How Much Does Interior Design Cost Per Room in London?

In London, a full-service interior designer typically charges £800 to £2,500 to design a bedroom, £1,000 to £3,500 for a living room, £1,500 to £5,000 for a bathroom and £2,000 to £8,000 or more for a kitchen. Online-only design packages bring that down to roughly £300 to £800 per room. Those figures are the design fee only: furniture, materials and trades are all on top, and that distinction is where most cost guides quietly mislead you.

This page sets out what each price band actually buys, why quotes for the same room can vary by a factor of ten, and how to get a straight number out of a designer when most of them refuse to publish one.

Why per-room prices are so hard to find

A survey by the British Institute of Interior Design (BIID), the UK’s only professional institute for interior designers, found that 80% of designers do not publish their fees anywhere on their websites. So when you search “interior design cost per room London”, almost everything that ranks is a design firm’s own marketing page, written to make their pricing look normal.

That same BIID survey on pricing a project found there is no single standard fee model either: 51% of designers charge a combination of methods, 21% a fixed fee, 18% hourly and 6% a percentage of the project cost. Two designers quoting the same living room can structure the fee completely differently, which is why we wrote a separate plain-English guide to how interior designer fees work.

London per-room design fees at a glance

These ranges are drawn from published 2025 to 2026 London pricing guides and the handful of firms that do publish rate cards. They cover the design fee only.

A useful sense check: most UK-wide guides put a standard full-service flat fee per room at £500 to £3,000, with London sitting at £800 to £3,000 and above. London rates run roughly 30% to 50% over the national average, which tracks with everything else in the capital.

Prime central London is a different market again. Luxury studios working in Mayfair, Chelsea or Notting Hill typically charge £75 to £300 per hour or 10% to 25% of project value; one published London guide prices a luxury one-bedroom apartment project at £10,000 to £25,000, and per-room fees beyond £10,000 are normal once bespoke joinery or structural work is involved. If a firm quotes you five figures for one room, you are not being ripped off so much as shopping in the wrong tier; there is a deeper breakdown by budget level in our 2026 London cost guide.

What you actually get at each price point

The 10x spread in those tables is not random. It maps to how much work the designer does.

Under £300: styling and quick fixes. Some firms publish entry packages here. My Bespoke Room, for example, lists a Design Fix at under £200 and Room Styling at around £300. Expect advice, a direction and a shopping steer, not drawings.

£300 to £800: e-design packages. This is the online tier. My Bespoke Room’s Room Design Package runs roughly £500 to £700 depending on room type and includes a 40-minute video call with your designer, a moodboard, space planning, 3D visuals and a sourced furniture list with discounts on the brands they sell. House Designer publishes room packages from around £500, covering a video consultation, a furniture layout plan, two 3D visuals, a shopping list and up to three revisions. You measure the room yourself, nobody visits, and you do the buying and installing. For a straightforward bedroom or living room refresh, this tier is genuinely good value.

£800 to £3,500: standard full service. A designer visits, measures, produces a concept, develops it through revisions, specifies furniture and finishes, and usually manages procurement. This is the realistic band for most London bedrooms and living rooms.

£2,000 to £8,000+: technical rooms. Kitchens and bathrooms cost more to design because they involve layouts, services, technical drawings and coordination with trades. Note that the design fee never includes the trades themselves: kitchens and bathrooms touch electrics and plumbing, and notifiable electrical work there falls under Part P of the Building Regulations, so you will also be paying a registered electrician and a competent plumber regardless of who designs the room.

£10,000+ per room: prime central London and luxury studios. Bespoke joinery design, full FF&E procurement, site supervision, and a brand name on the invoice.

The same living room under three fee models

No ranking page does this, so here it is. Take a living room redesign with a £25,000 budget for furniture, finishes and decoration, and see what the design fee looks like under each model.

Hourly. London experienced designers charge roughly £120 to £200 per hour (UK-wide the spread is about £50 to £200, with high-end central London reaching around £250). The BIID member survey, from 2019, found 59% of practices charged up to £75 per hour for a senior designer and 41% charged £76 to £150, so treat current London quotes at the top of that as normal inflation rather than gouging. Allow 15 to 30 design hours for a living room: at £150 per hour, that is £2,250 to £4,500.

Fixed fee. Per the table above, a London firm would quote £1,000 to £3,500 flat for this room. You know the number before you start, which is why fixed fees suit defined single-room projects best.

Percentage of project cost. Market guides commonly quote 10% to 20% of the build or renovation cost; the BIID survey skews lower, with 53% of percentage-fee designers charging 6% to 10%. On the £25,000 living room, 12% is £3,000. Notice the percentage model only makes sense when there is real project spend to take a percentage of; on a £5,000 refresh it produces a silly number, which is why designers mostly reserve it for renovations.

All three models land in roughly the same £2,000 to £4,000 zone for this room, which is reassuring. The model matters less than the scope. If you want to test your own numbers, our interior designer cost calculator runs the same comparison for any room and budget.

The design fee is the small number: budgeting the room itself

The fee tables above are what you pay for thinking, drawing and specifying. The room still has to be bought. UK furnishing guides put realistic FF&E budgets at:

Furnishing a typical 100 square metre home in full runs around £13,000 to £15,500 at mid-market level. And renovation spend has been climbing: the Houzz UK 2025 renovation study of 1,060 homeowners found a median renovation spend of £21,440, up 26% year on year, with the top 10% spending £169,000. Houzz’s kitchen research puts the median UK kitchen renovation at £17,500, up from £13,000 the year before. Those are national figures; apply the London premium before you set a budget, or use our London renovation cost calculator to model the whole project.

Two procurement points worth knowing. First, trade discounts are real: 10% to 40% off retail is the commonly cited range, and the online services advertise exclusive discounts as a selling point of their packages. A designer who passes most of that on can offset a meaningful chunk of their fee. Second, some designers add a procurement surcharge of around 10% to 15% on items they buy for you. Ask directly whether discounts are passed on and whether a markup applies; the honest ones answer in one sentence.

How to get a real quote out of a London designer

Since 80% will not publish prices, you have to extract them. This works:

1. Define the room and budget first. “Living room, Victorian terrace in Walthamstow, £20,000 all-in including your fee” gets a usable answer. “How much do you charge?” gets a discovery-call invitation.
2. Ask which fee model they use and why. Combination is the most common answer (51% in the BIID survey) and is fine, but they should be able to say what is fixed and what is variable.
3. Ask what is excluded. Trades, procurement markup, extra revision rounds and site visits beyond an agreed number are the usual surprises.
4. Get the deliverables in writing. Moodboard or 3D visuals? Shopping list or full procurement? Two concepts or one?
5. Check credentials. Interior design is unregulated in the UK; anyone can use the title. The profession’s flagship UK accreditation is BIID Registered Interior Designer, and you can search the BIID directory of registered designers for free.

Get three quotes structured the same way and the outlier exposes itself. For the step-by-step hiring process, including what a first consultation should cover, see our guide to hiring an interior designer in London.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an interior designer cost per room in London? Full service typically runs £800 to £2,500 for a bedroom, £1,000 to £3,500 for a living room, £1,500 to £5,000 for a bathroom and £2,000 to £8,000 or more for a kitchen. Online packages cost roughly £300 to £800 per room. In prime central London, luxury studio fees routinely pass £10,000 per room.

Are online interior design packages any good? For a single bedroom or living room where the layout is not changing, yes. Packages from under £200 to around £800 per room get you space planning, a moodboard, visuals and a shopping list, often with trade discounts. They are the wrong tool for kitchens, bathrooms or anything structural.

Do interior designers get trade discounts, and do they pass them on? Most have trade accounts giving 10% to 40% off retail. Whether you see that saving varies by firm: some pass it all on, some split it, and some keep it as part of their fee. Ask before you sign, and ask separately whether a 10% to 15% procurement markup applies to items they buy for you.

Why do so few designers publish their prices? A BIID survey found 80% do not publish fees. Partly it is because projects vary enormously, partly it is a sales tactic to get you on a call. The fix is to approach them with a defined room, scope and budget so they can only answer with a number.

Does the design fee include furniture and building work? No. The fee covers design work, drawings and specification. Furniture and finishes (FF&E) are a separate budget, typically £3,500 to £4,500 for a mid-range living room, and trades are separate again. Electrical work in kitchens and bathrooms falls under Part P of the Building Regulations, so budget for a registered electrician whoever designs the room.

Is a percentage fee or a fixed fee better for one room? For a single room, fixed fees are usually cleaner: you know the cost upfront. Percentage fees, commonly 10% to 20% in current market guides though a BIID survey found most percentage-fee designers charging 6% to 10%, suit larger renovations where the project cost is the natural base.