Ask anyone in the trade what it costs to replace kitchen doors and the answer comes back the same every time: it depends. That is true, and entirely useless on its own. So here is what it actually depends on, in the order it matters, so you can arrive at a sensible figure for your own kitchen before anyone waves a brochure at you. (Still weighing replacement against a tin of paint or a roll of vinyl? Paint, wrap or replace settles that first.)
Start by counting, not guessing
Replacement doors are bought piece by piece, so the first and largest driver of the total is simply how many pieces you need. Go and count them. Every cupboard door, every drawer front, including the ones you have stopped noticing: the sink base, the corner unit, the narrow one by the fridge that nobody can open fully.
Count doors and drawer fronts separately, because they are not the same item and they do not cost the same. A bank of four drawers is four fronts, not one. This is also where a lot of online pricing quietly misleads people. In any range, the cheapest single item is a small drawer front rather than a door, so a headline "from" price is the little strip at the bottom of the run, not the full-height cabinet door you were picturing. Doors cost meaningfully more. Price your kitchen on what you are actually buying.
Size, range and finish
Once you have quantities, size does the next chunk of the work. Made-to-measure pricing follows the dimensions of each piece, so a run of tall larder doors and a run of small drawer fronts will not land anywhere near each other, even in the same finish.
Then there is the range itself. Different ranges are built and finished differently, and that difference shows up per door across the whole kitchen — which is why a small change of mind on finish moves the total more than people expect when they are ordering thirty pieces. It is worth opening an actual range page, such as the Bella range, and looking at real finishes rather than choosing from a word on a list.
The parts that get left out of the sum
Doors alone rarely finish a kitchen, and quotes that ignore this are the ones that grow later. Depending on your layout you may also need:
- End panels where a cabinet side is on show, so the new fronts are not sitting next to the old colour
- Plinths along the bottom of the units
- Cornice and trims at the top of wall or tall units
- Edging tape for cut panels
- Hinges, if the existing ones are not staying
- Handles, which do a disproportionate amount of the visual work for what they cost
None of this is expensive relative to the doors, but it is not nothing, and it is far better in the spreadsheet at the start than discovered on a Saturday afternoon halfway through fitting.
Standard sizes or made to order
If your kitchen came from a mainstream supplier in the last couple of decades, there is a fair chance the openings fall on common sizes and you can order straight from standard. Kitchens that were built in place, or that have been altered around a boiler, a pipe or a chimney breast, generally do not. Bespoke sizes are made individually to your dimensions rather than picked off a size list, so the two are priced as different things.
Either way, the measurements are yours to take and they are the part that determines whether this goes well. Work through the measuring guide before ordering, and take the numbers from what is actually on the wall rather than from the original kitchen plan, which was drawn before anyone fitted it.
The comparison that matters
The useful question is not whether replacement doors are cheap. It is what they cost against the alternative, which is a full kitchen replacement.
In most kitchens, the carcasses are the part still in perfectly good condition. They live indoors, they are screwed to a wall, and nothing happens to them. What ages is the front: the finish you touch fifty times a day and look at every time you walk in. Replacing the fronts and keeping the boxes gets you the visible change for a fraction of the money, without the rip-out, the skip, the fitting, the making good, the floor that turns out to stop under the units, and the stretch of weeks with a kettle balanced on a dining chair.
It also gets you a bill you can actually read. A full kitchen quote tends to arrive as one large number with a generous-sounding discount attached, which tells you a great deal about the discount and almost nothing about the cost of anything in it. Doors are priced per door. We have set the two options side by side in more detail in new doors or a new kitchen.
Honesty demands the other half of that, though. If the cabinets themselves are sagging, water-damaged, or the layout is genuinely wrong, new fronts are a good coat on a bad frame and you will be irritated within a year. That is the point at which complete kitchens is the conversation to have instead.
Getting to a real number
Three steps, and none of them involve a four-hour appointment at your kitchen table. Count your doors and drawer fronts separately. Measure them properly. Then choose the range, the finish, the handles and the trims you need. At that point the total is arithmetic rather than a guess, and you can compare it fairly against anything else you are being offered.
If your kitchen has something the size list does not cover — an angled end, an odd opening, a unit built around a pipe by someone long gone — send us the details and describe what you are working with. It is a quicker route than measuring the same cupboard four times hoping for a different answer.