Budgeting benchmarks for kitchen and bathroom remodels.
Free Interactive Tool
Most heated-floor estimates online use a national average electric rate. In the Sacramento region that's useless — PG&E charges nearly triple what SMUD does. Pick your utility and get a real number.
What you'll get
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Tile area only — not the room's full footprint. A typical Sacramento primary bath runs 50–80 sq ft of heated tile. The thermostat and the dedicated circuit cost the same at any size, so small floors carry a higher cost per square foot.
SMUD covers Sacramento County — Carmichael, Sacramento, Folsom. PG&E covers El Dorado Hills and much of Placer County. Roseville runs its own municipal utility.
Most homeowners program a pre-heat before the morning routine, sometimes a second block at night. Two hours a day is typical.
Inside a full bathroom remodel the tile is already coming up, so the heating system is an incremental cost. Added later on its own, you pay for demo and a new tile floor too.
Monthly operating cost at your settings. Residential averages as of September 2026.
Leave it running around the clock and that same floor costs about $76 a month on SMUD. A programmable thermostat is most of what makes heated floors cheap to own — it isn't an upsell.
We assess heated floor feasibility and cost as part of every bathroom remodel estimate — no separate trip, no charge for the assessment.
Schluter DITRA-HEAT — the system we install as standard — draws about 12 watts per square foot of heated area. Multiply by your tile area to get the system's total draw, multiply by your daily runtime and the days in a month, then apply your utility's residential rate per kilowatt-hour. The range you see accounts for thermostat cycling: once the floor reaches its setpoint the cable switches off and on to hold temperature rather than pulling full power the whole time, so real consumption lands toward the lower end of the range.
Because the spread here is enormous and almost no online estimate accounts for it. PG&E residential rates run close to triple SMUD's. The same heated floor, run the same number of hours, costs dramatically different amounts in Carmichael than it does in El Dorado Hills. Any calculator using a national average electric rate is telling you something close to meaningless for this region — which is the reason this tool exists.
Four things. Panel upgrades: if your electrical panel is near capacity, adding a dedicated 20-amp circuit can run $800–$1,500 on its own, and we check this during the estimate rather than discovering it at the end of the job. Subfloor repair: soft spots or uneven areas have to be corrected before the membrane goes down, and this is the most common source of unexpected cost on these projects. Non-tile floors: these figures assume tile or natural stone, and under luxury vinyl plank or engineered wood the thermal benefit drops sharply while compatibility gets limited. And rate changes: utility figures here are approximate residential averages as of September 2026 and move periodically.
In a primary bathroom with a tile floor, in a home you plan to stay in — usually yes. The cost lands at roughly 3–9% of a typical Sacramento bathroom remodel, and you use it every single morning of the heating season. Where we'd tell you to skip it: guest baths and powder rooms you pass through, non-tile floors, or any project where the budget is better spent on waterproofing, ventilation, or fixing the layout. Those come first, and we will say so.
Inside a full bathroom remodel the tile is already coming up, the floor is already open, and the electrician is already on site — so the heating system is an incremental cost layered onto work that is happening anyway. Added later on its own, you are paying to demo a floor that was perfectly fine, dispose of it, run the circuit, install the membrane and cable, and then buy and set a whole new tile floor on top. That is why the per-square-foot band roughly doubles.
Estimates are directional and based on typical Sacramento-area conditions. Actual cost depends on your subfloor, electrical panel, and bathroom layout. Utility rates are approximate residential averages as of September 2026. More on how we install heated floors.
