Where the money goes in a Paris apartment renovation

We went back through our last nine signed renovation quotes for Paris apartments, line by line. One million five hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and eighty-nine euros before VAT, spread across 1,194 priced line items, from the smallest project at €78,219 to the largest at €352,342.

The idea was to check one simple thing: when a client signs, where does the money actually go?

The answer does not look like the questions we get during viewings.

The table

Here is the real breakdown, all projects combined. These are signed quotes — not estimates, not market averages.

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.

Painting costs more than electrical work

This is the figure that surprises everyone — us included, before we counted it. Painting takes 16% of a Paris renovation budget. Electrical work, 13.6%. Plumbing, 15.4%.

On a €143,000 project, that is roughly €23,000 of painting.

Nobody asks about painting during a viewing. People talk about the kitchen, the bathroom, the electrical panel, the wall they would like to open up. Painting comes at the end of the conversation, as a finishing formality.

It is not one. In an old Parisian apartment, the walls are not straight and the ceilings are high. Proper painting means filling, skim-coating, sanding, a primer and two coats, on surfaces that rise to 2.90 or 3.20 metres. The ceiling height a buyer paid a premium for at purchase, they pay for again by the square metre of wall.

On one of the nine projects, painting reached 24.6% of the quote. On another, 9.0%. The gap does not come from the price of the paint tin.

The 7% you will never see

Three trades in this table leave no visible trace on delivery day: demolition and strip-out, screed and levelling, site setup and protection of existing surfaces. Together: 7.0% of the budget — about €10,000 on the median project.

A client walking through their finished apartment cannot point to a single one of those euros. The levelling compound is under the parquet. The protective boards went into the skip. The demolition, by definition, is no longer there.

This is where two quotes compare worst. When two companies price the same apartment and one is €10,000 cheaper, the useful question is not "why are you more expensive" — it is "who priced the strip-out, and who left it out of the quote".

We have seen a "flooring, screed included" lot at 26.4% of a budget, on premises where the existing floor was badly out of level. And elsewhere a screed at 1.5%. From one project to the next, a ratio of seventeen.

What we will not give you: a price per square metre

There are a dozen French pages that answer the query "renovation price per m²". They quote ranges: €250 to €2,000/m², €600/m² on average, €1,200 to €2,000/m² in Paris for a full renovation. These ranges are not wrong. They are unusable.

A price per square metre assumes the cost scales with floor area. That is not what we observe. The cost scales with the number of wet rooms, the metres of custom joinery, the state of the existing services, the ceiling height, access to the building, and the co-ownership rules of the copropriété.

Two 70 m² apartments in the same arrondissement can differ by a factor of two. That is not estimation error — it is the reality of old Parisian building stock.

The question that predicts a budget is not "how many square metres". It is: how many wet rooms, and do they stay where they are? Moving a bathroom means rerouting a drain, which means a screed, which means a floor — and sometimes the ceiling of the neighbour below.

How to read this table if you are buying

Three uses, in the order they matter.

Before the offer. Take carpentry and built-in joinery: 21%, the largest of all. If the project includes custom storage, a bookcase, a designed kitchen, this line grows and grows fast. On one of the nine projects it reached 38.8% of the quote. It is the most elastic trade in the building — and the one a buyer decides last, when the budget is already committed elsewhere.

When comparing quotes. Go back to the three invisible trades. A quote that does not carry them is not cheaper: it is incomplete, and the gap will come back mid-project as change orders.

During the works. Painting comes last, on a tired project, after the other trades have overrun. It is the line everyone trims when everything else has already been trimmed. Sixteen percent of the budget passes through that moment.

Where these figures come from

Nine signed apartment quotes between 30 January 2025 and 11 May 2026, extracted from our quoting system, aggregated by trade from the priced line items themselves rather than the displayed totals. Lot names vary from one quote to the next — "Lot 07 // Électricité", "ELECTRICITE / ECLAIRAGE / AUDIO / SECURITE", "Électricité / remise en conformité" — and were grouped into ten families.

Three limits, to read these figures at their proper weight.

The grouping into families is a judgement, not a measurement: a single "plumbing and HVAC" lot does not say what share goes to heating. Shares are weighted by amount, so large projects weigh more than small ones — the per-project median gives close but not identical figures. And nine projects are nine projects: one company, one clientele, one type of building stock. This is not the Paris market. It is our order book.

We will republish this table when it covers twenty projects.

On a project in the Montparnasse neighbourhood, the 197 line items of the quote fall into eleven lots. The largest, carpentry and joinery, weighs €113,294. The last one, metalwork: zero.