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Bathroom Remodel Cost in Seattle, Washington

The median declared cost of a bathroom remodel in Seattle, Washington is $28,000, based on 130 residential building permits issued in the last 24 months.

Updated November 2026 · next refresh December 2026 · computed from permits issued through November 2026.

How to read this number

These are declared permit values — the job value the applicant reported to the City of Seattle when the permit was filed. Declared values are a real-world sample of what these projects get filed at, but they are not final invoices: applicants have no reason to inflate them, and final costs often run higher once the work is done. Use the median as a planning anchor and the range to see how far real projects spread.

One more caveat: a permit value covers the whole permitted job. When a bathroom remodel is filed together with other work, the single declared figure covers all of it — one reason the top of the range runs high.

For your own bathroom, the two numbers every quote is built on are the floor area — get yours from the square footage calculator before you price a single tile — and the paint for the walls and ceiling, which the paint calculator figures by the gallon.

How the costs spread

Half of all permits in the sample declared between $15,000 and $45,000. The full spread is wider: the cheapest 10% declared under $7,500, and the most expensive 10% declared over $62,750.

How to read this: half of all bathroom remodel permits declared less than the median; 90% declared less than the right-hand figure.

Median cost by ZIP code

Per-ZIP samples for this project type are thin, so this table uses a longer window than the headline figure: every permit in our Seattle archive, January 2023 to November 2026 (271 permits after the same outlier rules). A ZIP is listed only when at least 15 of its permits are in that sample, and each row shows its own count.

How this project gets permitted in Seattle

Seattle permit descriptions name the review path each job actually took. Of the 125 permits in this sample whose descriptions name it, 100% went through subject-to-field-inspection (STFI) (125 STFI vs 0 full plan review). STFI is the city's faster track for work that does not need a full plan check; structural work goes through plan review.

The permit itself is a small line item. SDCI charges by declared value (Development Fee Index, Seattle Municipal Code 22.900D.010, Tables D-1 and D-2): at this project's median declared value of $28,000, the building permit and plan review on the subject-to-field-inspection (STFI) path come to about $1,117, including the 5% technology fee and the $6.50 state building-code fee. Across the middle half of declared values ($15,000–$45,000), the same fees run about $814–$1,504. Trade permits (electrical, plumbing, mechanical) are charged separately.

Trend

Median declared cost was $30,000 in 2025 (60 permits) and $28,000 in 2026 (62 permits) — down about 7% across the two years.

Recent bathroom remodel permits in Seattle

Anonymized examples from the sample — work description and declared value as filed, no addresses or names.

Methodology

We pull every issued residential building permit the City of Seattle publishes through its open-data portal (Socrata), keep permits from the last 24 months with a declared value above zero, and classify each one by the project its description names. Records above $2,000,000 and statistical outliers (outside 1.5× the interquartile range) are excluded before the median is computed. Every classifier rule set is spot-checked by hand against 20 sampled permits before a project type is published. This page is refreshed monthly from the permit archive.

Frequently asked questions

Plan the work

More Seattle remodeling costs

About the author

Harrison Alley is a web publisher and data enthusiast based in Dallas, Texas. He built Urbarama’s remodeling calculators and maintains them.

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