Choosing your project and budget

Start by picking the project that matches what you’re actually doing — kitchen, bathroom, roofing, a room addition, or your own mix if none of those fit. Each preset loads a starting breakdown of where the money in that kind of project typically goes, based on industry cost breakdowns (NAHB, NARI): a kitchen leans heavily on cabinets, a roofing job leans on steel and fasteners, and so on. Enter your total budget next — this is the number the whole calculation is built from, not a regional average or a per-square-foot estimate. For example, a $45,000 kitchen with the default mix comes out to roughly $5,050 in tariff additions, about 11.2% on top of the budget — cabinets are the single biggest piece of that, but steel, aluminum, and copper hardware add up too.

Fine-tuning your material mix

The five sliders under your budget control how much of that total is assigned to cabinets and vanities, lumber and framing, steel and aluminum, copper and electrical, and everything else that isn’t directly tariffed. The preset fills these in automatically, but you can drag any of them — if your kitchen is going all-custom cabinetry, push that slider higher; if you’re keeping your existing cabinets and only redoing counters and floors, push it down. Don’t worry about getting the five numbers to add up to exactly 100 — the calculator rescales them proportionally the moment you calculate, and it’ll show you the rescaled values on the sliders themselves so you can see exactly what was used.

Reading your result

After you calculate, the headline number is the dollar amount tariffs are adding on top of your entered budget, plus that same amount as a percentage, along with which single category is driving the biggest share of it. Below it, a bar shows your budget split by material, with each category’s own tariff addition sitting right next to its base cost rather than lumped into one long strip at the end. Two boxes underneath give the number most calculators skip: the share of your budget that’s actually exposed to tariffs at all, versus the share that isn’t. For most renovation budgets that second number is the bigger one — materials, labor, and permits that carry no import tariff at all still make up most of what you’re paying for.

Where the money is going, category by category

Underneath the bar, each material category gets its own card, sorted from the largest tariff addition to the smallest, along with its share of your budget and the rate applied. Categories are tagged as either a published rate or an estimate — steel, aluminum, and copper are tagged as estimates, because current trade rules tax raw, unfabricated metal at 50% but tax the finished building products most renovations actually use at 25%, and the card is upfront about which side of that line it’s assuming rather than presenting a single number with false precision. A small badge above the headline also tells you whether you’re looking at a standard preset or a mix you’ve customized yourself.

Testing how much your supplier absorbs

Tariffs are paid at the border, not automatically passed on in full at the checkout counter — some suppliers eat part of the increase to stay competitive, others pass on all of it. The “supplier passes through” slider lets you move between 50% and 100% to see how sensitive your number is to that assumption; drop it from the default 85% to 60% and your addition falls by the same proportion, updating instantly without needing to press calculate again. The toggle next to it swaps in the tariff schedule from before October 2025, when cabinets, lumber, and copper carried none of today’s Section 232 tariffs at all — for that same $45,000 kitchen, the addition back then was closer to $1,530, about a third of where it stands now.

From here, it’s worth going back and forth: swap presets, nudge a slider, try a lower pass-through assumption, and watch the number move each time you press calculate. The gap between your best case and your worst case is often as useful to know as the headline figure itself.

This estimate combines published US Section 232 tariff rates with industry-typical material shares for each project type; it is not a contractor quote. Rates shown are current as of the date noted above the headline result. Tariffs, trade actions, and supplier pricing change — this tool may not reflect the most recent adjustment, and Canadian-sourced softwood lumber specifically carries an additional antidumping/countervailing duty on top of the 10% rate used here, currently under a pending revision expected around August 2026. Sources: National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) tariff cost surveys and residential materials data; Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) producer price index tracking for steel, aluminum, and copper; U.S. Section 232 proclamations on steel, aluminum, copper, and wood products.