There is a reason we publish a set price for a bathroom and quote individually for a refurbishment. A bathroom is a defined room with a knowable set of tasks. A flat refurbishment is a programme — and the difference between two flats on the same staircase can be substantial, because one had its wiring done in 1998 and the other has been untouched since the block was built.
Anyone giving you a per-square-metre number for a Central London flat before seeing it is giving you a marketing figure. What follows is what actually sets the price, in roughly the order of how much it moves the total. Our refurbishment work is per quotation, fixed against a defined scope before work begins.
The pieces that do have published prices
A whole-flat refurbishment is quoted rather than rated. But it is assembled out of parts, and several of those parts have set prices you can use to build a picture before anyone visits. All of the following exclude VAT.
- Painting and decorating, labour — 1 bed from £1,400, 2 bed from £1,600, 3 bed from £1,800, 4 bed and above from £2,200.
- Bathroom installation, first and second fix, labour only — from £2,800.
- Kitchen installation, flat-pack — from £1,300. Oven, hob and extractor hood are by quotation.
- Tiling labour — £55/m² for 600x600 and 800x800, £70/m² for 1200x600.
- Flooring — laminate from £30/m², carpet from £20/m², skirting from £20/m².
- Plumbing and electrician call-out — from £80. All electrical work and wiring, first and second fix, is by quotation.
Read those carefully, because the wording is doing real work. The decorating figures are labour: they are what it costs to paint the flat, not to paint the flat and supply the materials. The bathroom figure is labour for the first and second fix — it is the installation, not the sanitaryware, not the tiles, not the stone, and not a project-managed refurbishment with everything in it. The kitchen figure is flat-pack installation. Where the list says by quotation, that is not evasion; it is because the work has no honest standard unit and inventing one would only mean revising it later.
What that gives you is a floor, not a total. A useful way to use it: take the published labour for the parts you know you want, then read the rest of this page to understand what your particular flat is going to add to it. The distance between those two numbers is the whole subject.
1. Scope is not a spectrum — it is three different jobs
People say refurbishment to mean three quite distinct things, and the first job of any conversation is finding out which one you mean.
Cosmetic. Decoration, floors, maybe a kitchen and bathroom replaced in situ. Nothing structural, nothing moving, services largely untouched. Predictable, and mostly a question of finish and access.
Full strip and refit. Back to shell within the flat. New wiring, new pipework, new heating, new kitchen and bathrooms, often altered layout. This is a different animal, because once the walls are open you are dealing with whatever the building has been hiding.
Reconfiguration. Moving walls, adding a bathroom, changing where wet rooms sit. This brings in structure, drainage, consent and — frequently — a much longer timeline than anyone anticipated.
Most cost surprises come from a client describing job one and wanting job three. The wall does not come down cheaply just because it was not in the original conversation.
2. What the flat is sitting in
Mansion blocks
Solid construction, shared risers, a communal stack you cannot reroute, a lift and a porter, restricted working hours, and no skip. The building imposes a rhythm on the work: materials in by hand through protected common parts, waste out the same way in bags, noisy work confined to permitted windows. That is real time. There is also usually a managing agent with a legitimate interest in what you are doing, and a neighbour below whose ceiling is your floor. Our mansion block guide covers the access side.
Period conversions
The wild card. A Victorian or Georgian house divided into flats, often more than once, usually with no records. Shallow timber joists, walls that are not square, previous alterations of unknown quality, and services that were improvised each time. The survey can only tell you so much; the strip-out tells you the rest. This is where contingency earns its keep, and where an honest contractor tells you what they cannot yet know rather than quoting a low number they intend to revise. Our period property guide goes further.
Purpose-built and post-war blocks
More predictable. Concrete slabs you do not cut, a plan that is what it looks like, and services that are usually traceable. The constraints are the building's rules rather than its surprises.
3. Services — the part that is invisible and expensive
Rewiring and re-piping are the cost centres nobody photographs. In older Central London flats you commonly find old wiring approaching or past the end of its sensible life, a consumer unit that predates modern protection, lead or old iron supply pipe, and a heating system that has been extended rather than designed. None of that is visible on a viewing.
Electrical work in dwellings falls under Building Regulations Part P and installations are to BS 7671. If you are letting the flat, an EICR is required at least every five years under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, and a refurbishment is the obvious moment to deal with anything that would otherwise become a finding. Landlords also need an annual gas safety check under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. An electrician or plumbing call-out is from £80 excluding VAT; the wiring itself, first and second fix, is by quotation, because a rewire is set by the number of circuits and the state of the building rather than by anything you can rate per metre. A boiler installation is from £700, excluding VAT.
The important cost point: services are cheap to do while the walls are open and expensive to do afterwards. A refurbishment that skips the wiring to save money now is deferring a bigger job that will involve destroying the decoration you just paid for.
4. Consent, and the two things people forget
Most leases require freeholder or managing agent consent for alterations, typically as a formal licence to alter, and typically triggered by structural work, moving soil or waste, and changing floor finishes. Many Central London freeholds sit with large estates whose requirements and timescales vary considerably — check your lease and ask early rather than assume. See our licence to alter guide and consent guide.
Two further items catch people out. If the building is listed, listed building consent is generally required for works affecting its special character, and that includes interiors — panelling, plaster, chimneypieces, joinery, original floors. Conservation area controls add planning constraints, particularly to anything visible externally. And the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 applies to notifiable works, which in a flat can include work to a wall or floor shared with a neighbour. Notice periods are set by statute and they are not negotiable by enthusiasm. See listed building consent.
Consent rarely dominates the budget. It routinely dominates the calendar, and a stalled programme costs money in every direction.
5. Specification, honestly assessed
This is the lever you control most directly. Bespoke joinery against standard units. Natural stone against porcelain — see marble versus porcelain. Floors: laminate is from £30/m² and carpet from £20/m², with skirting from £20/m², while timber and stone are their own conversation. Tiling labour is £55/m² for 600x600 and 800x800 and £70/m² for 1200x600 — the large format costs more to lay, not less. Concealed cisterns and wall-hung sanitaryware against exposed. Underfloor heating. Made-to-order brassware with lead times measured in months. All figures exclude VAT.
Kitchens are where spec and labour part company most sharply. A flat-pack kitchen installation is from £1,300, and that number is largely indifferent to whether the boxes cost two thousand pounds or twenty. Appliances are their own line — oven, hob and extractor hood are by quotation, because the work depends entirely on what is being fitted, where the extraction goes, and whether a flat in a block can vent externally at all. Decoration behaves similarly: painting a 1 bed from £1,400 and a 4 bed from £2,200 in labour is a function of the flat's size and condition, not of the paint you choose.
Two things worth saying about spec. First, it is the most visible part and the least structural, which means it is where a budget can flex late without wrecking the job. Second, in prime Central London the spec has to be legible to the eventual audience: a very cheap finish in a good building is a false economy at sale or let, and an extravagant finish in a modest flat does not come back.
6. The things that are not building work at all
- Protection. Lift blankets, common part coverings, dust screens, and cleaning what you pass through. Non-negotiable in a shared building.
- Waste. No skip. Bagged, carried, and removed by a licensed carrier. That is labour.
- Loading and parking. Frequently nonexistent. Deliveries have to be planned rather than turn up.
- Working hours. A shorter permitted day lengthens the programme without changing the labour content.
- Occupied or empty. Working around a household is slower and staged differently. Landlords have the reverse problem — an empty flat and a hard deadline. See refurbishing between tenants.
- Section 20. If you are involved with works to the building rather than inside your own flat, leaseholder consultation under Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 applies to works costing over £250 per leaseholder. That is the freeholder's process, not yours, but it affects timing where the two overlap.
7. Contingency, and why refusing to have one costs more
A contingency is not padding and it is not a contractor hedging their bets. It is an acknowledgement that in a building of unknown history, some proportion of what is behind the plaster is unknowable until it is exposed. Every experienced client in this market carries one. Every client who refuses to carry one ends up funding it anyway, later, under pressure, at the worst possible moment in the programme.
What it typically absorbs: a supply pipe that turns out to be lead and should be replaced while the floor is up. Timber that has been quietly damp behind a bath panel for a decade. An electrical installation that has to be made safe before anything else can proceed. A previous alteration done without consent that has to be dealt with before yours can be approved. A stack that is not where the drawing said. None of these are exotic in period Central London stock — they are ordinary Tuesdays.
The useful discipline is to treat the contingency as the client's money, not the builder's. It sits with you, it is spent only on things you have agreed, and anything unspent is yours at the end. A contractor who wants the contingency inside their number has misunderstood whose risk it is.
What a trustworthy quote looks like
- A defined scope, written down, that you can hold the price against.
- Strip-out, waste removal and making good stated as in or out — not left ambiguous.
- Named assumptions about what is behind the walls, and what happens if they are wrong.
- A programme with the dependencies visible, not a finish date pulled from the air.
- Clarity about who obtains consent and what a refusal does.
- Certification you will be handed at the end.
A quote without those is an opening position dressed as a price. The number will move, and it will only move in one direction.
How we price it
Refurbishment is per quotation because that is the truthful answer for a whole flat. Within it, the published set prices apply where they apply, all excluding VAT: bathroom installation, first and second fix, labour only, from £2,800; flat-pack kitchen installation from £1,300; painting and decorating labour from £1,400 for a 1 bed rising to from £2,200 for 4 beds and above; tiling labour £55/m² or £70/m² depending on tile size; laminate from £30/m², carpet from £20/m², skirting from £20/m²; fire door installation labour from £220; plumbing and electrician call-outs from £80. Wiring, other carpentry and appliance work are by quotation. Detail on how the rooms interlock is in our guide to sequencing a kitchen and bathroom refurb.
These are starting points and they are labour where the list says labour. What a fixed itemised quote does is take those published rates, apply them to your actual rooms, add what your building and your lease impose, and give you one number you can hold us to before anyone lifts a floorboard.
We survey, we quote a fixed price against a defined scope, and then we work. If something genuinely unforeseeable appears once the walls are open, you are told what it is and what it changes before we act on it. One point of contact for the whole programme. Send us the flat details and photographs and tell us which of the three jobs above you actually mean.