Journal · Planning your project
Three per cent came in under budget
Houzz asked more than a thousand UK homeowners what they actually spent. Thirty-eight per cent went over. Three per cent came in under. A quarter never set a budget at all.
The 2026 UK Houzz & Home Report landed on 7 July. More than a thousand UK homeowners, surveyed between March and June, asked what they set out to spend and what they ended up spending. Three per cent came in under budget.
That is the number worth sitting with. Not because renovation is uniquely badly behaved — but because almost everyone planning one quietly assumes they will be in the 3%.
What the study found
went over their budget
came in under it
set no budget at all
median spend on a 2025 renovation
Three quarters of homeowners (74%) set a budget. Of everyone surveyed, 38% exceeded it, 33% held it, and 3% beat it. The remaining 26% began without one.
How renovation budgets actually ended up
Share of UK homeowners, 2026 Houzz & Home Report
| Over budget | 38% | |
|---|---|---|
| On budget | 33% | |
| No budget | 26% | |
| Under budget | 3% |
These four figures cover every respondent and total 100%. Source: 2026 UK Houzz & Home Report, published 7 July 2026 (1,000+ UK respondents, surveyed March–June 2026).
A quarter of these projects started with no number attached at all. That is not carelessness so much as a very common sequence: people begin with a room they dislike and a rough sense of wanting it fixed, and the figure arrives later, from a quote, rather than earlier, from a decision.
Almost nobody beats a renovation budget. The useful question is not whether you will exceed yours, but by how much, and whether you decided that in advance.
The gap between what people plan and what things cost
Two figures in the report look like a collapse in spending, and aren't. The median spend on renovations carried out in 2025 was £20,000, down slightly from £21,440 in 2024. The median budget homeowners have planned for 2026 is £10,000.
Those are different measurements — what people actually spent, against what they currently intend to spend. Read as a year-on-year fall they would suggest the market halving, which is not what the study says. Read properly, they describe something more useful: the sum people have in mind at the start is routinely about half what comparable work has recently cost.
That single gap probably explains most of the 38%.
Where the overrun usually comes from
In our experience it is rarely the furniture. Cabinetry — a kitchen run, a vanity unit, a wall of fitted wardrobes — is the part that gets quoted precisely, early and in writing. The overrun arrives from what it is attached to: floors that turn out not to be level, first-fix plumbing and electrics that have to move, a wall that was load-bearing, plaster that fails once the old units come off. Bathrooms tend to be the worst for it, because almost everything in them is a services job wearing a tiled coat.
The study is consistent with that: 92% hired at least one professional, and the three most-hired trades were electricians (56%), plumbers (54%) and carpenters (41%). Those are services trades, and services are where the surprises live.
It shows up differently by room. In a bathroom the unknowns are under the floor and behind the wall — soil pipe runs, joist positions, whether the extract can actually reach an outside wall. In a kitchen they are the services and the structure: moving a sink, a run of three-phase, a wall someone assumed was a stud. In a fitted bedroom they are the fabric of the room itself — walls that are nowhere near square, floors that fall away, and the condensation risk behind a wardrobe built tight against a cold external wall.
The long view
One more finding is worth putting next to the budget numbers. 71% of these homeowners plan to stay put for eleven years or more, and 39% describe the house as a forever home. Bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms were the three most common projects, at 27% each — an even split, which is not what the coverage of this sector would lead you to expect.
So this is not churn. It is people investing in somewhere they intend to be for over a decade — which is exactly the case for deciding the difficult, expensive, invisible things properly rather than economising on them and looking at the result every morning until 2037.
What we’d take from it
Three things. Set a contingency and say the number out loud — ten to fifteen per cent is realistic, and a contingency you have named is different from one you are quietly hoping not to need. Price against what work actually costs, not against the figure you started with; the £10,000 versus £20,000 gap in this report is the single most instructive thing in it. And spend the money on the parts you cannot change later — layout, services, the carcass — before the parts you can.
None of that makes a project cheaper. It makes the final number one you chose rather than one that happened to you.