What fitted wardrobes actually cost in 2026
Summary: Fitted wardrobes cost anywhere from DIY money to full bespoke money because the price is mostly measuring, cutting, installation, overhead, and risk. The useful question is not just the quote total, but which part of the work you actually need someone else to do.
The first quote I ever got for a fitted wardrobe arrived as a PDF on a Friday afternoon. The number on the bottom of page two was 6,840 euros. The wardrobe was meant to fill a 2.4 m alcove next to a chimney breast in a flat I rented, not owned. I read it twice, closed the laptop, and went for a walk along the Singel because the maths wasn't going to fix itself.
That walk is why I know roughly what these things cost now. I called more carpenters. I sat through three home visits. I priced out the panels myself at a wholesaler near Amsterdam Sloterdijk. The number on that first PDF wasn't wrong, exactly. It was just one point on a much wider curve, and nobody had bothered to draw the rest of it for me.
So here's the rest of it.
The honest range, before anyone gives you a quote
For a single-wall fitted wardrobe between roughly 1.8 and 2.5 m wide, in a normal-height room (about 2.6 m ceilings), the cost in Western Europe in 2026 lands somewhere in this range:
- DIY with off-the-shelf panels and your own labour: 600 to 1,200 euros
- Flat-pack systems like the IKEA PAX line, fully kitted out: 1,100 to 2,200 euros
- High-street fitted-wardrobe chains (Sharps, Hammonds, equivalents on the continent): 3,500 to 9,000 euros
- Independent local carpenter, fully bespoke: 4,000 to 12,000 euros
That's a 20-times spread for what is, structurally, the same object: four walls, a back, a top, some shelves, a rail, doors. The price isn't really paying for the wardrobe. It's paying for who measures it, who cuts it, who delivers it, and who shows up when something doesn't line up.
I once watched a fitter spend forty minutes shimming a single panel because the wall behind it bowed by 11 mm in the middle. He charged for the time. Fair enough.
Where the money actually goes
If you break a typical 5,000-euro fitted wardrobe quote into its parts, it tends to look something like this:
- Materials (carcass panels, doors, hinges, rail, shelves): 30 to 35 percent
- Cutting and edge-banding: 5 to 10 percent
- Site survey and design time: 5 to 10 percent
- Installation labour, usually two people for a day: 20 to 25 percent
- Company overhead, showroom, sales commission, warranty: 25 to 35 percent
That last line is the one most people don't think about. When a national chain quotes 7,500 euros for a fitted wardrobe, you're not paying 7,500 euros for wood. You're paying for the showroom, the salesperson's drive out to your flat in a branded van, the office in Slough or Utrecht, and the ten-year guarantee that may or may not survive the company's next ownership change.
A small carpenter quotes less because they have less to cover. They also have less margin for error. If you've got a square room and a flat ceiling, that's fine. If you've got a 1930s flat with a 14 mm slope across the top of the alcove, you want someone who's seen that before.
Why two quotes for the "same" wardrobe can differ by 4,000 euros
Three things move the price more than anything else, and the showroom rarely volunteers them.
Door type. A flat MDF door in a painted finish costs about a third of a sliding mirrored door with a soft-close mechanism. On a 2.4 m wardrobe, that's a swing of around 1,400 to 1,800 euros for the same opening.
Internal fittings. Empty box with one rail and three shelves: cheap. Pull-out trouser rack, soft-close drawers with felt liners, integrated LED strip, shoe carousel: not cheap. I priced a "luxury internal" upgrade once at 1,950 euros for components I could buy at Hafele for around 700. The rest was assembly time and margin.
Finish and edge detail. A 2 mm ABS edge band on white melamine is the standard. A solid oak lipping with a rounded profile, hand-sanded, costs about four times as much per running metre and adds maybe 600 to 900 euros to a typical job. Whether that's worth it depends on whether you'll ever look at the edge.
There's also the wildcard of "scribing", which is the polite term for cutting the panels to follow the actual shape of your walls and floor. Old buildings are not square. Newer ones often aren't either. A good fitter will scribe filler strips so the wardrobe sits flush against a wonky wall. A bad one will leave a 6 mm gap and call it a "design feature".
The middle path most people don't know exists
Between IKEA PAX and a 9,000-euro local carpenter is a gap that, for a long time, didn't have much in it. PAX has fixed widths in 50 cm, 75 cm, and 1 m increments. Real walls are 1.84 m or 2.31 m or whatever they happen to be. The gap-filler strips help, but you can spot them.
The middle path is custom-cut, flat-pack panels: someone takes your real measurements, cuts every piece to size, ships them with the holes already drilled, and you screw it together yourself. No saw, no van, no two-person installation team, no showroom overhead. The materials are the same 18 mm birch ply or melamine that the carpenter uses. The labour you save is theirs, not yours.
For the 2.4 m alcove I mentioned at the start, this route comes in at roughly 1,400 to 2,200 euros depending on door choice and internal fittings. It's not free. It's about a third of what the original quote was, for what is, materially, the same wardrobe.
The catch is you have to measure carefully. If you tell the cutter the alcove is 2.4 m wide and it's actually 2.387 m, you'll have a 13 mm gap at the side. Use a filler strip. It happens.
What to ask before you sign anything
If you're getting quotes, four questions will save you most of the surprises:
- What are the carcass panels made of, and how thick? (You want 18 mm, ideally birch ply or a decent particleboard with a real edge band, not 15 mm chipboard.)
- Is the price for fully-fitted, or does the floor need to be level first?
- What happens if a panel arrives damaged or the wall turns out not to be straight?
- How long is the lead time, in writing?
The answers tell you more than the headline number does. A 5,200-euro quote from someone who can answer all four is usually a better deal than a 3,800-euro quote from someone who shrugs at question three.
If your alcove isn't a standard width and you don't fancy paying showroom overhead on it, that's roughly the problem knuslabs.com was built around.
If you're planning the same kind of project, start with built-in closet concepts or compare it with online cabinet maker workflow. For adjacent planning detail, read What Sharps wardrobes actually cost (and why) and Shaker fitted wardrobes, and the tiny rules that make them look right.