Bathrooms are one of the most common rooms Americans pay to rework. Federal survey data shows how often that happens, what a typical project runs, and who does the labor.
The same data helps explain why remodelers in places like Lafayette, Indiana, tend to talk about bathroom work in tiers rather than as one kind of job.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey asks homeowners about improvement work done in the previous two years. Its 2023 release counts each project by type and records what was spent.
Owners reported about 7.5 million bathroom remodels in that window. The survey defines a remodel as work that makes substantial changes to a room, and it leaves out decorating such as new wall treatments or furnishings.
Selected interior projects by U.S. homeowners, 2023 American Housing Survey.
Bathroom remodels outnumbered kitchen remodels by about 2.5 million. Only flooring work and plumbing fixture replacements, which cover many rooms of the house, came up more often among interior projects.
The survey’s medians climb as the work goes deeper. A plumbing fixture replacement had a median of $542. A flooring, paneling, or drywall project had a median of $3,000.
A full bathroom remodel had a median of $5,000, and the mean was $9,322. The gap between those two numbers shows that a smaller share of large projects pulls the average well above the typical job.
Kitchen remodels, for comparison, had a median of $8,000. Across all 140 million or so improvement projects the survey counted, the median was $2,000, so a typical bathroom remodel ran about two and a half times the typical home project.
The survey also asks who did most of the work on each project. Census defines that as more than half of the time or physical effort.
By our tabulation of the survey’s public-use file, households hired out about 57 percent of bathroom remodels and did the rest themselves. The median for hired-out remodels came to about $8,000, compared with about $2,000 when the household did most of the work.
These split figures come from our own weighting of the public-use records, which Census releases with a small amount of added noise to protect respondents. They are estimates, not published Census tables.
The gap mostly reflects labor and scope. A household that paints, swaps a vanity, and installs a new toilet is doing a very different job from a crew that tears a room down to the studs.
The survey does not sort projects into tiers, but its categories line up loosely with how the trade describes bathroom work. The lightest projects replace fixtures and surfaces and leave the room’s layout alone.
A full remodel within the same footprint sits in the middle. Census counts that as a remodel when the changes to the room are substantial.
The heaviest category changes the room itself. The survey counted about 329,000 projects that added a bathroom or converted existing space into one, such as building a bathroom out into a closet.
Interior water pipe work, about 3.6 million projects with a median of $1,000, is its own line in the survey. Any layout change that moves a drain or a supply line adds that kind of work to the job.
The projects that change spending the most are the ones that change the room. Moving plumbing and converting a tub to a walk-in shower both reach into the floor and walls.
In older homes, opening those surfaces can also turn up subfloor or plumbing problems that were not visible beforehand.
Local demographics shape which tier makes sense. According to 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey estimates, Tippecanoe County has about 40,500 owner-occupied households.
About 11,700 of them, or roughly 29 percent, are headed by someone 65 or older. Another 8,400 are headed by someone 55 to 64.
Tippecanoe County owner households by age of householder, 2020 to 2024.
The county’s renters skew young, with 13,347 renter households headed by someone 15 to 24. Among households headed by someone 65 or older, about 80 percent own their home.
Nationally, the housing survey found about 3.2 million owner households that cited accessibility for older or disabled residents as a reason for improvement work, about one in 16 households that did projects. For bathrooms, that often points toward lower thresholds and walk-in showers.
At least one local contractor publishes its own version of this tier structure. Starling Construction is one company that describes bathroom remodel tiers in Lafayette, Indiana, on its website.
It sorts projects into three levels. Good is a cosmetic refresh where the layout stays put. Better is a full remodel within the same footprint, often with a tub-to-shower conversion. Best is a primary suite with a layout change.
The page names moving plumbing and converting a tub to a walk-in shower as the two biggest budget movers, and notes that older Lafayette and West Lafayette homes can carry hidden subfloor and plumbing surprises.
The federal data puts bathroom remodeling among the most common home projects in the country. It also shows that spending tracks scope, and that hiring out the work roughly quadruples the typical figure.
Two limits apply to these figures. The housing survey’s medians are national, so they are not Indiana or Lafayette numbers, and labor and material prices differ from one market to the next.
The county figures are survey estimates with margins of error. The owner household total, for example, carries a margin of about 900 households either way.
For Tippecanoe County, with nearly three in ten owner households headed by someone 65 or older, the deeper tiers that involve walk-in showers and layout changes are likely to remain a regular part of the local remodeling mix.
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