Ask three companies what a bathroom costs and you will get three answers, because most of them are answering a different question. One is pricing the suite. One is pricing the labour. One is pricing the whole job.
The range below is ours, and it covers everything from strip-out to the finished, decorated room.
What A Bathroom Renovation Costs
Our indicative range for a full bathroom renovation is £5,000 to £20,000 including VAT.
- Towards £5,000 sits a straightforward replacement. The room stays the same size, the bath, basin and WC stay broadly where they are, and the specification is solid rather than luxurious.
- Towards £20,000 sits a larger room with a changed layout, premium tiling and sanitaryware, and the plumbing and electrics reworked to suit the new arrangement.
Those are indicative figures to help you plan, not a quotation. Your own figure follows a survey of the property, because the thing that moves the price most is something no one can see over the phone.
Our renovation costs and pricing guide sets out the same ranges for kitchens, flooring and whole-property work.
What Actually Drives The Price
Most people assume the suite is the big number. It usually is not.
How much has to move. Relocating a WC means altering the soil pipe, which is the single most expensive thing you can ask of a small bathroom. Moving a basin is far cheaper. Keeping everything where it is, cheaper again. This one decision can be worth several thousand pounds.
What is behind the tiles. Older Norwich properties regularly turn up perished pipework, inadequate waterproofing or damp once the old suite comes out. It is better found than missed, but it has to be priced.
Tiling. Tiling is labour as much as material. Large-format tiles, small mosaics, herringbone patterns and feature walls all take longer to set out and cut. Two bathrooms with identically priced tiles can differ by a four-figure sum in the fitting.
Electrics and ventilation. Bathrooms are governed by Part P of the building regulations, and extraction has to be adequate. In a room that currently has a pull cord and a window, bringing it up to standard is real work.
The room itself. Square metres matter, but so does shape. An awkward room with a sloping ceiling or a chimney breast takes longer at every stage.
Where The Money Goes
A useful way to think about a bathroom budget is that roughly half of it never appears in the finished photographs.
The waterproofing behind the shower, the pipework replaced while the walls are open, the ventilation, the floor levelled before tiling. None of it shows, and all of it decides whether the room still looks right in ten years.
That is why the cheapest quotation is so often the most expensive one. Work that is skipped at this stage is not saved, it is deferred, and it comes back as a failed shower tray or blown tiling two winters later. Our bathroom installations page sets out how each stage is handled.
Two Bathrooms, Two Very Different Figures
A recent full house renovation in Norwich shows the spread inside a single property.
The main bathroom was a renovation in place. A dated suite and corner bath came out, a walk-in shower, wall-hung vanity and feature tiling went in. The room kept its footprint.
The second bathroom was an ensuite that did not previously exist, created by altering internal partitions. That brought drainage and plumbing alterations before any of the fit-out could start.
Same house, same week, same team. Very different pieces of work, and the second cost appreciably more than the first for reasons that had nothing to do with the sanitaryware.
How To Get A Figure You Can Rely On
Three things separate a quotation you can plan around from an estimate that moves.
- It follows a survey. Someone has looked at the room, the pipework and the floor. A price given over the phone is a guess about a property nobody has seen.
- It is itemised. You can see what the preparation costs, what the fitting costs and what the finishes cost, so you can make informed choices rather than blunt ones.
- It states what happens if something is uncovered. Our position is that work stops, you are shown what has been found, and the additional work is priced and agreed before it is carried out.
If you are weighing a bathroom against other work, our guide to what order to renovate a house in covers how bathrooms fit into a wider programme, and how long a bathroom renovation takes covers the timescale.
Is It Worth Doing Properly?
A bathroom is one of the two rooms buyers look at hardest, and one of the two most used in the house. It is also the room where cutting corners shows soonest, because water finds every shortcut eventually.
The difference between a bathroom that lasts five years and one that lasts twenty is rarely the suite. It is the preparation underneath it.
Planning A Bathroom In Norwich Or Norfolk?
We survey the room, explain what it will take, and give you a written quotation that reflects the actual job rather than a rough figure that moves once work begins.
You can see completed bathrooms on our projects page, and our bathroom installations page covers the process in full.
If you are planning a bathroom renovation in Norwich or the surrounding area, get in touch to arrange a survey.