What a kitchen costs in Malta, per linear metre

If you have just bought a shell-form property in Malta and started asking what a kitchen costs, you will have noticed that nobody answers in euro per square metre. That is not evasion. It is because the floor area of the room is close to irrelevant to what the kitchen costs.

The unit of measurement is the run, not the room

A kitchen is a row of boxes with doors on the front and a worktop on top, plus the machines that go into and around it. The cost lives in the boxes and the machines. A generous 20 square metre kitchen-diner with a single four-metre run of units along one wall contains less kitchen than a cramped 12 square metre galley with units down both sides. The bigger room costs less to fit out.

So the trade prices kitchens two ways at once, and the kitchens.mt rate card follows the same convention:

1. An appliance basket, quoted per tier as a single figure.
2. A rate per linear metre of units, multiplied by the length of your runs.

Add the two together and you have an indicative kitchen budget. This is the same rate card that sits inside the Turnkey.mt budget calculator, where the kitchen is one line in a whole-property fit-out — worth knowing if you are budgeting a full shell conversion rather than a kitchen in isolation.

The four published tiers

All figures in euro, reproduced exactly as published in the rate card.

Two things jump out. First, the appliance basket rises from Basic to Ultimate Designer by a factor of roughly six, while the units rate rises by a factor of roughly six as well — the tiers move together rather than one dragging the other. Second, the jump from Basic to Luxury nearly doubles the metre rate. That step is where most of the decisions get made.

The three-metre minimum

The calculator assumes a minimum of three linear metres of units. Below that you are not really specifying a kitchen, you are specifying a kitchenette, and a showroom will price it as a one-off rather than off a rate card. If your run is genuinely shorter than three metres — a small letting apartment, a summer kitchen on a roof — treat the three-metre figure as your floor and expect the quote to come back with its own logic.

Worked at three linear metres

At the minimum length, the four tiers work out as follows.

Basic: 1095 + 3 x 2419.09 = 8,352.27

Luxury: 2495 + 3 x 4782.73 = 16,843.19

Super Luxury: 3511 + 3 x 8525.27 = 29,086.81

Ultimate Designer: 6381 + 3 x 15203.45 = 51,991.35

The top two tiers are displayed on the site as a range of plus or minus 30 per cent, because at that level the specification is subjective and a single number would be false precision. Applied to the three-metre figures above, that puts Super Luxury somewhere between 20,360.77 and 37,812.85, and Ultimate Designer between 36,393.95 and 67,588.76. Two kitchens can be the same length, the same tier and the same brand and still land at opposite ends of that band depending on door material, worktop, handle detail and which appliances are chosen.

To use the card on your own plan, measure the wall length that units will occupy — not the room. A single wall of 3.6 metres is 3.6 linear metres. Two runs of 3.2 and 2.4 metres is 5.6 linear metres. The card does not tell you how to treat an island or the corner of an L-shape, so state your layout plainly when you send a quote request and let the showroom resolve it.

What moves the number

The rate card gives you an order of magnitude. Several things then move it, and most of them are decided before a showroom is involved.

The length of the run. This is the biggest single lever and the one buyers most often overlook. Cutting a metre of units out of a Luxury kitchen saves more than 4,700 euro. Adding a metre costs the same. If the budget is tight, shortening the run is far more effective than downgrading the doors.

Whether you are working from a shell. A shell-form property has no water points, no waste, no gas run and no electrical circuits where the kitchen is going. That first-fix work is a different trade and is not what a kitchen showroom quotes for. Decide where the sink and hob go before the plasterer arrives, not after.

Appliances. The basket is a per-tier figure, not an itemised list. If you already own appliances, or you want one very expensive item and three ordinary ones, the basket figure stops describing your situation and the showroom's own appliance pricing takes over.

Where you buy. Sicily is a ferry ride away and often carries the same Italian brands that Maltese showrooms stock. Within the EU, VAT is paid once, in the country of purchase, so a Sicilian purchase is not double-taxed on arrival. What you are trading is proximity: delivery, installation and anything that goes wrong afterwards are all easier when the showroom is on the same island. The rate card does not price either route separately.

Gozo. Every delivery to Gozo involves a ferry. That is a real constraint on lead times and on how willing suppliers are to come back for a snag. Nothing in the published rate card accounts for it.

Treat the card as a sanity check, not a quote

The rate card exists so that you can tell, before you spend a Saturday in showrooms, whether the kitchen you have in mind is an eight-thousand-euro conversation or a fifty-thousand-euro one. It is indicative by design. It does not know your ceiling height, your corner, your appliance loyalties or the state of your walls.

The showroom quote is the figure. Everything above it is arithmetic.