HDB Renovation: A Room-by-Room Cost Planning Blueprint

HDB Renovation cost planning starts with breaking your budget into rooms instead of one scary lump sum. We've found that homeowners who budget per-room sleep better at night, because you can see exactly where every dollar goes. A typical 4-room BTO runs about S$30k–S$50k on the open market and a 5-room around S$40k–S$60k, while resale flats often climb to S$50k–S$80k once you add hacking, rewiring and waterproofing. Since HDB pushed the "Open Book" itemised pricing rule, you can finally see what each space actually costs instead of guessing from a single headline number.

Anchor the Total to Your Flat Type First

Before you split anything, fix the ceiling. A 4-room flat is roughly 90 sqm and a 5-room about 110 sqm, and that floor area drives most of your spend. BTO buyers usually spend less because the shell is newer; resale buyers carry older wiring, tired tiles and sometimes a full hack back to bare concrete. We've seen plenty of first-timers set the total first, then shape the rooms around it. Keep a 10% buffer for the surprises that always turn up once the walls come down.

Living Room: Usually the Largest Single Slice

The living room eats the biggest share in most flats. Flooring, painting and a feature wall can land anywhere from S$4k to S$10k depending on the materials you pick. If you add a built-in TV console and a full-height display cabinet, custom carpentry pushes that up another S$2k–S$5k. This is where whole-home customization earns its keep — a single measured console beats three mismatched store-bought shelves, and it swallows the awkward corner space most flats waste. Decide the joinery early so the flooring and paint scope line up with it.

Kitchen: Cabinets Drive the Number

Kitchens swing wildly on carpentry. A basic overlay job with standard cabinets might sit near S$5k, while a full custom kitchen with a tall pantry, pull-out racks and a quartz top can reach S$12k–S$18k. We always tell clients to lock the cabinet layout before the tiles go in, because the carcass dimensions fix your splashback and flooring cuts. A well-planned custom kitchen also hides the ugly pipes HDB leaves behind, which is a small mercy in older resale units where the existing risers are anything but pretty.

Bedrooms: Wardrobes Are the Budget Multiplier

Bedrooms look cheap until you price the wardrobes. Two built-in wardrobes in a 4-room flat often run S$3k–S$7k, and a walk-in style or sliding system adds more on top. Custom wardrobes are the single biggest cost shifter we see — off-the-shelf frames save cash but waste ceiling height, while floor-to-ceiling carpentry stores a whole family's worth of stuff in the same footprint. If budget is tight, keep one room's wardrobe simple and splurge on the master so the daily routine feels good.

Bathrooms: Small Rooms, Steady Spend

Bathrooms are predictable but not cheap. A single toilet reno with new tiles, sanitary ware and a glass shower screen typically costs S$3k–S$6k, so two baths land around S$6k–S$12k. Remember the hard HDB rules here: you can't hack the toilet parapet wall or shift the floor trap, so plan the layout around what's already there. That constraint actually simplifies your choices — you're dressing the existing box, not reinventing it, which keeps the bill from creeping.

Tie Your HDB Renovation Rooms Together With a Buffer

Add the rooms up and you'll usually land inside the market ranges we quoted at the top. The trick is treating custom carpentry as its own line item, not buried inside "kitchen" or "bedroom", so you can trade it off clearly when money gets tight. If you want a home that fits your family rather than a catalogue, whole-home customization lets you balance each room's spend and still hit your total comfortably. Take your per-room list to a few contractors and compare the quotes line for line.