Where the money goes in a Paris apartment renovation

When planning the renovation of a Paris apartment, conversations about budget tend to revolve around the most visible parts of the project: the kitchen, the bathrooms, perhaps a wall to be opened up, a new parquet floor or a piece of bespoke joinery. Yet once work begins, the way a renovation budget is actually distributed can look quite different from what a client might have imagined at the outset.

We wanted to understand that difference using our own projects rather than market averages. So we went back through nine apartment renovations signed by Costaud Rénovation between January 2025 and May 2026 and analysed every priced line of every quote.

Together, those nine projects represent €1,577,689 before VAT and 1,194 individual priced items, with project values ranging from €78,219 to €352,342.

The purpose was not to establish another theoretical “Paris renovation price”. There are already countless figures available online for that. Instead, we wanted to answer a more useful question: once a renovation project has actually been designed, priced and signed, where does the budget really go?

The results contain a few surprises.

Where the renovation budget really goes

Here is the real breakdown, all projects combined. These are signed quotes — not estimates, not market averages. Across all nine projects, carpentry and bespoke joinery represent the largest share of expenditure, accounting for 21% of the combined budget. Painting follows at 16%, ahead of plumbing, heating and ventilation at 15.4%. Electrical work accounts for 13.6%, masonry, partitions and plastering for 13.3%, and floor and wall finishes for 12.9%.

Trade	Share of budget	Combined amount
Carpentry and built-in joinery	21.0%	€331,851
Painting	16.0%	€252,388
Plumbing, heating, ventilation	15.4%	€243,291
Electrical	13.6%	€214,324
Masonry, partitions, plastering	13.3%	€210,340
Floor and wall coverings	12.9%	€203,539
Demolition and strip-out	3.5%	€54,476
Screed and levelling	2.0%	€31,141
Site setup, protection, cleaning	1.6%	€25,380
Metalwork, mirrors, sundries	0.7%	€10,960

Nine projects, from the 2nd to the 20th arrondissement, plus two in Boulogne-Billancourt. Median project: €143,200. These figures are not intended to represent the Paris renovation market as a whole. They represent something much more specific, and arguably more useful: the reality of nine projects actually commissioned from the same renovation company, for the type of Parisian properties and clients we work with.

Painting costs more than electrical work

Perhaps the most unexpected result is painting. Across the nine projects, it accounts for 16% of total expenditure, compared with 13.6% for electrical work and 15.4% for plumbing, heating and ventilation. Applied to the median project value, this would represent approximately €23,000.

Painting rarely receives that level of attention when a property is first visited. Buyers naturally focus on the kitchen, bathrooms, electrical installation or the possibility of opening up the layout. Painting tends to be discussed much later, almost as though it were simply the decorative layer applied once the “real” renovation has been completed.

In an old Paris apartment, however, achieving an immaculate painted finish involves considerably more than choosing a colour.

Walls that have lived through several generations of decoration are rarely perfectly straight. Ceilings can rise to 2.90 or 3.20 metres, old cracks and irregularities need to be treated, and achieving the finish expected in a high-quality renovation requires careful preparation. Filling, skim coating, sanding and priming take place before the final coats are applied, and the quality of that preparation determines the quality of everything the client will eventually see.

There is also a particular irony to Parisian architecture: the generous ceiling height that makes an apartment so desirable when it is purchased also creates considerably more wall surface to prepare and finish during its renovation.

The variation between projects illustrates this perfectly. Painting represented 24.6% of one of the nine quotes, but only 9% of another. The difference has relatively little to do with the cost of the paint itself; it reflects the condition and dimensions of the surfaces, the level of preparation required and the finish expected at delivery.

The part of a renovation budget that disappears. The 7% you will never see.

Some of the most important expenditure on a renovation is also the expenditure that becomes completely invisible once the project is finished.

Demolition and strip-out, screed and levelling, and site installation and protection together account for approximately 7% of the combined value of these projects. On a renovation close to our median project value, that represents around €10,000.

None of it will feature in the final photographs. The levelling compound disappears beneath the parquet or stone. The protection installed over floors, staircases and existing elements is removed when the project is complete. Everything paid for under demolition has, by definition, ceased to exist.

Yet these are precisely the areas that deserve close attention when comparing renovation quotes.

A lower total does not necessarily mean that one company can deliver an identical project more economically. Sometimes the difference lies in what has—or has not—been anticipated at the quoting stage. Strip-out, protection, preparation of substrates and levelling can represent substantial sums, particularly in older properties where the existing condition only becomes fully apparent once work begins.

Our nine projects show just how variable these requirements can be. On one project, a flooring package that included substantial screed work represented 26.4% of the entire renovation budget, because the existing floor required significant correction. Elsewhere, screed represented just 1.5%.

The difference between the two is not an inconsistency in pricing. It is a reminder that the existing building has as much influence on the renovation budget as the new interior being designed.

Why we are cautious about quoting a renovation price per square metre ?

Search for the cost of renovating an apartment in Paris and you will quickly encounter prices expressed per square metre. They can be useful for establishing a very preliminary order of magnitude, particularly before a property has been purchased or a project designed.

Their usefulness diminishes rapidly once the renovation becomes more ambitious.

A square metre of floor area tells us very little about the number of bathrooms in an apartment, whether they are being moved, the condition of the electrical and plumbing installations, the quantity of bespoke joinery, the height of the ceilings or the restrictions imposed by the copropriété and the building itself.

Two apartments of 70 m² in the same arrondissement can therefore require very different budgets without either quote being anomalous.

In our experience, some of the questions that influence cost most significantly are not about surface area at all. How many wet rooms are there? Will they remain in their existing positions? How much bespoke joinery is planned? What condition are the existing services and substrates in? What can be preserved, and what needs to be rebuilt?

Moving a bathroom, for example, is not simply a question of installing sanitaryware somewhere else. Drainage may need to be rerouted, floor build-ups reconsidered and adjacent finishes reconstructed. In an old Parisian building, a seemingly straightforward change on an architect's plan can have consequences extending well beyond the room itself.

This is why we prefer to consider a renovation as a whole rather than applying a universal rate to its floor area.

Bespoke joinery: the largest—and most flexible—part of the budget

At 21%, carpentry and bespoke joinery represent the largest category across our nine projects. On one renovation, that figure reached 38.8% of the total quote.

For high-end interiors, this is not particularly surprising. Bespoke joinery has become integral to the way many Paris apartments are designed: kitchens conceived as part of the architecture, libraries spanning entire walls, concealed storage, wardrobes adapted to irregular spaces, integrated desks, banquettes and pieces designed specifically around the proportions of a room.

Unlike many technical elements of a renovation, however, joinery can expand considerably as a project develops. Once the essential structural and technical works have been defined, bespoke elements are often where a client and architect choose to invest more heavily in the identity of the interior.

That makes joinery both one of the most transformative parts of a project and one of the most elastic areas of its budget.

For a buyer considering a property with the intention of undertaking a substantial renovation, it is worth thinking about this relatively early. An apartment requiring extensive made-to-measure storage, a fully bespoke kitchen and architectural joinery throughout will have a very different budget profile from an otherwise comparable property fitted predominantly with standard elements.

How to compare two renovation quotes properly

A good comparison begins well before the total at the bottom of the page.

The first question is whether both companies have priced the same scope of work. Have demolition and disposal been included? What provision has been made for protecting existing elements and common areas? Has preparation beneath the final floor finish been allowed for? Are painting costs based on simply repainting sound walls, or on the level of preparation the existing apartment is likely to require?

These distinctions matter because the most attractive quote at the beginning of a project is not necessarily the least expensive by the time the apartment is delivered.

A detailed quote should make it possible to understand not only how much a renovation is expected to cost, but what assumptions have been made to arrive at that figure. For us, this is one of the most important parts of the relationship between a client, their architect and the company responsible for executing the work.

Transparency at this stage does not eliminate every surprise—renovating old buildings will always involve an element of discovery—but it greatly reduces the number of surprises that could reasonably have been anticipated.

What nine Paris renovations can—and cannot—tell us

These figures come from nine signed apartment renovation quotes dated between 30 January 2025 and 11 May 2026. Rather than using the headline totals alone, we extracted and classified the 1,194 individually priced items into ten broad families of work.

The original terminology naturally varies between projects. Electrical work, for example, may appear under a straightforward Électricité heading on one quote and within a more extensive package covering lighting, audio or security on another. For the purposes of this analysis, comparable work was grouped into the same broad category.

There are therefore limits to how these figures should be interpreted. The categories involve a degree of judgement, and the percentages shown above are weighted by project value, meaning that larger renovations influence the combined figures more heavily than smaller ones. Most importantly, nine projects cannot describe an entire market. Nor are we claiming that they do.

This is Costaud Rénovation's order book, reflecting our projects, our clients and the type of existing buildings in which we work. That specificity is precisely what makes the exercise interesting.

Rather than offering another theoretical range for what an apartment “should” cost to renovate in Paris, these figures provide a snapshot of where money was actually allocated once nine real projects had been designed, priced and commissioned.

And perhaps the most useful lesson is that the largest costs are not always where a client initially expects to find them. Beautiful materials certainly matter, but so do the surfaces beneath them, the preparation behind the paint, the technical work concealed inside the walls and the craftsmanship required to make new elements sit naturally within an old building.

A successful renovation budget is therefore not simply about spending more or spending less. It is about understanding where investment makes a difference, what the existing property demands, and what is required to deliver the project to the standard originally imagined.

We intend to repeat this analysis once our dataset reaches twenty comparable projects. The percentages will undoubtedly evolve. What will remain unchanged is the principle behind the exercise: when discussing the cost of renovating a Paris apartment, real projects tell us considerably more than a generic price per square metre.

Your Paris apartment is not an average

Its proportions, history, existing structure and the way you want to live in it will determine its renovation budget far more accurately than any generic price per square metre.

If you are considering the renovation of an apartment in Paris or the surrounding area, Costaud Rénovation can review your project, alongside your architect where applicable, and provide a detailed quotation based on the work your property actually requires.

Tell us about your renovation project →