What should it cost? A homeowner's 2026 price guide

Start here, then read the detail below for the job you actually care about. Every range assumes a standard detached or semi-detached home and an existing system being replaced rather than added from scratch.

Bathrooms are where published numbers disagree most violently. One major Canadian guide puts a basic refresh at $5,000 to $10,000; another starts its entry-level full renovation at $18,000. Both are describing real projects. They are just describing different scopes and calling them the same thing.

Two of the three largest Canadian sources cluster at $10,000 to $25,000 for a standard mid-range full bathroom, and that is the band worth carrying in your head. Labour is roughly 55 percent of the total, finishing materials 30 percent, rough materials 10 percent, and permits and contingency the rest. Moving a drain, converting a tub to a curbless shower, or working in a condo with booked elevators and narrow water shutoff windows all push you toward the top.

Kitchens are more predictable, because one line item dominates. Cabinetry is 40 to 50 percent of the budget, so the cabinet spec is the budget conversation. Everything else is rounding by comparison.

One thing to clear up first, because it comes up in nearly every furnace conversation. You cannot buy a mid-efficiency gas furnace in Canada any more. Federal energy efficiency regulations have required residential gas furnaces manufactured on or after 3 July 2019 to be at least 95 percent AFUE. If a quote offers you a cheaper 80 percent unit, that is a question, not a saving.

So the real spread between a $4,000 furnace and a $7,500 furnace is not efficiency. It is staging, blower type and warranty. Single-stage with a standard blower sits at the bottom. Modulating with a variable-speed ECM blower sits at the top, runs quieter, and holds temperature more evenly.

Heat pumps are where quotes vary most, because contractors are pricing genuinely different machines. A standard air-source unit and a cold-climate unit rated for output at minus 25 are not the same product, and comparing their prices side by side without checking which is which is how homeowners end up disappointed in February.

Roofing is priced per square foot of roof area, not floor area, and that is why two homeowners with the same size house get different numbers. Pitch, valleys, dormers, skylights and the number of existing shingle layers to tear off all change the labour more than the material.

Quebec sits noticeably higher than Ontario or the Prairies on asphalt, and the territories run 40 to 60 percent above national ranges, with roughly 30 percent of that coming from shipping material in.

Hourly rates are the number people find most jarring, usually because they are comparing a billed rate to a wage. An HVAC technician earning around $40 an hour is billed out at $80 to $120. The gap is truck, fuel, insurance, workers compensation premiums, licensing, warranty reserve, office overhead and profit. It is not markup on the person.

What to actually watch for is the fee structure around the rate. Service call fees, one and two hour minimums, and after-hours multipliers turn a twenty minute fix into a $400 invoice without anybody doing anything dishonest.

A general contractor's management fee runs 10 to 20 percent of project cost, and it trends toward the top of that on smaller jobs, because the coordination work does not shrink proportionally with the budget. On a fixed-price contract that fee is baked in and invisible. On cost-plus it is a line you can see. Neither is dishonest; they simply put the risk in different places.

Contingency is the one homeowners skip and then regret. For renovation work, 15 to 20 percent is the sensible floor, and 20 to 25 percent is realistic on anything built before 1980 or on any job that opens walls. New construction gets away with 5 to 7 percent because there are no surprises behind the drywall. Renovation is nothing but drywall with surprises behind it.

Then tax, which is real money on a $30,000 job and varies more than people expect.

Two separate forces push prices away from the national average, and they are worth keeping apart because they behave differently.

In big cities, labour is scarce and expensive. Toronto and Vancouver trades bill roughly 30 to 45 percent above Halifax or Winnipeg, and a mid-range bathroom in either city runs 15 to 30 percent over the national band. Montreal runs 10 to 15 percent below it, and Atlantic Canada 15 to 20 percent below.

In remote areas, logistics are scarce and expensive. An hour or two outside a metro adds 20 to 40 percent to HVAC work; three hours or more can add 50 to 60 percent, mostly in travel time and freight.

The practical upshot is that the cheapest place in Canada to renovate is neither downtown Toronto nor rural Nunavut. It is a mid-size city like Calgary or Edmonton, which sits close to the national average on almost everything.