Renovation budgets have not held up this year. What has held up is which rooms people spend that smaller budget on, and for anyone chasing bathroom fitting leads or kitchen work, it is the same two rooms it always was.
The 2026 UK Houzz & Home Study, fielded between March and June this year, asked over a thousand UK homeowners what they had actually done to their homes. Bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms tied as the most common project, each chosen by 27% of renovating homeowners. Nothing else came close. For a kitchen or bathroom showroom, that is the reassuring half of this year’s figures: homeowners are not skipping the job, they are still choosing it first.
The budget is smaller, not the appetite
The less reassuring half is the number next to it. The average planned renovation budget for 2026 has fallen to £10,000, down from £14,000 in 2025, a drop of around 28%. Even so, 49% of homeowners renovated in the last twelve months, barely down on 51% the year before. People have not stopped renovating. They are doing it on less money.
The same study found that 38% of homeowners went over their initial budget once the work was under way, against roughly a third who came in on budget. Put the two figures side by side and a pattern appears: people are planning smaller jobs than they used to, and a large minority still end up spending more than they planned. That is not a homeowner being careless. It is someone working from a budget they are not fully confident in, on a job they have not done before, which is exactly the position a showroom or a fitter is placed to help with.
What people are searching for while they decide
Search behaviour backs this up. Across both bathroom and kitchen renovation searches in the UK this year, the fastest growing related terms are not about designers or finish, they are about cost. “Kitchen renovation ideas on a budget” and “kitchen renovation on a budget” are both among the fastest rising searches around kitchen renovation, alongside “budget kitchen renovation” and “small kitchen renovation cost”. On the bathroom side, “bathroom renovation tips”, “bathroom renovation price” and “bathroom renovation costs” lead the rising queries, and “bathroom renovation cost uk” sits at the top of the established ones.
None of that reads as people going cold on the idea of a new kitchen or bathroom. It reads as people trying to work out what one actually costs before they get in touch with anyone, which matches the Houzz finding almost exactly: smaller budgets, but the same two rooms, and a lot of homework happening before the enquiry.
Where that argues for spending your budget
That combination, a visual decision, a nervous budget, and a lot of comparing before contacting anyone, is a strong match for Meta rather than search. A homeowner scrolling Facebook or Instagram in the evening is already looking at kitchens and bathrooms, comparing finishes and layouts the way they compare anything else there. Showing them a real finished room, not a stock photo of someone else’s kitchen, meets them exactly where the search data says they already are: comparing, not yet ready to type a query and click through a list of results.
That is the case for Meta advertising specifically for bathroom fitting leads and kitchen enquiries, not a general claim about paid advertising. A search ad answers someone who has already decided to look for a fitter. A well targeted Meta campaign, built on real photography of real jobs, can reach the much larger group who are still deciding what the job should look like and what it should cost, which the figures above suggest is most of this year’s renovating homeowners.
Cotswood Kitchens and Lime Showrooms are two of the kitchen and bathroom businesses already on our books, if you want a sense of who this argument is written for.
Where to start
Nothing here says spend more. It says the opposite: the homeowners are already out there, still choosing bathrooms and kitchens over almost anything else, working out what they can afford before they ever pick up the phone. The job is putting real, finished rooms in front of them while they are still deciding, rather than waiting for a search someone else answers first.
If that is where your enquiries have gone quiet, get in touch and we will show you what a Meta campaign built around your own finished jobs could look like.