Which Home Remodels Add the Most Value, and Which Add the Most Dollars

Replace a garage door and you’ll get back more than two and a half times what you spend. Add a primary suite and you’ll get back less than a fifth. Both numbers come from the same report, published the same week, measuring the same thing.

Which home remodels add the most value has a clean answer on the measure everyone uses: small exterior replacements, led by a garage door replacement that recouped 267.7 percent of its cost nationally in the 2025 Cost vs. Value Report. Inside the house, only one project clears 100 percent, a minor kitchen remodel at 112.9 percent. Everything bigger returns less than it costs, and the biggest projects return the least of all.

That’s the answer to the question almost everyone asks. It isn’t the answer to the question a lot of homeowners actually mean. Sort those same twenty eight projects by the dollars they add to a sale price instead of the share of your money they return, and the project sitting at number one drops to twenty sixth.

Which Home Remodels Add the Most Value, Measured Two Ways

There are two ways to measure whether a remodel added value, and they don’t agree.

Percentage recouped is what every ranking you’ve read is using. It’s the resale value a project adds divided by what the project cost. A garage door replacement averaged $4,672 nationally and added $12,507 at resale, which is where the 267.7 percent comes from. It’s a measure of efficiency: how hard each of your dollars worked.

Dollars added is the other one. It’s the resale value on its own, with no reference to what you paid.

That garage door added $12,507. A minor kitchen remodel, which sits fifth on the percentage list at 112.9 percent, added $32,141. On the measure most people have in their head when they say “adds the most value,” the kitchen beats the garage door by two and a half times.

Neither measure is wrong. They answer different questions:

• Percentage recouped answers how much of your money survives the sale. It’s the right measure when the remodel is a means to an end and the end is selling
• Dollars added answers how much higher the closing number goes. It’s the right measure when you’re comparing a remodel against other ways to move your home’s price
• Neither one measures whether you’ll enjoy living there, which for most homeowners turns out to be the deciding factor anyway

Every list on the first page of Google ranks by the first measure and headlines it as the second. That’s why those lists look so strange to people who’ve actually remodeled.

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The Remodels That Return the Highest Share of What You Spend

The efficiency list is dominated by projects that cost very little and change what the house looks like from the street.

For the second year running, garage door replacement took the top spot nationally, followed by steel entry door replacement and manufactured stone veneer. Zonda, which publishes the report, notes that eight of the top ten projects are exterior replacements, and that a minor kitchen remodel is the only interior project in the top five.

Three things those winners have in common:

• Replacements, not renovations: nothing gets moved, nothing gets rerouted, and there’s no demolition beyond the part coming off
• Visible before a buyer parks: a buyer’s opinion of a house starts forming from the sidewalk, and these are the projects that change what they see there
• Cheap enough that the math works: when a project costs under $5,000, it only takes a modest bump in perceived condition to clear 100 percent

The one interior project that keeps up is the minor kitchen remodel, and its definition matters.

In the report it means keeping the existing cabinet boxes and replacing the fronts, new countertops, a new sink and faucet, a new energy efficient range and refrigerator, new flooring, fresh paint. It is not a new layout. The moment you move the sink, you’ve left this project and joined a different one, which is exactly the gap between a minor and a major kitchen remodel.

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The Remodels That Add the Most Dollars at Sale

Now flip the sort.

The projects that push a sale price up the most, in raw dollars, are additions. New conditioned square footage moves an appraisal in a way a new front door never will, because it changes what the house is rather than how it looks. A detached accessory dwelling unit tops that list, with an upscale primary suite addition right behind it.

The catch is the price of admission. An upscale primary suite addition averaged $351,613 nationally and added $63,136 at resale. That’s an 18.0 percent return: you’re buying about $63,000 of sale price for about $352,000.

That ratio isn’t a fluke of one project. Additions cost roughly 20 to 40 percent more per square foot than equivalent new construction, purely because of tying new structure into an existing house, so what a home addition actually costs starts high before anyone picks a finish level.

Which leaves one project doing something unusual. The minor kitchen remodel added $32,141 on $28,458 spent. It’s the only project in the report that adds serious dollars and still returns more than it costs, which is why it lands near the top of both lists while everything else picks a side.

If you want one answer to “which remodel adds the most value” and you’re not planning to move out for six months, that’s the answer.

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Why the Top of One List Sits Near the Bottom of the Other

The divergence isn’t a quirk in the data. It’s what the two measures reward.

Percentage rewards cheap and visible. A small, low cost project only needs to shift a buyer’s impression a little to clear its own cost, and the exterior is where impressions get made.

Dollars reward big and permanent. Square footage, bedroom count and bathroom count are the things an appraiser can quantify, and quantities are what move a valuation.

Clay DeKorne, chief editor of Zonda’s JLC Group, put the trade off in one line: “While large interior remodels may be personally rewarding, their appeal is often too subjective to deliver the same return when it’s time to sell.”

There’s a second thing worth knowing about these figures, and none of the pages quoting them mention it. The resale values aren’t measured from sales of remodeled houses against comparable unremodeled ones.

They come from surveys of real estate professionals, combined with cost data from Verisk’s XactRemodel estimating software, across twenty eight projects in 115 local markets. That’s a serious method, and it’s the best national data anyone has. It’s also an informed estimate of what a project would fetch, not a record of what one did.

Which matters more here than it does most places, because none of those 115 markets is anywhere near Luzerne County.

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What These Numbers Look Like in Pennsylvania

The report publishes 115 local markets. Wilkes-Barre isn’t one of them, and neither is Scranton.

The closest Pennsylvania market is Philadelphia, four hours south, with a housing market that behaves nothing like the Wyoming Valley. The regional column that covers us, Middle Atlantic, blends Pennsylvania with New York and New Jersey metros where job costs run visibly higher.

Even so, the Philadelphia column is the most relevant published figure a Pennsylvania homeowner has, and it moves in both directions:

• Garage door replacement: 257.2 percent in Philadelphia against 267.7 percent nationally, on a job costing $4,596
• Minor kitchen remodel: 113.0 percent in Philadelphia against 112.9 percent nationally, which is about as stable as a number gets
• Basement remodel: 65.0 percent in Philadelphia against 71.0 percent nationally, a six point drop on a project costing over $52,000

The bigger local adjustment isn’t in the percentages though. It’s in the denominator of your own house.

A home in Wilkes-Barre sold for a median of roughly $183,000 in August 2026, up about 6 percent over the year. A $28,458 kitchen is just under 16 percent of that median house. A $351,613 primary suite addition is nearly twice the whole house.

National averages are built on markets where the median sale price runs two and three times ours. A percentage recouped travels between markets reasonably well. A dollar figure does not.

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The Ceiling Your Street Puts on Any Remodel

Every one of these numbers assumes a buyer exists who’ll pay it, and in a specific neighborhood that assumption has a limit.

An appraiser values your house against comparable sales, usually three to six recent sales of similar homes nearby. If nothing on your street has sold above $210,000 in two years, a remodel that would justify $260,000 has nowhere to put the difference.

The remodel is real, the value is real to you, and the appraisal still lands near the comps. That ceiling is the mechanism behind the 30 percent rule for remodel spending, and it’s the most common way a good project turns into a bad investment.

Below grade space runs into a second ceiling on top of the first. Fannie Mae requires appraisers to measure under ANSI Z765-2021, and under that standard any level with any portion below grade is reported as basement area and excluded from gross living area, no matter how well it’s finished.

A finished basement gets contributory value instead, typically a fraction of the above grade rate per square foot, which is why finishing a basement pays back differently than it looks like it should.

Run this check before you set a budget, not after:

1. Pull the last three to six sales within about half a mile of your house, similar size and age
2. Note the highest price any of them reached, and what that house had that yours doesn’t
3. Subtract your current estimated value from that ceiling. What’s left is the realistic room a remodel has to work in
4. If the project costs more than that room, you’re buying it for yourself, and that’s a fine reason to buy it as long as you know that’s what you’re doing

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The Projects That Give Back the Least

The worst returns aren’t strange projects. They’re upscale versions of sensible ones.

• Upscale anything: the upscale version of a project returns a fraction of what the midrange version does, in the same house, in the same market. An upscale primary suite addition at 18.0 percent is the extreme case, but the same gap shows up in kitchens and bathrooms. Buyers pay for clean, current and functional, and they rarely pay for custom
• Pools in a market like ours: appraisers commonly add $5,000 to $15,000 for a pool where pools are standard for the neighborhood, and may add nothing at all where they aren’t. In Northeastern Pennsylvania, with a swimming season that runs about three months, a pool is a lifestyle purchase and should be budgeted as one
• Anything highly personal: wine cellars, dedicated theater rooms, bold custom finishes. These have real value to the person who chose them and close to none to the average buyer
• Deferred maintenance you skipped to fund the remodel: a failing roof, a wet basement or an HVAC system at the end of its life gets discounted hard in negotiation, and inspection reports find all three

That last one is the expensive one. Buyers discount for problems far more reliably than they pay premiums for upgrades, so the first dollars belong to the failing thing, not the pretty thing.

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Which List You Should Actually Be Reading

Your selling horizon decides which of the two measures applies to you, and it’s the only input that really matters.

Your situation	Read this measure	Where the money goes	What to skip
Selling within about two years	Percentage recouped	Exterior replacements first, a minor kitchen refresh if it’s dated, and every failed inspection item	Layout changes, additions, upscale finishes
Staying five years or more	Neither, mostly	The rooms you use daily and the problems that get worse with time	Choosing a project because a national list ranked it well
Not sure yet	Percentage recouped	Projects that work either way: roof, siding, doors, a minor kitchen	Anything that only makes sense if you stay

Todd Tomalak of Zonda drew the same line from the data. Exterior improvements drive the most value for owners who are selling, while interior projects make the most sense for people planning to stay a while.

That second row is where most homeowners are standing, and it’s the row a ranking list can’t help with. A report that measures resale value is measuring one day in your ownership of the house. If that day is a decade out, the finished basement your family actually uses for ten years is a better purchase than the garage door with the impressive percentage, even though the garage door wins on paper every single time.

There’s a way to price that second row, and it isn’t in any ROI report. Take what the project costs, divide it by the months you plan to stay, and compare that to what the space would cost you any other way.

A basement remodel averaging $52,012 nationally, used for twelve years, works out to about $360 a month for a finished floor of your house. Renting equivalent square footage anywhere in Luzerne County costs more than that, and you get roughly two thirds of the money back at the end anyway. Run the same arithmetic on a project you’d use twice a year and the answer flips immediately.

Both measures are honest. One tells you which projects survive a sale intact, the other tells you which ones move the number at the closing table, and the day you’re planning for is what decides which one is yours.

If you’re weighing a project in Wilkes-Barre or anywhere in Luzerne County and you want real numbers for your house instead of a national average, a free on site estimate is a good place to start. We’ll tell you what your project costs here, and we’ll tell you honestly when a smaller version of it is the better buy.

Source: the 2025 Cost vs. Value Report. (c)2025 Zonda Media, a Delaware corporation. Complete data from the 2025 Cost vs. Value Report can be downloaded free at www.costvsvalue.com.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What home improvement has the best return on investment?

Garage door replacement, by a wide margin. It recouped 267.7 percent of its cost nationally in the 2025 Cost vs. Value Report, on an average job of $4,672 that added $12,507 at resale. Steel entry door replacement and manufactured stone veneer follow it, and all three are small exterior replacements rather than renovations.

Does adding a bathroom increase home value?

Yes, and how much depends on how under bathed the house is to begin with. A three bedroom home with one bathroom gains far more from a second one than a home that already has two. A midrange remodel of an existing bathroom, by comparison, cost $26,138 nationally and added $20,915, which is 80.0 percent. Adding a bathroom where none existed adds more dollars than remodeling one that’s already there, and it also costs more to do.

Do renovations increase your appraised value?

Some do, up to the limit your neighborhood’s comparable sales allow. Appraisers value your house against recent sales of similar nearby homes, so improvements that bring a dated house up to the standard of its comps get credited fairly reliably. Improvements that push it past the top of the comp range often don’t. Quality, permits and completeness all matter, and unpermitted work can be excluded outright.

What renovations don’t increase home value?

Upscale versions of ordinary projects, highly personal features like wine cellars and theater rooms, pools in markets where pools aren’t standard, and anything that removes a bedroom. Sunrooms and large additions rarely return what they cost either. Skipped maintenance belongs on this list in reverse: leaving a failing roof or a wet basement will cost you more at the negotiating table than most upgrades will earn.

Does a finished basement count as square footage?

Not as gross living area. Under ANSI Z765-2021, the measurement standard Fannie Mae requires, any level with any portion below grade is reported as basement area and kept out of the above grade square footage, regardless of how it’s finished or how many windows it has. It gets contributory value instead, typically a fraction of the above grade rate per square foot. That’s why two houses with the same total finished space can appraise differently.

Is it better to remodel before selling or sell as is?

Fix what fails, refresh what’s dated, and skip everything else. Repairs and small cosmetic updates return well because buyers discount aggressively for visible problems. Large remodels done specifically to sell rarely return their cost, and they cost you time on market. If a kitchen is functionally worn out, a minor refresh is usually worth it. If it’s merely not your taste, leave it and price accordingly.

How much does a minor kitchen remodel add to home value?

About $32,141 nationally, on an average cost of $28,458, which is a 112.9 percent return and the only interior project in the report’s top five. The Philadelphia figure is nearly identical at 113.0 percent. The scope is specific: existing cabinet boxes stay, and the fronts, hardware, countertops, sink, faucet, range, refrigerator and flooring are replaced. Move the layout and the return drops sharply.

Do new windows increase home value?

Moderately, and they sit in the middle of the pack rather than the top. Window replacement returns better when the existing windows have actually failed, because then you’re fixing a problem a buyer can see and feel rather than upgrading something that already worked. If your windows are sound, the same money does more for resale on the roof, the siding or the front entry.