Kentucky Construction Estimating Services

Kentucky gives you one building code. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Commercial work in Frankfort, Paducah and Pikeville is all built to the same book: the 2018 Kentucky Building Code, Fourth Edition, dated February 2024, adopted by the Department of Housing, Buildings and Construction. Houses run on the Kentucky Residential Code, Third Edition, August 2024. You’re not calling a city hall to find out which edition they’re on this year, the way you would across the river.

Then the commercial plans go to the state. Plan review runs through DHBC, and the fee is math you can do before you bid: total building area times a rate set by occupancy. Business, mercantile, storage and residential are 15 cents a square foot. Assembly, institutional and high hazard are 16 cents. Utility and miscellaneous is 13. There’s a $285 minimum under all of it. A 40,000-square-foot mercantile shell is $6,000 of review fee before anybody talks about a local permit.

The energy side surprises people. The Department of Energy’s tracker still shows Kentucky on the 2012 IECC and ASHRAE 90.1-2010 for commercial buildings, and the 2009 IECC for houses, both effective back in 2014. Whatever the envelope costs you in Cincinnati, it is not the same number in Covington eight minutes away.

And the tax hides. Kentucky treats the contractor as the consumer of materials. The tax gets paid when you buy the brick, not when you bill the owner, and there’s no resale certificate on anything you install. If you carry tax as one line at the bottom of a Kentucky bid, you’re going to double-count it or lose it.

Under all of it is the rock. Much of the state is karst, which is limestone with water moving through it. The Kentucky Geological Survey says cover-collapse sinkholes severely damage buildings, drain farm ponds and damage roads, and its advice is blunt: don’t build on a filled sinkhole, and bring in a geologist or an engineer who has worked in karst. That’s a foundation number, and sometimes it’s a big one.

Every one of these has cost somebody real money. We see them monthly.

1. The plan review fee, and the alteration math. New construction is area times the occupancy rate. Alterations and repairs are different: it’s the cost of the alteration times 0.0030, or the altered area times the occupancy rate, whichever is less — same $285 floor. On a fit-out those two answers are rarely close, so run both. If you want an early site and foundation release, fast track adds 50% to the fee, minimum $400, capped at $3,000. It belongs in General Conditions, not in a footnote.

2. Sales tax buried in the materials. The rule is 103 KAR 26:070: materials, fixtures and supplies that get incorporated into the structure are taxed at the time of sale to the contractor. So your material pricing has to be tax-in, your sub quotes have to be checked for whether theirs are, and nobody is getting a resale exemption on installed work. A bid that shows a clean pre-tax material column is a bid that’s short.

3. Wage assumptions on public work. Kentucky repealed its prevailing wage law effective January 7, 2017, and the repeal also stops cities and counties from setting their own wage and fringe requirements. Federal Davis-Bacon didn’t move. So a county-funded building and a federally funded one on the same street carry two different labor numbers. If you price a federal-aid job at open-shop rates, you’re going to eat the difference out of your fee.

4. Sitework, before anything above grade. Karst is the headline, but it travels with the rest of it — rock at shallow depth in the Bluegrass, floodplain and river work along the Ohio from Ashland to Paducah, and hillside cut on the eastern side of the state. Kentucky estimates go wrong in the ground far more often than they go wrong in the finishes.

We don’t ask you to take our word for it. Sixteen real estimates are on this page, four in each of the four categories we work in. $56.5M of construction value across 108 pages of takeoff and pricing. Nine of them are Kentucky jobs. The rest come from the states we work across the line, and every one of those is labeled with its city and state so you know exactly what you’re looking at. Open them. Read the line items.

Commercial Buildings — ground-up retail, hospitality and institutional.

• S. Ohio Medical Center project, Vanceburg – $6.8M (41179)
• Amenity Reserve, Nicholasville – $1.9M (40356)
• All American Food, Lexington – $982K (40511)
• Makers Mark Distillery, Loretto – $678K (40037)

Multi Family and Apartments — apartments, condos and multi-unit housing.

• Lofts at Gateway, Chattanooga TN – $15.7M (37412)
• 5 Story Apartments, Clayton OH – $11.1M (45315)
• Vitra Apartments Core Redevelopment, Indianapolis IN – $7.9M (46240)
• Villavo Apartments – Studio, Antioch TN – $173K (37011)

Residential — custom homes, ADUs and whole-house remodels.

• 1008 Pine Hill Residence, McLean VA – $6M (22101)
• Grandin Lane Residence, Cincinnati OH – $2.6M (45208)
• Homefest 1989, Erlanger – $842K (41018)
• 3235 West 41st Street, Cleveland OH – $203K (44109)

Tenant Buildouts — interior fit-outs in existing buildings.

• Culinary Arts Project, Russellville – $842K (42276)
• Total Wine, Florence – $426K (41042)
• Frutta Bowl X Saladworks, Murray – $257K (42071)
• Hilton Garden Lobby, Louisville – $140K (40202)

Four building types, from a $140K hotel lobby in downtown Louisville to a $15.7M apartment building. That range is the whole point. Most shops price one lane and call it a service.

Look at the Total Wine store in Florence. It’s $426K and the estimate runs eleven pages, because a retail fit-out is framing and drywall priced wall type by wall type, then insulation, then ceiling, then paint. Eleven pages of quantities for a job some people would put on one line.

Same idea on the other side of the size range. The Vanceburg medical center is $6.8M over nine pages, general conditions through electrical. The Amenity Reserve building in Nicholasville is eleven pages for $1.9M, and a big part of that is the pool: slab on grade, stem walls, deck pavers, railing, equipment doors. And Makers Mark in Loretto is a reminder of what Kentucky work actually looks like — distilleries, bourbon warehouses and the sitework that comes with them.

We estimate statewide. Here’s where the volume actually is.

Louisville and Jefferson County. Downtown hotel and office interiors, retail on the Outer Loop, industrial along the river. The Hilton Garden lobby above is a Louisville job.

Lexington and the Bluegrass. Lexington, Nicholasville, Georgetown, Richmond, Frankfort and Versailles. Three of the sixteen estimates are Bluegrass jobs. Shallow rock, tight sites, and a lot of institutional work.

Northern Kentucky. Covington, Florence, Erlanger, Newport and Fort Thomas. It’s the Cincinnati market with Kentucky’s code and Kentucky’s tax rule on it, which is exactly the trap for a contractor who works both sides of the river.

Bowling Green and south central. Bowling Green, Glasgow, Elizabethtown and Radcliff. This is the middle of Kentucky’s karst country, and it’s the part of the state where a foundation number needs a geotech behind it.

Western Kentucky. Paducah, Murray, Hopkinsville, Owensboro and Madisonville. Long hauls, thin sub markets, and the Frutta Bowl X Saladworks fit-out in Murray to show for it.

Eastern Kentucky and the Ohio River. Ashland, Vanceburg, Maysville, Somerset, Pikeville and Hazard. Hillside sites, river towns, and medical and school work that carries the region.

General contractors bidding hard-bid and negotiated work. Subs who need a takeoff that survives a scope review. Developers who want a real number before they commit money. Architects who’d rather price a design now than explain a surprise on bid day.

Kentucky had 92,500 construction jobs in July 2026, in a state with just over two million jobs total. It’s not a huge market, and that cuts both ways: the good subs are busy, and the invitations keep coming anyway. That’s what our Kentucky construction estimating services are built for. You send the plans. We send back a priced estimate with the quantities shown, in a format you can hand straight to a client or an owner.

We’re not a lead service and we’re not a software subscription. A person does the takeoff. Another person checks it. You can call and ask why a number is what it is, and get an answer.

What you’re hiring is a cost estimator who has already priced work under the Kentucky Building Code, on Kentucky ground, with the tax where Kentucky puts it. Not a national square-foot average with a horse on it.

Send us your plans. We’ll tell you what it costs.