What Should a Bathroom Renovation Cost in Canada?

A cosmetic refresh, roughly $5,000 to $12,000, keeps every fixture where it is. New vanity, new toilet, new lighting, paint, possibly a tub liner or a reglazed tub, and new flooring over a sound subfloor. No plumbing moves, minimal tile, no permit in most cases. This is the best value renovation available if the layout works and the bones are dry.

A standard full renovation, roughly $15,000 to $28,000, strips the room to studs and rebuilds it. New tile in the shower or tub surround, new waterproofing, new vanity and countertop, new toilet, new fan, updated lighting and electrical, and fresh flooring. Fixtures stay near their existing locations. This is what most homeowners mean when they say "we're redoing the bathroom."

A high-end or reconfigured bathroom, $30,000 to $60,000 and up, moves plumbing, changes the footprint, or adds features like a curbless shower, heated floor, custom glass, freestanding tub, or a double vanity with stone. Structural work and a larger permit scope usually come with it.

Add it up and you'll see why the middle of the range clusters where it does. Notice also that labour dominates. Tile setting, waterproofing and plumbing are skilled, slow, and the parts of the job you cannot see once it's done, which is exactly why they're the wrong place to cut.

Keeping fixtures within a foot or so of their existing locations is the difference between a straightforward job and an expensive one. Moving a toilet means relocating a three-inch drain, which usually means opening the floor and cutting into joists, which sometimes means an engineered fix.

In a two-storey home you also have to open the ceiling below. In a slab-on-grade or basement bathroom, you're breaking concrete. Each of those adds days of labour, a new set of trades, and drywall repair in a room you weren't renovating.

If you're staring at a layout you don't love, price both versions. Sometimes a swapped vanity and a wider shower deliver most of the benefit for a third of the cost of a true reconfiguration.

Behind the tile in a house built before the 1990s, contractors commonly find a mortar bed on wire lath, no waterproof membrane, and a subfloor with soft spots around the toilet flange. Cast iron drains may be corroded at the hub. Galvanized supply lines restrict flow and are worth replacing while the wall is open.

Ventilation is another common find. Older bathrooms were often vented into the attic or not at all, which shows up as mould at the ceiling edge. Running a proper duct to the exterior costs a few hundred dollars during a renovation and thousands to correct later.

This is the reason for the contingency. Ten percent is the minimum on a house under thirty years old; fifteen to twenty is realistic on anything older. Money you don't spend is money you keep.

Tile size and pattern change labour more than material cost. Large-format tile needs a flatter substrate and more prep. Herringbone, hexagon and mosaic all cut slower and take longer to lay out. A simple stacked or offset pattern in a mid-size tile is the efficient choice.

Shower niches, benches and curbless entries each add waterproofing detail work. Curbless in particular usually requires recessing the subfloor or building the whole floor up, which is a framing job.

Fixtures span an enormous range. A functional pressure-balanced shower valve and trim runs a few hundred dollars; a thermostatic system with a rain head, hand shower and body sprays can pass three thousand, and it may require upsizing supply lines and confirming your water heater can keep up.

Heated floors add roughly $15 to $25 per square foot installed, including the thermostat and dedicated circuit. In a cold-climate bathroom over an unheated space, most people who install it say it's the feature they'd repeat.

Where saving usually backfires: waterproofing, the exhaust fan, the shower valve, and the person setting the tile. Those four determine whether you renovate again in eight years.

A cosmetic refresh takes three to seven working days. A standard full renovation runs two to four weeks of active work, though the calendar time is often longer because of inspection scheduling and material lead times. A reconfigured or high-end bathroom is commonly four to eight weeks.

The most common cause of delay isn't labour, it's back-ordered tile, a custom vanity, or shower glass that can only be measured after the tile is set and then takes two weeks to fabricate. Order early and confirm everything has arrived before demolition starts.

A mid-range bathroom renovation is one of the more reliable improvements at resale, generally returning a meaningful share of its cost, though almost never all of it. The bigger effect is that a dated bathroom is a visible objection for buyers, and objections translate into lower offers or a longer listing.

Adding a bathroom where there wasn't one, particularly a second full bath in a three-bedroom home, tends to move value more than upgrading an existing one. Going far above the standard of the neighbourhood usually doesn't.

Write down the tile you want, the vanity width, the fixture brand and finish, whether the shower gets glass, and whether the layout changes. Hand the same document to each contractor. Ask each quote to separate labour from materials, and to state clearly what is excluded.

Then compare exclusions first. A quote that's four thousand dollars cheaper often turns out to exclude disposal, the permit, the shower glass and the paint, at which point it isn't cheaper at all.