Kitchen Cabinet Cost in Ontario (2026): What You Will Actually Pay

The short version!

For a typical Ontario kitchen, which I will define as 18 feet of base cabinets, 14 feet of uppers, a 3-foot pantry and a 6-foot island, here is what the cabinets cost installed with crown, fillers and panels, before countertop and before HST. I use this same reference kitchen in the cabinet cost calculator, so you can change the footage to yours and get your own number in about a minute.

Pantry and island footage is priced higher per foot than wall runs because the boxes are bigger and there is more finished surface. The full rate table is on the calculator page. Two honest shops will land 10 to 15% apart on the same kitchen and neither is wrong.

Why “per linear foot” is useful and why shops hate it

Cabinet shops price by the box. A 36-inch sink base is one price, a 30-inch upper is another, a lazy susan corner is a third, and the quote is a list of forty of them. That is the right way to price a kitchen and it is useless to you at the planning stage, because you do not know how many boxes you have yet.

Linear foot pricing takes the total of all those boxes and divides it by the length of the run. It is a budgeting tool, not a quote. Shops hate it because it hides the difference between a run of cheap 30-inch doors and a run of pull-outs, drawer stacks and a corner unit. They are right. That is why I quote a base run and an upper run separately, add 15% for a drawer-heavy kitchen, and keep pantries and islands on their own rates. Done that way, it lands within 10% of a real quote often enough to set a contract allowance on, and I have been setting them on it for years.

The four grades, honestly

What’s in the box: the parts that move the price

The box itself

Particleboard with melamine on both faces is the standard carcass in Ontario and it is adequate when it stays dry. Plywood costs 15 to 25% more per box, is lighter, holds screws better, and shrugs off a wet sponge left in the sink base. The side that is against the wall and the back panel are where shops cheap out; ask how thick the back is. A 1/8-inch hardboard back stapled on is builder grade whatever the door says.

The doors

Melamine or thermofoil doors are the cheapest and the thermofoil will peel by the dishwasher within ten years, usually. Painted MDF is the Ontario default: stable, smooth, and it chips at the corners if you abuse it. Solid wood doors, usually maple with an MDF centre panel, cost 20 to 35% more than painted MDF and move with the seasons, so a painted wood door will show a hairline at every joint by February. Everybody in the trade knows this. Nobody in the showroom mentions it.

The hardware

Soft-close hinges and runners add roughly $12 to $25 per door or drawer at the factory and are worth every cent. Undermount full-extension drawer runners (Blum Tandem and the like) over side-mount ball-bearing runners add $20 to $40 per drawer and are the single upgrade I would never skip. Handles and pulls are extra at every grade: budget $5 to $15 each for decent ones, and a reference kitchen has about 45 of them.

Drawers versus doors

A base cabinet with three drawers costs about 40% more than the same width with a door and a shelf, because it is three boxes, three fronts and three sets of runners instead of one. Across a kitchen that works out to roughly 15% on the base run. It is also the difference between finding the frying pan and kneeling on the floor to find the frying pan. Put drawers in.

What a cabinet quote should include

Before you compare three quotes, make sure they are quoting the same thing. The honest shops will do this gladly. The others will explain why their way is simpler.

• A drawing with every cabinet labelled by size and type, and the total linear footage you can check against your tape.
• Box material and thickness, door material and finish, and the hinge and runner brand, in writing.
• Soft-close, included or extra, stated.
• Crown moulding, light rail, fillers, finished end panels, toe kick and any decorative legs or corbels, each listed.
• Delivery, and whether the cabinets arrive assembled or flat.
• Installation, with what it covers: levelling, scribing to walls, cutting for plumbing, hanging the uppers. And what it does not: the sink, the dishwasher, the hood, the electrical.
• Countertop templating and installation, if the shop is doing the top, as its own line.
• Lead time from deposit and from final measure.
• Deposit, progress payments and the holdback, in a schedule. Ontario’s renovation rights guidance is clear that you are entitled to a written contract and should keep the deposit small.
• Warranty on the boxes, the finish and the hardware, separately, because they are different.

The hidden costs

1. Installation: $100 to $300 per linear foot, or 15 to 20% of the cabinet price. A straight run of stock boxes on a flat floor is at the bottom. Nine-foot ceilings, scribed panels, a stacked upper with crown to the ceiling, and a 1950s house where nothing is square is at the top.
2. Trim and panels: about 6% of the cabinet price. Crown, light rail, fillers, finished ends, toe kick. Showrooms leave them off the first number because the first number is what you remember.
3. Demolition and disposal: $800 to $1,800. A day for two people, a bin, and the surprise behind the old cabinets. Condos with freight elevators and booking fees are the top of that range.
4. Delivery: $150 to $500. Free from the big box if you can collect two pallets in a hatchback. Not free from a shop two hours away.
5. Countertop template and install: separate invoice, usually. Quartz runs $95 to $130 per square foot installed in Ontario in 2026, and the reference kitchen has about 60 square feet of it. Call it $6,000 to $8,000.
6. Electrical and plumbing: $500 to $3,000. Moving the sink, adding an island outlet (the Ontario Electrical Safety Code wants one), a dedicated microwave circuit, under-cabinet lighting. None of it is the cabinet shop’s job.
7. The fridge that does not fit. Counter-depth is 24 to 27 inches; your old one is 33. The opening the shop designed is for the fridge you told them about. Pick appliances before the final measure or budget a change order.
8. Painting and patching: $400 to $1,500. The uppers come off and the wall behind them is the colour the kitchen was in 1998.
9. HST: 13% on everything above. Cabinets, install, countertop, the lot. A $25,000 kitchen is a $28,250 kitchen.

What $10,000, $20,000 and $40,000 buys

Installed, cabinets and trim only, before countertop and HST, on the reference kitchen.

A word on IKEA

An IKEA SEKTION kitchen for the reference layout runs roughly $5,000 to $8,000 for boxes, fronts and hardware depending on the door line, plus assembly and installation at $3,000 to $6,000 from an independent installer, plus the fillers, panels and toe kick you will be back for twice. Call it $9,000 to $14,000 installed, which puts it between builder and mid-grade. The 3/4-inch particleboard box with a thin painted fibreboard back and the 25-year warranty on frames, fronts and hinges are both real. So is the Saturday you lose in the Vaughan store.

Where it makes sense: tight budgets, rentals, and people who like to do things themselves. Where it does not: anyone who thinks the box price is the kitchen price. The HomeStars Canadian cost guide puts a SEKTION kitchen in the same bracket; a 36-inch base frame is about $73 on IKEA.ca today, which sounds like nothing until you add forty frames, the doors, the drawers and the legs, which are all sold separately.

Does Toronto cost more?

The cabinets do not. A semi-custom line costs the same from the factory in Vaughan whether it is going to Leaside or Lindsay. Installation does: Toronto labour runs 15 to 25% above Simcoe County or London, condos add elevator bookings and parking, and old Toronto houses add the scribing. Delivery to cottage country adds the kilometres. Net effect: a GTA kitchen lands 5 to 10% above the same kitchen in a smaller city, almost all of it labour.

Up here in Simcoe County and around Georgian Bay, the catch is lead time rather than price. The good shops are booked three to four months out by spring. If you want cabinets installed before the cottage season, order in January.

How to save money without regretting it

1. Keep the layout. Moving the sink or the stove drags plumbing, electrical and sometimes a permit into a cabinet job. Same footprint, new cabinets, is the cheapest kitchen there is.
2. Spend on the base run, save on the uppers. Base cabinets take the abuse and hold the heavy things. Uppers hold glasses. A premium base run with mid-grade uppers in the same door is a trick good designers use and will not tell you.
3. Standard sizes where nobody will notice. One custom 27-inch cabinet to kill a filler at the end of a run is money well spent. Custom everything is not.
4. Painted MDF, not painted wood. Cheaper, more stable, and it will not show the joint lines every winter.
5. Buy the drawer runners, skip the glass doors. Hardware you touch forty times a day beats decoration you look at twice.
6. Get three quotes on the same written scope. Not three quotes on three different drawings. The calculator on this site builds the scope for you; hand it to all three.

If you want the longer treatment on choosing between materials and layouts, the guide to choosing kitchen cabinets in Ontario goes deeper than a pricing page should. For what certification on a cabinet label actually means, the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association runs the testing program most North American lines quote.

The rest of the cabinet guides

One question per page, all priced for Ontario, none of them trying to sell you a door style.

• Cabinet installation cost
• Stock vs. semi-custom vs. custom cabinets
• Plywood vs. MDF vs. particleboard boxes
• Painted vs. thermofoil vs. laminate doors
• Drawers vs. doors
• Standard cabinet dimensions
• How to measure a kitchen for cabinets
• Cabinet quality checklist (14 points)
• Refacing vs. replacement
• Cabinet storage that gets used