What a kitchen costs in Malta, and why we price it by the linear metre

Why the linear metre

Until 5 September 2026 our rate card priced a kitchen per square metre of kitchen floor area. It now prices it per linear metre of cabinet run, because floor area was the wrong driver. A 7 m² galley and a 12 m² eat-in kitchen can carry exactly the same 4 m of cabinet run. Under the old card, the second one cost 70% more for identical joinery, identical worktop and identical fitting labour. Kitchens are sold by the linear metre everywhere in the trade, for good reason, and our card now follows that.

The two numbers

The kitchen line in the calculator is two parts, not one.

Appliances — a fixed figure per tier:

This does not scale. An oven costs what an oven costs whether the room is 6 m² or 20 m².

Units, worktop and fitting — per linear metre of run:

That second rate carries the cabinetry, the worktop and the installation labour. It is the number that moves with the size of your kitchen.

Where the run comes from

Neither calculator asks you for a run length, because few people know theirs. Each works it out from a floor area, and they use different areas.

The kitchen calculator asks for the kitchen's own floor area, from 4 to 50 m², and converts it:

run = 1.8 m + 0.2 m per m² of kitchen, between 2 m and 12 m

A 12 m² kitchen gives 4.2 m of run, a 20 m² L-shape about 5.8 m, and a 50 m² open-plan kitchen with an island about 11.8 m. That conversion is our own working assumption, not a published standard. Real kitchens vary with layout, which is why the calculator shows the run it used next to the price, and why a survey measures the actual run.

The whole-property budget has no kitchen floor area to work from, so it derives the run from the property's total floor area:

run = property area × 0.055, clamped between 3 m and 9 m

So a 100 m² apartment is modelled with 5.5 m of kitchen run. The clamps bite at both ends: any property at or under roughly 54.5 m² is priced at the 3 m floor, and any property at or over roughly 163.6 m² is priced at the 9 m ceiling. A 400 m² villa and a 170 m² townhouse get the same 9 m of kitchen in the budget, which is deliberate — beyond a certain point people buy a better kitchen, not a longer one.

At 5.5 m of run, the totals are:

In the whole-property budget, at the 3 m floor (a small city apartment, a Sliema one-bed), the totals fall to €8,352.27, €16,843.19, €29,086.81 and €51,991.35. At the 9 m ceiling they rise to €22,866.81, €45,539.57, €80,238.43 and €143,212.05. Those are the full range the card can produce.

Why this is the more honest unit

A single headline price — "a kitchen is €15,000" — hides which of two completely different things you are buying more of. Length and specification both push the number up, and they push it up for different reasons. Length is a fact about your plan that you cannot really argue with. Specification is a choice you make. Splitting them lets you see, before you have spoken to anyone, that moving from tier 2 to tier 3 on 5.5 m costs about €21,600, while adding two metres of run at tier 2 costs about €9,565. Those are different conversations.

It also makes the number falsifiable. If you have a plan, you can measure your own run — the total length of wall the units will occupy, plus any island if you are treating it as run — and multiply. If our formula gives 5.5 m and your architect's layout gives 7 m, our figure is low for you and you now know by how much.

What this means if you are buying in shell form

Most property in Malta is sold in shell form, which in the case of a kitchen means there is nothing there at all: no units, no worktop, often no water or waste in the right place, and sometimes no wall where the kitchen is eventually going. The full run has to be bought. There is no existing carcase to reuse and no partial credit, which is the main expectation British buyers bring across that does not hold here. The kitchen line is not a refit budget, it is a first-fit budget.

Two Malta-specific things the rate card does not resolve. In an apartment, core drilling for extraction and any change to a shared façade is a condominium matter and can be a Planning Authority matter, and neither the timing nor the cost of that consent sits in the kitchen line. In Gozo, every unit and every slab of worktop crosses on the ferry, and the card does not state whether the kitchen line carries an adjustment for that.

The open question about the top tiers

We should say plainly what we cannot yet verify. Divide the totals at 5.5 m by the run and the all-in rates, appliances included, come to roughly €2,600, €5,200, €9,200 and €16,400 per linear metre.

Trade indications from Italian manufacturers that we have seen put mainstream cabinetry considerably below the first of those, and luxury marques below the last. We cannot point you to a published source for that comparison, and no public Maltese benchmark per linear metre exists that we know of. What we can say is that our upper two tiers are not market-typical figures and we are not presenting them as such. They sit above the Italian marques we are aware of, and the question of whether that gap reflects Maltese import, installation and warranty costs, or simply an over-priced card, is unresolved pending a real quote from a Maltese kitchen supplier. When we have one, this page changes.

One more thing not to over-read: the top appliance figure of €6,381 is not a premium-brand basket. It buys mainstream brands at the upper end of their own ranges. If you are planning on specialist appliance marques, that figure is not your figure, and the rate card gives no guidance on what yours would be.