Renovation budgeting in Malaysia: a 2026 breakdown by trade.
How a typical RM150,000 terrace refresh splits across demolition, wet trades, joinery, finishes and contingency in current market conditions. The aim here is to give first-time renovators a rough mental model before they sit down with a contractor.
The numbers below are an averaged composite from twenty-something residential projects we have priced in the last fourteen months across Perak and the Klang Valley. Your project will vary — a bungalow scales differently from a terrace, a structural alteration changes everything — but the proportions hold up.
The benchmark: a typical 1,800 sqft two-storey terrace refresh
Light demolition, kitchen refit, two bathroom remediations, full repaint inside and out, new floor finish on the ground floor, replaced built-in wardrobes in three bedrooms, miscellaneous joinery and electrical works. No structural alterations. Contract value: RM150,000.
Where the money actually goes
Demolition and waste disposal — 4% (RM6,000). Sounds small, but a permit-compliant strip-out for a terrace house with proper SWCorp waste disposal is usually RM5,000 to RM8,000. Cheaper figures often mean the demolition rubble is going somewhere it should not.
Wet trades and waterproofing — 22% (RM33,000). Two bathrooms remediated to a proper standard with three-coat membrane, plus the kitchen wet area. This is one of two categories where homeowners tend to compress the budget, and it is one of the two places where compression hurts most when the leak comes back.
Plumbing and electrical — 12% (RM18,000). Repipe of hot and cold water lines, DB upgrade, additional power and data points, lighting circuit revisions. Licensed-trade work; cutting corners here causes problems years later.
Joinery and carpentry — 24% (RM36,000). Kitchen cabinetry, three wardrobes, TV console, miscellaneous shelving. The single largest line item in most residential renovations. Material choice (HPL versus melamine versus solid timber doors) moves this figure dramatically.
Floor and wall finishes — 16% (RM24,000). Ground-floor flooring (SPC or engineered timber), bathroom and kitchen tiling, miscellaneous wall finishes. Tile pricing has come down post-2024 but porcelain large-format is still where most of the cost sits.
Painting — 6% (RM9,000). Full internal repaint with proper surface preparation, external touch-up. Trade-grade paint system (Nippon or Dulux) included.
Project management and supervision — 9% (RM13,500). Project lead time, site supervisor time, drawing revisions, supplier coordination, weekly walk-throughs. This is the line that small contractors often hide; if you do not see it explicitly, it is buried in the materials margins.
Contingency — 7% (RM10,500). Reserved for site conditions that emerge during demolition. Anything spent here is itemised in writing; anything unspent is refunded or rolled forward to optional scope.
If a quotation comes in materially below 22% for wet trades on a job involving bathrooms, ask hard questions. If it comes in materially below 9% for project management, ask where the management is going to come from.
What this does not include
Loose furniture, appliances, soft furnishings, art and accessories are excluded from the contract value. A common rule of thumb is to budget another 20–30% of the renovation contract for soft furnishings and appliances. For our composite RM150k project, you should plan for around RM30,000 to RM45,000 in soft costs on top.
If you are reading this and starting to draft a budget, the most useful thing you can do is build the spreadsheet first — even with rough numbers — before you take quotations. You will see the structure of any contractor quotation more clearly when you already have a frame of reference for what each category should cost.