At a Glance

• As a rule of thumb, budget 10% to 25% of your property’s purchase price for furnishing it properly, on top of any building work.
• Where you sit in that range depends on how many rooms need furnishing from scratch, the level of finish you want, and how much you’re keeping from your previous home
• This figure includes design fees, project co-ordination, painting and decorating, and a sensible contingency. It doesn’t include flooring or structural building work, those sit in a separate budge
• Worked example: a £1.5 million, four-bedroom Cotswolds home needing a full furnishing scheme and a kitchen refresh (not a replacement) comes in at a little over 10%, close to the floor of the range. All figures are illustrative, not a quote, actual costs vary by specification and supplier
• The same rule of thumb holds at higher price points too. A £2.5 million property typically has a larger brief, more bedrooms, an extra reception room, a bigger principal suite, which lands at a slightly higher percentage than the £1.5 million example, but still well within the same lower third of the range.
• The earlier you work this percentage into your numbers, ideally before you complete on the purchase, the less likely you are to be caught out partway through.

People weighing up a property purchase do a reasonably good job of budgeting for the things that feel like “the project”: the purchase price itself, stamp duty, maybe a rough figure for knocking through a wall or replacing a bathroom. What they very often underestimate, sometimes badly, is the cost of properly furnishing the place once that work, large or small, is done.

It’s an easy gap to fall into. A built-in wardrobe, glanced at, feels like it should cost £3,000. The reality, made to measure, properly fitted, is closer to £13,000. Multiply that kind of gap across every room in a house and you can see how a furnishing budget that felt generous on day one turns out to be roughly half of what’s actually needed.

We’ve had countless conversations with prospective clients who have seriously underestimated what this costs. It’s rarely carelessness, it’s simply that most people haven’t furnished a home from scratch for some years, and are genuinely out of touch with what things cost today. We hope this article gives a realistic, honest sense of what to expect, so that gap doesn’t catch you out partway through.

It’s worth being clear about something else too. Someone with the time to spend months looking, comparing, and waiting for the right piece to come up secondhand or in a sale can absolutely furnish a home well for less than the figures in this article, that’s a perfectly reasonable way to do it, if you have the time and the inclination. We tend to work with people who want a finished result within a defined timeframe, so they can get on with enjoying the property and the rest of their life, rather than spending evenings and weekends for the next year or more hunting for the right sofa.

This isn’t really about renovation budgets, the kind we’ve written about elsewhere. It’s about a simpler, earlier question: if you’re buying a property at a certain price, roughly how much should you expect to spend furnishing it, even if the building itself needs little or no structural work?

The Rule of Thumb: 10% to 25% of Purchase Price

As a starting point, plan to spend somewhere between 10% and 25% of your property’s purchase price on furnishing it properly.

On a £1.5 million property, that’s a furnishing budget somewhere between £150,000 and £375,000. That’s a wide range, deliberately so, because where you land within it depends on a handful of genuinely variable factors:

•  How many rooms need furnishing from scratch, versus how much you’re bringing with you from a previous home
• The level of finish you want, from quality and considered to fully bespoke throughout
• How much of the property is reception space, since these rooms typically carry the largest individual furnishing budgets
• Whether the kitchen needs a full replacement or just a refresh, which makes a significant difference on its own
• How many windows need dressing, particularly large or unusually shaped ones, which (as we’ve covered elsewhere) often cost far more than people expect

Think of 10% as the floor for a lighter-touch project, furnishing throughout, but with some economy built in, and 25% as the ceiling for a fully bespoke scheme with no compromises.

A note for anyone starting again entirely

Many of the people we work with are doing exactly that, moving to a significantly larger or smaller home, or starting a new phase of life altogether, and bringing little or nothing with them from their previous property. For this group, 10% to 15% of the purchase price is a sensible starting point to plan around, rather than the full 10% to 25% range. It’s a narrower, more practical figure to budget against from day one, with room to revise upwards once the brief for each room becomes clearer.

What’s Included, and What Isn’t

To make this percentage genuinely useful, it needs a clear boundary around it.

Included in the 10% to 25%:

• Furniture for every room, including delivery: sofas, beds, dining furniture, occasional chairs, side tables
• Curtains, blinds and other window treatments
• Rugs, cushions, and accessories
• Lighting fittings (though not a full rewire or lighting design installation, which sits within building costs)
• Painting and decorating throughout the rooms being furnished
• Design fees for the furnishing scheme itself
• Project co-ordination: managing trades, storage of goods ahead of installation, and delivery through to completion
• A sensible contingency for the inevitable extras that come up along the way

Not included, and budgeted separately:

• Flooring throughout the property
• Any structural or building work: extensions, reconfigured layouts, new kitchens fitted from scratch, bathroom refits
• The purchase price itself, stamp duty, and other buying costs

If you’re also planning building work alongside furnishing, our companion guide on [what £150,000, £250,000 and £500,000 actually achieve in a Cotswolds renovation] covers that side of the budget in detail. The two figures are meant to sit alongside each other, not be confused for one another.

A Worked Example: £1.5 Million, Four Bedrooms

Here’s how the percentage plays out for a specific, realistic scenario: a £1.5 million Cotswolds property with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two or more reception rooms, and a kitchen that needs a refresh rather than a full replacement.

A quick note before the numbers: these figures are illustrative, not a quote. They’re a reasonable, typical guide for a project at this scale, but actual costs vary considerably depending on the specification, fabrics and suppliers chosen for each room. Treat the totals below as a sensible planning figure, not a fixed price.

The 30% line covers two things: the design fee for putting the scheme together, and the project co-ordination involved in managing trades, storage and delivery through to completion. We’ve kept contingency as its own, smaller line rather than folding it into that figure, since lumping it in would overstate what design and project management actually cost. The 10% on top covers painting and decorating throughout the rooms being furnished, since a freshly furnished room rarely sits well against tired walls and woodwork.

As a percentage of the £1.5 million purchase price, that comes to roughly 10.8% to 11.3%, close to the floor of the range. That makes sense for this particular scenario: the kitchen is being refreshed rather than replaced, the bathrooms aren’t included here at all (since they’re not typically “furnished” in the same sense), and the brief is for a comfortable, well-finished home rather than a fully bespoke one throughout.

Why These Figures Are a Starting Point, Not a Formula

The figures above are a sensible average across a typical brief, but the real cost of any individual room can move a long way in either direction, depending on what’s being kept and what’s being bought new.

A guest bedroom used only occasionally, and furnished largely with pieces you already own, might come in at £5,000 rather than £10,000: new bedding, a throw, a lampshade and a rug, rather than a full furniture specification. A dining room can move the other way too: keep the existing table and simply re-cover or replace the chairs, and that line drops considerably, unless wallpaper, a new rug, lighting or artwork is added at the same time, in which case it climbs straight back towards the figure quoted, or beyond it.

It cuts both ways, but it’s worth being honest about which direction is more common. Once people actually start specifying room by room, the realistic figure for a generous, well-finished family home tends to come in higher than expected, not lower. As a rough sense check: a typical 3,000 square foot house, even furnished sensibly rather than lavishly, will rarely be properly finished for £100,000 all in. People are consistently surprised by just how much more than that the honest total comes to.

To give a sense of what actually sits inside a single room figure: the £25,000 main reception room allowance typically covers a statement sofa from a quality maker (£6,000 to £12,000 depending on size and fabric), one or two upholstered armchairs, a coffee table, table and floor lamps, a substantial rug, and a handful of accessories and art. At this level of project, an £8,000 sofa isn’t an indulgence, it’s simply what a well-made, generously proportioned piece costs.

Curtains are another item that consistently catches people out. A full-length, fully lined curtain on a proper pole, hung at a generously sized window or a pair of doors, can easily total £3,500 to £5,000 depending on the fabric chosen. There are genuinely metres and metres of fabric involved, and a curtain made well takes hours of skilled work, but it’s also something that will last twenty years or more if it’s done properly. Multiply that across several windows in a single room, and the curtains and blinds line in the tables above stops looking like an afterthought and starts looking like exactly what it is, one of the more significant individual costs in the house.

What Pushes a Project Towards 25%

The upper end of the range tends to apply when several of the following are true:

• Every room is being furnished from scratch, with little or nothing carried over from a previous property
• Materials are largely bespoke: made-to-measure curtains and upholstery throughout, rather than a mix of bespoke and quality off-the-shelf pieces
• The property has more than the typical number of reception spaces: a snug, a home office, a playroom, a principal suite with a separate dressing room
• Original art and considered accessories feature throughout, rather than a smaller, curated handful of statement pieces
• The property is listed or has unusual proportions, meaning more items than usual need to be made to measure rather than bought ready-made (a point we’ve covered in more depth in our main renovation budgets guide)
• The kitchen needs full replacement rather than a refresh, and the bathrooms need renovating rather than simply being furnished and accessorised. Kitchen and bathroom renovation costs sit within the broader interiors budget, but they’re outside the scope of the worked examples in this article, which assume a kitchen refresh and no bathroom works. Where a full kitchen replacement or bathroom renovation is needed, budget for it separately, and expect the combined total to land firmly towards the top of the range.

None of this means a 25% budget is excessive. For a property of real scale and character, it’s simply what a complete, considered furnishing scheme costs.

Does This Percentage Still Hold at £2.5 Million?

It does, and it’s worth showing why, because a more expensive property doesn’t usually mean a higher percentage. It usually means more rooms, which pushes the pound figure up but tends to leave the percentage roughly where it was.

A £2.5 million Cotswolds property often comes with a larger brief: perhaps six bedrooms rather than four, a principal suite with its own dressing room, and an extra reception room or two, a family room or a study alongside the drawing room and dining room. As with the example above, treat these figures as a planning guide rather than a quote. Here’s how that scales:

As a percentage of the £2.5 million purchase price, that’s roughly 11.8% to 12.1%. That’s a touch higher than the £1.5 million example, mainly down to the larger principal suite and dressing room and the extra reception room, but it’s still comfortably in the lower third of the range, nowhere near the 25% ceiling. The rule of thumb holds: more rooms at a higher price point still land in broadly the same part of the scale.

It’s also worth noting that not all six rooms in a property like this need to function as bedrooms. One might just as easily become a home office or a private gym instead. The figure holds steady either way, what drives the cost is the room being properly fitted out, not the label on the door.

The Earlier You Work This Out, the Better

The real value of this percentage isn’t the precision of the number itself, it’s having a figure in mind before you’ve committed to the purchase, rather than discovering the real cost of furnishing room by room once you’ve already exchanged.

Buyers who factor this in early tend to make better decisions about which property to choose in the first place, sometimes a slightly less expensive property with more left over for furnishing it well serves them better than a more expensive one that leaves nothing in reserve. That’s a conversation worth having with your designer before you make an offer, not after.