Almost everyone asking about bathroom cost wants one number. It is a reasonable thing to want, and it is the wrong thing to chase in Central London. The same bathroom — same tiles, same sanitaryware, same size room — can be a straightforward week of work in one building and a licensing exercise with a pumped waste and a lift booking in the one next door. The room is not the variable. The building is.
So this page does not give you a range. It explains what a surveyor is actually looking at when they walk into your bathroom and start forming a price, in roughly the order that those things matter. If you understand the levers, you can pull the ones you care about and stop paying for the ones you do not. Our published starting price is from £2,800, and every job is fixed-quoted before anyone starts work — but you will get more out of the quote conversation if you know what is behind the number.
Lever one: are you moving the waste?
This is the single biggest fork in the road, and it dwarfs almost everything else. A like-for-like refurbishment — WC where the WC was, bath where the bath was, basin more or less where the basin was — reuses the existing soil and waste connections. The pipework already has the fall it needs, it already goes where it needs to go, and nobody has to prove anything to anybody about it.
The moment you move a WC, you are no longer refitting a room, you are re-engineering its drainage. A soil pipe needs a specific fall to work, and that fall has to fit inside the depth of your floor. In a Victorian conversion with shallow joists, or a mansion block with a concrete slab you are not allowed to cut, that depth often does not exist. The options then are to raise the floor (which affects the door, the threshold, the ceiling height, and sometimes the lease), to build a plinth, or to fit a pumped or macerating waste — which works, but adds a mechanical item that needs power, servicing, and access for the rest of its life.
None of that is exotic. All of it costs. And in a flat, moving waste is usually the specific thing your lease requires permission for, which brings a whole second cost centre with it. If your budget is the constraint rather than the layout, keeping the WC where it is will buy you a great deal of tile and sanitaryware elsewhere in the room. Our plumbing page goes into the drainage side in more depth.
Lever two: what building are you in?
Central London is not one building stock, and the stock genuinely changes the labour.
Mansion blocks
Shared risers, communal stacks, neighbours below you and above you, a porter, a lift, and a managing agent with a view. Work here carries costs that have nothing to do with your bathroom: protecting the lift and the common parts, booking access windows, working only within permitted hours, and carrying waste out by hand because there is nowhere to put a skip. There is also usually no realistic route to relocate a stack — the riser is where the riser is. A mansion block bathroom is not harder to build; it is harder to get to, and that is a real line in the cost.
Period conversions
Terraced or townhouse buildings chopped into flats, often decades ago, often more than once. The joists are timber and shallow. Previous works are frequently undocumented and occasionally alarming. Bathrooms have often been squeezed into former bedrooms, cupboards or return extensions, with waste runs that were improvised at the time. You find out what you actually have when the floor comes up, which is why we survey properly rather than price off a photograph alone.
Townhouses and listed stock
Whole houses give you more freedom on layout and far less freedom on fabric. Listed building consent is generally required for works affecting a building's special character, and that includes interiors — panelling, plaster, original floors, staircases. Conservation area controls add further planning constraints, particularly to anything visible externally such as a new vent or soil pipe. Here the cost driver is care: reversible fixings, protection, and slower, cleaner working.
Lever three: what is behind the tiles
Strip-out is where estimates turn into quotes. Until the wall is open, everything anybody tells you about the substrate is inference. What we commonly find in older Central London stock: lead or old iron supply pipe, tiles bedded onto sand-and-cement that is holding the wall together, timber that has been quietly damp for years, previous waterproofing that was a coat of paint and optimism, and electrics that predate any sensible standard.
A good contractor tells you which of these are possible before starting, and prices the known scope honestly rather than burying a low number that will be revised the moment the wall is open. That is the point of a fixed quote after a survey — you are agreeing to a price, not starting a meter. Where something genuinely unforeseeable appears behind a wall, you should be told what it is and what it changes before it is done, not on the final invoice.
Lever four: specification
This is the lever most people assume is the main one. It matters, but it is more controllable than the others.
- Tile format and material. Large-format and natural stone are heavier, less forgiving of an out-of-true wall, and slower to cut and set. The substrate often needs work before the first tile goes on. Our tiling is published from £55/m², and the honest driver behind it is preparation and cutting, not the trowel.
- Sanitaryware and brassware. Concealed cisterns and wall-hung pans need framing and access; exposed traps and pedestals do not. Thermostatic and multi-outlet valves need more first-fix than a single mixer.
- Wet room versus enclosure. A tanked wet floor is a different construction, not a different tile choice.
- Heating. Underfloor heating adds a build-up, a control, and a circuit.
- Lighting and extraction. Both engage the regulations below, and both are cheaper to do properly at first fix than to retrofit.
Lever five: consent, and the cost of not thinking about it
Bathrooms engage Building Regulations Part F (ventilation), Part G (sanitation and hot water) and Part P (electrics). That is not optional and it is not a formality — it is the baseline for a compliant room, and it is priced in. Our electrical work is carried out to BS 7671, and the bathroom Building Regulations guide sets out what applies where.
On top of that, if you are a leaseholder — which in Central London you very likely are — most leases require freeholder or managing agent consent for alterations, typically via a formal licence to alter, and typically triggered by exactly the things people want to do: moving soil or waste, touching structure, or changing floor finishes. Many freeholds in this part of London sit with large estates and their requirements vary considerably, so check your lease and ask your managing agent early. Consent is not usually the expensive part. Discovering you needed it halfway through, and stopping, is. The freeholder consent guide and the licence to alter guide cover the process; for protected buildings, see listed building consent.
Lever six: the practical stuff nobody quotes for and everybody pays for
Occupied or empty? Working around a family that needs the only bathroom in the flat is a slower job than working in a vacant one, and it usually means staging the work differently. Landlords refitting between tenancies have the opposite problem: an empty flat but a hard deadline, which changes sequencing rather than cost.
Then there is getting materials in and rubble out. No skip. Frequently no parking. Loading bays booked, or nonexistent. Waste carried through a communal hall that has to be protected and cleaned. Lift blankets. Porter notified. Restricted hours that shorten the working day. None of this is glamorous, and all of it is real time on a Central London job. A quote that ignores it is not cheaper — it is just less honest.
What to ask before you accept any quote
- Is the price fixed, and fixed against what defined scope?
- Does it include strip-out, waste removal, and making good — or are those extras?
- Who is responsible for obtaining consent, and what happens to the programme if it is refused?
- What is assumed about the substrate, and what happens if that assumption is wrong?
- Is waterproofing a system with a specification, or a coat of something?
- Who certifies the electrics, and what paperwork will I be handed at the end?
- Who protects the common parts, and who cleans them?
If a contractor cannot answer those without hedging, the number they gave you is not a price. It is an opening position.
How we price it
Bathroom refurbishment starts from £2,800, tiling from £55/m², wood flooring from £30/m², and plumbing and electrical work from £80. Larger refurbishment is per quotation, because a whole-flat programme is a genuinely bespoke thing and pretending otherwise would be a sales tactic.
What you get in every case is a survey first, then a fixed quote covering the defined scope, then work. One point of contact. Protection down before the first tool comes out and up on the last day. If you want a price now rather than a conversation, send photographs of the room, tell us whether you are leasehold, and say whether anything is moving. Send it through and you will get a straight answer about what your particular building is going to make this job.