's the hardware you add: pulls and knobs. Budget $3 to $8 each for decent ones, and a 10 by 10 has about 25 to 30 openings. It's a small line, but it's the one that shows in every photo, so I wouldn't go cheap on it.

How to budget your own kitchen in ten minutes

Measure each wall that will have cabinets, along the floor, in inches, and add them up. Divide by 12. That's your linear feet. Count the corner once, where the two runs meet. Don't subtract the appliances. If you have an island, measure its long side and add it as its own run, since islands are priced the same way.

Multiply your feet by the tier you're leaning toward from the first table. That's your cabinet budget. Add about $140 per foot for prefab quartz, installed, if you want it from us, and your local labor rate for install. If you're in Southern California, use $150 per foot for the labor, or $150 per cabinet box if you've already counted boxes, and you'll be close. Then add 10 percent for fillers, panels, toe kick and the drawer upgrades you'll talk yourself into, because everyone does.

A 14 foot galley with a 6 foot island in the mid range framed tier works out to 20 feet at $170, so $3,400 for cabinets, about $2,800 for quartz, about $3,000 for labor, and $900 for the extras. Call it $10,000 installed, and a real quote will land within a few hundred of that. If it doesn't, something's in there that isn't cabinets.

For contractors and designers

For trade accounts, the per foot numbers above are retail. Ask us for the trade sheet before you quote a job off the website. Three things on takeoffs: frameless lines need fillers at every wall and an end panel on every exposed side, and the panel count is where most of the quote errors we see come from. Second, our prices already include the soft close hinges and slides, so don't double count an upgrade that's standard. Third, lead time is usually one to two weeks on in stock lines and four to six on anything made to order, and I'd put that in the client's contract, since the counter template can't happen until the bases are set.

If you want a check on a takeoff, send the plan and the line and we'll price it as a list, not a lump. We'd rather catch a missing filler on paper than on install day.

The contractor on the Tuesday call went with the mid range framed tier, and his client picked the color off a $45 sample door a week later. His final cabinet number was within $200 of what I'd quoted him per foot on the phone, which I'll admit I was a little relieved about. The extra $200 was drawer bases on the cooking wall. It always is.

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