What a renovation starts at per square metre in 2026
The per-metre figure, the hourly rates behind it, and how to read a Dutch contractor’s quote well enough to compare two of them. Prices for the same work still differ by 20 to 30 percent between builders, and most of that gap is visible on paper before anyone starts.
Per square metre is how Dutch renovation is priced in conversation, and it is a useful number as long as you know what it cannot do. It sets the order of magnitude. It does not price your house. Two homes of 110 m² can differ by a factor of four, because the cost lives in the rooms with water and power in them, not in the floor area.
The four bands, and what they mean
| Level of work | Per m² | Typical scope |
|---|---|---|
| Light | from €300 | Plastering, painting, floors, doors, a refreshed but unchanged house |
| Medium | from €600 | New kitchen or bathroom, rewiring in part, some walls moved |
| Heavy | from €900 | Structural changes, new pipework and cabling throughout, insulation |
| Complete | from €1,200 | Stripped to the shell and rebuilt, kitchen and bathroom included |
For a 100 m² house, a complete interior renovation therefore starts around €120,000. Guides that open at €60,000 for “a whole house” are describing the medium band applied selectively, which is what most families actually commission.
What Dutch houses cost, by type
The same figures, expressed as houses rather than metres. The first column is where a light refresh begins, the second where a full rebuild begins.
| Property | Light | Complete |
|---|---|---|
| Apartment, 50 – 70 m² | from €15,000 | from €60,000 |
| Mid-terrace, 90 – 120 m² | from €25,000 | from €110,000 |
| Corner or semi-detached, 120 – 160 m² | from €35,000 | from €150,000 |
| Detached, 160 – 220 m² | from €50,000 | from €200,000 |
Room mix is what moves a project between the columns. A kitchen and a bathroom together can absorb half the budget of a mid-terrace renovation while occupying a fifth of its floor. Bedrooms are cheap per metre. Anything with a drain in it is not. The published figure for a kitchen starts at €10,000 and for a bathroom at €8,000, and neither depends much on how large the rest of the house is.
Hourly rates, and why the lowest one is not the cheapest
Where Dutch trade rates start in 2026, excluding VAT and materials.
- General contractor: from €35, with guides that measure differently starting at €50
- Plasterer: from €45
- Carpenter: from €50
- Tiler: from €55
- Painter: from €55
- Roofer: from €55
- Glazier: from €60
- Electrician: from €60
Rates are the least useful comparison available. A tiler at €55 an hour who lays 12 m² a day is dearer than one at €65 who lays 18 m², and neither figure tells you which is which. What the rate is good for is sanity-checking a total: divide the labour part of a quote by the rate and see whether the resulting number of days could plausibly do the work.
How the money divides
Across a typical Dutch renovation, labour takes 40 to 50 percent of the budget and materials 30 to 40. Design, drawings and permits account for 5 to 10 percent. Unforeseen work runs 10 to 15. Everything else, from skips to scaffolding to temporary power, adds 3 to 5.
On top of the trade costs, a main contractor adds a margin of 10 to 15 percent for coordination, planning and risk. That margin is not a surcharge to be negotiated away. It buys somebody whose job is to make the electrician arrive after the plasterer and before the tiler, and a project without it does not save 12 percent, it spends the difference in waiting.
The 20 to 30 percent spread between quotes
Price differences of a fifth to a third between contractors for the same described work are ordinary in the current Dutch market. Three causes account for most of it, and only one of them is about profit.
The first is scope drift. Quote A includes making good the plaster after the electrician has chased the walls. Quote B does not mention it. The work still has to happen, so quote B is not cheaper, it is shorter.
The second is how the risk is carried. A fixed price (aanneemsom) contains a buffer for what the contractor cannot see. Cost-plus (regie) contains none, which is why it always looks cheaper on the day of signing and often is not on the day of completion. Both are legitimate. Comparing one against the other without saying so is not.
The third is order books. A builder with a full spring quotes a price that means declining other work, and a builder with a gap quotes to fill it. In a market this tight, the difference between those two is worth more than any negotiation.
What has to be in a quote before you can compare it
A Dutch quote worth comparing carries these, and asking for the missing ones costs nothing.
- Aanneemsom or regie, stated explicitly, and if regie, the rate per trade and an estimate of hours.
- A scope list per room, not one paragraph for the house.
- Materials named with brand and type, or a stated budget per item, so a substitution is visible.
- Meerwerk clause: how additional work is priced and who authorises it in writing.
- Payment schedule tied to stages of the work rather than to dates.
- Exclusions, written down. This is the line that decides whether two totals mean the same thing.
- Warranty, with a term per element, and the insurance the contractor carries.
Since 1 January 2024 the Dutch Civil Code has treated defects found after handover more strictly than before: a contractor stays liable for them unless the defect cannot be attributed to the contractor, and the duty to warn a client about a problem in the plan has to be recorded in writing. That applies to renovation contracts as well as new build. The wider quality-assurance regime under the Wkb reached new-build houses first, and its extension to renovation work has been moved more than once, so the practical step is to ask which regime your contract falls under rather than assume either answer.
The contingency is part of the price, not an admission of doubt
Every Dutch guide arrives at the same advice from different directions: keep 10 to 15 percent aside, and 20 percent in a house built before 1970. The reason is not vagueness in the quote. It is that a renovation opens surfaces nobody has seen since the house was built.
What actually appears: rot at the ends of floor joists where they enter a damp wall, a chimney breast doing structural work nobody documented, drainage running the opposite way to the drawings, cabling with no earth, asbestos in a 1970s adhesive under the floor tiles. Any one of them is a week and a few thousand euro. None is unusual. A homeowner with a contingency treats them as scheduled surprises. A homeowner without one treats them as a crisis, and makes worse decisions under time pressure.
Permits, fees and VAT
Beyond the build, a project carries costs that arrive early and are easy to forget. Drawings and structural calculations start at €150 for a prefab element and at €500 where an architect or engineer is involved. Municipal leges for a permit start at €200 for small work and are calculated as a percentage of the building sum for larger projects. An energy performance calculation, a party wall survey or a soil report each add their own fee.
VAT is 21 percent on renovation work, with one exception worth using. On homes older than two years, insulating, painting, plastering, wallpapering and cleaning carry 9 percent. For painting and plastering that covers the materials too. For insulation only the labour qualifies. On a project with a lot of plastering and insulation, the difference between a quote that splits those lines and one that does not is real money, and it is entirely legal to ask for the split.
Where the 2026 numbers start
A light refresh of a Dutch house starts at €300 per m². A serious renovation starts at €900. A rebuild to the shell starts at €1,200 and climbs from there with the ambition of the kitchen and the bathroom. Labour is about half of it, the contingency is a tenth, and the difference between the cheapest and the dearest quote for identical work is normally about a quarter.
The question that saves the most money is not which builder is cheapest. It is which parts of the house actually need to change, and which are being renovated because the scaffolding happens to be up.
LucKey Construction works across Zaandam, Amsterdam, Haarlem and the surrounding towns, and quotes renovation work per room and per trade, with exclusions written out, meerwerk priced before it is carried out, and the 9 and 21 percent VAT portions shown separately. See house renovation or apartment and home renovation. Which permissions a job is likely to need is flagged at the quotation stage. Submitting them stays with the homeowner.
Disclaimer: every figure in this article is a starting point, not a price and not a ceiling. They are national market indications for 2026, drawn from published Dutch price guides and observation of the Amsterdam region, and they describe where work of this kind begins when nothing unusual is found. They are not a quotation, a price list or an offer, and no figure here can be relied on for any particular project. What the work actually costs depends on the property, its age and condition, the scope of work, the materials chosen and the region, and it is fixed only in a written quotation after a property visit and a full calculation. That quotation is the only figure that binds anyone. The legal points are a general summary and not legal advice. Labour rates and material prices change, and the figures here reflect the position in September 2026. Rules on permits, subsidies and VAT change: check anything here that affects a permit, a subsidy or a tax rate with the body responsible for it, which means your municipality and the Omgevingsloket for permits, RVO for the ISDE, and the Belastingdienst for VAT. Responsibility for permits and applications rests with the homeowner, not with the contractor.
