The 2026 Renovation Read:
Five Shifts That Will Decide Your Year
Distilled from the 2026 Houzz & Home Study — a survey of 10,176 U.S. homeowners who renovated in 2025. The playbook for 2026 isn’t “do more.” It’s reposition.
Renovation & Remodeling
● Active Tracking
The renovation market didn’t crack in 2025. It split. Activity held flat (54% of homeowners renovated). Median spend held at $20K. But the 90th-percentile job climbed 7% to $150K, while planned 2026 budgets are softening across the board.
The top of the market is getting more aggressive. The middle is hesitating. And there’s a quiet generational handoff happening underneath: Gen X just overtook Boomers as the highest-spending cohort, and Gen Z is showing up at the door with cash from a recent home purchase, ready to hire trades direct.
The Market Is Bifurcating. Pick a Lane.
$15K–$30K kitchens, mid-tier baths. Expect pricing compression, more bid-shopping, longer sales cycles, harder closes.
Planned median spend dropped 25%.
$100K+ remodels, major kitchen/bath at $50K+. Demand is accelerating. These clients have decided to spend and trade up mid-project.
90th percentile climbed 7% YoY.
The danger zone: The un-positioned generalist pitching both ends. You’ll lose the high end to specialists and lose the middle to price.
Action: Audit your last 24 months of jobs by spend bracket. If 60%+ of your revenue is coming from the $20K–$50K band, you’re sitting in the soft spot of the market. Time to move up or specialize down.
Knowing which lane to pick is one thing. Building the plan to get there is another. SBGP analyzes your business from the inside out — your financials, your sales process, your market positioning — and delivers a step-by-step 12-month plan built around where you actually need to go.
Overruns Aren’t Accidents. They’re Upsells You’re Leaving on the Table.
37% of renovating homeowners went over budget in 2025. Here’s the part most operators miss: it wasn’t mostly about surprise rot or hidden electrical.
Three of the top four are intentional client decisions made after work started. Homeowners are seeing options on the jobsite and choosing to spend more. If you don’t have a structured process for capturing those upgrades, you’re watching margin walk out the door.
Allowance buckets in the original contract that frame the base spec as the floor, not the ceiling.
A “good/better/best” selection deck delivered at the framing-complete milestone, when the client can finally visualize the space.
A 5-day change-order SLA — scope creep gets priced and approved before it eats your schedule.
This single internal change is probably the highest-ROI move in this entire briefing.
SBGP reviews your financials and financial tracking processes and builds a step-by-step 12-month plan so you can identify where margin is leaking, formalize your upgrade capture, and protect profit job after job.
Credit Card Use Just Jumped — and It’s Concentrated in Your Smaller Jobs
84% of homeowners still pay from savings. That’s the headline. The story is underneath. Credit card financing jumped 5 percentage points in a single year, from 29% to 34%.
More likely to push back on price, delay deposits, and feel the pinch when the bill hits in 30 days.
More often using cash, HELOCs (23%), and home-sale proceeds (20%). Better collateralized clients.
The Generational Center of Gravity Has Moved
For a decade, Boomers were the default median client. That’s over. Gen X is now your highest-spending generation by median and ties Boomers at the 90th percentile ($150K).
| Generation | Share | YoY | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boomers | 54% | –5 pp | $22,000 |
| Gen X | 34% | +5 pp | $24,000 |
| Millennials | 10% | +2 pp | $15,000 |
| Gen Z | 0.5% | +0.3 pp | $8,500 |
| Seniors | 2% | flat | $25,000 |
Action: If your marketing photography, testimonial reel, and lead-gen messaging still skew “empty-nester downsizing” or “aging-in-place,” you’re talking past your fastest-growing segment. Refresh with mid-career, kids-still-at-home, “this is our forever house” narratives. Pull at least one Gen X testimonial onto your homepage this quarter.
SBGP conducts a full review of your marketing, sales process, and online presence and builds a targeted 12-month plan to put you in front of the clients who are actually spending — before your competition does.
Gen Z Is the New Direct-to-Trade Channel
Small numbers, big signal. Gen Z went from 0.2% to 0.5% of renovators — a 150% jump in one year.
Sharpen your direct-to-consumer funnel. Google Business Profile, clean Houzz Pro listing, Instagram before/afters, and a same-day quote process. Gen Z searches, decides, and hires on a much shorter clock than you’re used to.
Build a “first-time renovator” service tier. Fixed-fee scope definition, transparent pricing, a 6-week-to-start guarantee. Make the GC value proposition obvious to someone who has never hired one.
Five Moves, Ranked by ROI and Speed
Reprice your top 3 services. Exterior categories saw 18–51% median spend increases in 2025: doors +50%, insulation +51%, decks +25%, paint +25%. If you haven’t raised in 12 months, you’re underpriced.
Build the 9-month sales pipeline. Kitchen projects average 9.5 months from first idea to completion. Your Q4 2026 revenue is being decided right now in your top-of-funnel.
Formalize your upgrade pathway. See Shift 2. Highest-ROI internal change in this brief.
Refresh your client persona. Pull one outdated testimonial off your homepage and replace it with a Gen X “forever home” story this month.
Tighten payment terms on sub-$10K jobs. Credit card concentration in the small-job tier is a leading indicator of collection risk.
Median Spend Benchmarks (2025)
Use as proposal-calibration anchors. Spend is not inflation-adjusted, and regional variance is significant.
| Project | Median | 90th Pctile |
|---|---|---|
| All renovations | $20,000 | $150,000 |
| Kitchen — all remodels | $24,000 | $100,000 |
| Major kitchen, large (200+ sqft) | $55,000 | $150,000 |
| Major kitchen, small (<200 sqft) | $35,000 | $93,000 |
| Primary bathroom — all | $15,000 | $50,000 |
| Major primary bath, large (100+ sqft) | $30,000 | $75,000 |
| Major primary bath, small (<100 sqft) | $18,000 | $44,000 |
| Roofing | $13,000 | — |
| Windows / skylights | $7,000 | — |
| HVAC heating or cooling | $6,000 | — |
| Deck | $5,000 | — |
| Living room | $5,000 | — |
| Laundry room | $3,000 | — |
Generational Cheat Sheet
| Gen Z | Millennials | Gen X | Boomers | Seniors | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top trigger | Bought home | Finances ready | Finances ready | Have time | Have time |
| Median spend | $8.5K | $15K | $24K | $22K | $25K |
| 90th pctile | $52K | $125K | $150K | $150K | $114K |
| Hires GC | 13% | 37% | 42% | 41% | 48% |
| Hires trades | 63% | 47% | 46% | 49% | 52% |
| Never moving | 21% | 34% | 37% | 51% | 61% |
The 2026 market isn’t punishing the renovation industry. It’s sorting it.
A BPA from SBGP is a 30+ page, step-by-step 12-month plan built specifically around your business: your financials, your marketing and sales process, your hiring and team structure, and your strategic positioning. It includes DISC Profile and Motivational Assessments for you and up to five members of your management team. Every insight gets documented, every gap gets addressed, and every recommendation comes with a timeline.
✓ Operations
✓ Finance & Tracking
✓ People & Role Clarity
Source: 2026 U.S. Houzz & Home Study (n=10,176) · houzz.com/research
Executive Briefing
SBGP
