What Actually Drives the Cost of Electrical Work in a Kitchen Remodel

Most homeowners budget their kitchen remodel around the stuff they can see. Cabinets, countertops, the backsplash, the new range. The wiring behind the wall is an afterthought right up until the quote comes back higher than expected and nobody can say why.

I wanted a straight answer, so I called someone who quotes this work every week. Alexandr Godonoaga runs Cob Services LLC, a licensed electrical outfit in Naperville, Illinois (License #26-00032356). He has spent more than a decade wiring remodels across the western suburbs, and he walks every estimate himself before a number ever lands on paper. What follows is mostly his explanation, lightly organized so it reads in order.

The kitchen is the most electrical-heavy room you own

“People are always surprised by this,” Godonoaga told me. “They think the bathroom or the panel is the big electrical job. It’s the kitchen, every time.”

The reason is load. A modern kitchen runs more dedicated circuits than the rest of the house combined. The dishwasher wants its own. So does the disposal, the microwave, and especially an induction range, which can pull more than double what an old electric coil unit did. Add the fridge and a couple of small-appliance circuits for the countertop, and you are already past what a 1980s kitchen was wired to handle.

“The original kitchen in a lot of these homes was built for a fridge, a light, and maybe a toaster,” he said. “Now there’s an air fryer, a coffee machine that draws like a hair dryer, and somebody wants an induction cooktop. The wiring was never sized for that.”

So the first cost driver is simply how many new circuits the new kitchen needs. That is rarely zero.

Code is not optional, and code got stricter

The second driver is the part people argue with him about: bringing the work up to current code.

Every outlet serving a kitchen countertop now has to be GFCI protected. The rest of the kitchen needs AFCI protection. When the walls are open and the inspector is coming, there is no version of the job where the old ungrounded two-prong setup quietly stays. It has to be right, or the project fails inspection and stalls.

“A handyman will run you a cheaper number because he’s not pulling a permit and he’s not doing the GFCI and AFCI work the code wants,” Godonoaga said. “Then it fails, or worse, it doesn’t fail and you find out two years later when something melts. I’d rather lose the bid than do it that way.”

Naperville requires an electrical permit for this scope, and the permit gets pulled in the contractor’s name, not the homeowner’s. That is part of what you are paying a licensed electrician for. He pulls it, schedules the rough-in and final inspections around the rest of the trades, and signs off the inspector’s punch list at the end.

Lighting is where the budget quietly grows

Here is the line item that catches people. The lighting plan almost always gets rebuilt from scratch.

Old kitchens usually had one fixture in the middle of the ceiling. A remodeled kitchen wants recessed cans laid out on an actual plan, under-cabinet LED strips, maybe pendant lights over an island, and dimmers that are compatible with the LEDs you chose. Each of those is wiring, and the under-cabinet runs in particular are fussy work behind finished cabinetry.

“I won’t guess at can placement,” he said. “I sit down with the homeowner and we lay it out before I cut a single hole. Bad placement gives you shadows on the counter where you’re chopping, or a room that feels like a dentist’s office. The lighting is half of how the finished kitchen feels.”

The work itself is not wildly expensive per fixture. It is the volume. A from-scratch lighting plan is a lot of individual runs, and they add up.

The surprise nobody budgets for: the panel

This is the one Godonoaga is most careful about, because it is the number that blindsides people mid-project.

A lot of older Naperville homes came with 100-amp service. That panel was sized for the loads of its era. Once you add a remodeled kitchen with an induction range, plus whatever else the household has piled on over the years (an EV charger in the garage, a finished basement, central air), the existing panel may not have room to feed the new kitchen safely.

“I run a load calculation against the existing service before I quote the kitchen,” he said. “If the panel can carry it, great. If it can’t, you’re looking at a 200-amp upgrade, and I want that number on the original quote, separated out, so the homeowner decides with full information. I’m not going to spring it on you after demo when you have no leverage and nowhere to go.”

That separation matters. A panel upgrade is its own job with its own cost, and it often involves coordinating with ComEd, which is the piece that quietly adds weeks if it does not get started early. A kitchen that needed a panel upgrade and a kitchen that did not are two very different invoices, and the only honest way to handle it is to price them as separate lines.

So what does a kitchen actually run?

I pushed him for a real range, because every contractor hedges on this and homeowners hate it.

“For the electrical scope alone, a kitchen remodel usually lands somewhere between thirty-five hundred and eight thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s new circuits, recessed lighting, under-cabinet runs, the GFCI and AFCI work. Where you fall in that range depends mostly on the layout and how much new circuit work the design needs. If a panel upgrade is in the mix, that’s a separate line on top, and I’ll have already told you about it.”

The spread comes down to a few things: how many new dedicated circuits the appliances demand, how ambitious the lighting plan is, and whether the existing wiring is sound or hides something ugly once the walls open. Knob-and-tube and aluminum branch wiring still turn up in older homes, and finding either changes the math.

What you are not paying for, he was clear, is hourly surprises. “I walk the space, I quote a flat number, and that’s the number. The only thing that moves it is if we open a wall and find existing conditions nobody could’ve seen. And even then, I quote that separately so you can see exactly what the old wiring is costing you versus the new work.”

What I took away from the conversation

Listening to Godonoaga, one thing kept repeating. The costs that catch homeowners off guard are the ones nobody can see during a walkthrough: circuits the kitchen genuinely needs, code work the inspector will enforce, a lighting plan that eats real layout time, and a panel that might not have the headroom for any of it.

That is not upsell. It is what the room needs to work and pass inspection. A bid that leaves it out looks cheaper on paper, and stays cheaper right up until the job fails or the old wiring becomes something you can’t put off.

If you are planning a kitchen project in the western suburbs and want the electrical scoped honestly before demo starts, it is worth talking to a kitchen remodel electrician in Naperville, IL who walks the job and runs the load calculation up front. Getting that number right before the cabinets are ordered is a lot cheaper than fixing it after.