Ask three fabricators to price the same kitchen and you will get three rates per running foot, and they will not be close. The published guides do not agree either. Malaysian market ranges for 2026 put melamine-faced cabinets at RM290 to RM600 a running foot and solid plywood at RM330 to RM600, which means a quoted rate of RM600 a foot tells you nothing whatsoever about which board is inside the box. That is the real story of this unit. The disagreement between sources is not carelessness, it is what happens when a made-to-order object gets described by a single number.
Every figure on this page is a published third-party market range, collected from Malaysian renovation and stone suppliers and dated 2026. None of them is a Fatt Interior quotation. They are worth having as a sanity check against a piece of paper already in your hand, and worth nothing as a specification. So this page explains the unit first, then works through everything the unit hides, and finishes with a list of questions that turns two rates into two quotations you can actually compare.
What does a running foot actually measure?
A running foot is one foot of length measured along the wall, and nothing else at all. Height is not in it. Depth is not in it. Whether the box has a shelf or four drawers is not in it. A base run roughly 32 to 36 inches high and 21 to 24 inches deep is one running foot per foot of wall, and a wall run 12 to 14 inches deep is also one running foot per foot of wall, so a straight ten foot wall fitted top and bottom is twenty running feet, not ten. This is the single most common misreading of a Malaysian kitchen quotation, and it doubles a budget in one line.
Corners are the second trap. On an L-shaped kitchen the two runs meet, and some workshops count the overlap once while others count it twice. Tall units, pantry columns and island ends are frequently pulled out of the per-foot count and priced as their own items. If you want your own number before anyone quotes you, measure the wall lengths off your floor plan with our scale rule and write the base run and the wall run on two separate lines.
How much is a kitchen cabinet per foot in Malaysia in 2026?
Published Malaysian ranges for 2026 start at RM290 a running foot at the melamine end and reach RM700 a running foot at the aluminium end, with plywood sitting almost entirely inside both. Notice how badly the bands overlap. Read across the table below and you will see three material families sharing one span of numbers, which is precisely why the rate on its own settles nothing.
| Item | Published range | Unit | Publisher, as of 2026 | How it behaves in a Malaysian kitchen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Melamine-faced cabinets | RM290 to RM600 | per running foot | AmpQuartz, kitchen cabinet price guide | Flat, clean, wide colour choice, and only as waterproof as its edges are |
| Solid plywood cabinets | RM330 to RM600 | per running foot | AmpQuartz, Johor kitchen cabinet buyer guide | Holds a screw properly, survives a damp floor far better, still needs sealed edges |
| Aluminium cabinets | RM400 to RM700 | per running foot | AmpQuartz, kitchen cabinet price guide | Ignores water and termites, sounds hollow, dents instead of chipping |
| Quartz countertop | RM70 to RM190 | per square foot | AmpQuartz, quartz stone supplier page | Non-porous, wipes clean, still wants a trivet under a hot wok |
| Granite countertop | RM10 to RM500 | per square foot | AmpQuartz, granite table top price guide | Hard and heat-tolerant, porous, priced by colour rarity and origin |
The granite line is the clearest proof of the point. A published span from RM10 to RM500 per square foot is a fiftyfold spread for one named material, so anybody quoting you a granite top without naming the slab, the thickness and the origin has told you nothing. For the whole room, the wider market bracket for a kitchen in 2026 runs RM10,000 to RM100,000 according to PropertyGuru Malaysia, which again is a third-party range and not our price. What this workshop has published for a Seremban kitchen is a band of RM15,000 to RM50,000, and that band exists because we will not pretend a number is knowable before the specification is.
Why do two quotations at the same rate differ so much?
Because the material name is the smallest part of the specification. Two workshops can both write plywood carcass, both quote the same rate, and hand you boxes that will not last the same decade. Here is what moves while the material stays fixed.
Carcass thickness. An 18mm board and a 15mm board look identical once the doors are on. The thicker one holds a screw in its edge and carries a three foot shelf of plates without bowing. The thinner one saves board on every panel in the kitchen, and announces itself two years later as a shelf with a sag in the middle.
Edge sealing. This is the least discussed thing in a Malaysian kitchen and the reason cabinets die. Board is stable across its face and thirsty at its cut edge. Every panel in a kitchen has four cut edges, and the ones that matter are at floor level, along the bottom of a door, and around the pipe cut-outs inside the sink cabinet. Ask specifically about those cut-outs. They are hidden, they sit directly under a slow drip, and they are the edges a fast job leaves raw. A sink cabinet does not fail from the top down, it swells outward from an unsealed hole nobody was ever going to see.
The back panel. A grooved structural back panel housed into the sides is what keeps a box square for twenty years. A 3mm hardboard sheet stapled to the rear edges is not a back panel, it is a dust cover. Boxes with stapled backs rack out of square as the run settles, and then the door gaps go crooked and no amount of hinge adjustment brings them back.
Hinges and runners. Hinges are sold with a stated cycle rating, and two hinges of the same shape and colour can be rated tens of thousands of cycles apart. Drawer runners carry a stated load rating in kilograms, and a drawer of pots needs a different rating than a drawer of tea towels. Undermount runners hide under the drawer box, give you the full internal width and cost more; side-mount runners take a slice of width off each side and are cheaper. All of this is invisible in a rate per foot.
Drawers against doors. A three-drawer stack is three boxes built inside a box, with three sets of runners and three fronts to align. A door with a shelf behind it is one panel and one hinge pair. At identical width they are not remotely the same amount of work, so a single flat rate across the whole kitchen means the workshop has averaged them, and every extra drawer stack you ask for later moves the total. Lift-up doors with gas struts, appliance housings for an oven or microwave, and a vented fridge gap with a filler panel are all separate work again.
The edges nobody sees. Whether internal edges and the reverse face of every door are finished, or left raw, is a real cost difference and a real durability difference. It is also the easiest thing to check on a sample door. Open it and look at the back.
Which carcass material belongs in a wet kitchen?
The wet kitchen wants a carcass that does not care about standing water, which in practice means solid plywood with properly sealed edges or an aluminium carcass, and not plain melamine board at floor level. Malaysian wet kitchens get hosed and mopped, the wok throws steam and oil, and water sits at the bottom edge of the base cabinets for hours. That is a different job from the dry kitchen, where the work is a kettle, a fridge, a coffee machine and looking good in front of guests.
This is the argument against running one continuous specification through the doorway. Extend a single material through both rooms and you are either paying wet-kitchen board prices for a dry-kitchen wall, or putting dry-kitchen board where the mop water is. Split the specification at the door instead: the tougher carcass and simpler doors on the wet side, and the money spent on door finish and hardware on the dry side. Raise the base cabinets on adjustable legs with a removable skirting so the board never touches a wet floor, and so a leaking trap can be found before it has soaked a panel. Our kitchen cabinet page sets out how we build the two sides differently.
Is aluminium worth the extra per running foot?
At a published RM400 to RM700 a running foot against RM290 to RM600 for melamine, the extra buys immunity rather than looks. An aluminium carcass will not swell, will not feed termites and does not mind a hosed floor, which makes it a defensible choice for a wet kitchen in a house that gets cleaned hard, or for an outdoor or semi-covered kitchen where nothing wooden survives.
What you give up is feel and quiet. Aluminium sounds hollow when a door closes, feels cold under the hand, and offers a narrower range of door looks than board with a laminate or paint finish. The joints are mechanical rather than glued, so a hard knock leaves a dent that stays a dent. Thin extrusion also flexes, so if you are paying at the top of that range, ask about the extrusion thickness and the corner brackets rather than the colour.
What is not included in a per-foot price?
Most of the kitchen. The per-foot rate normally covers the carcass, doors, shelves and basic hardware, and the rest arrives as separate lines or as a surprise. Compare this list against the quotation you have.
| Line item | Usually inside the per-foot rate | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Carcass, doors, shelves | Yes | Which board and what thickness, in millimetres |
| Edge banding | Yes, at some level | Are pipe cut-outs and internal edges sealed too |
| Standard hinges and side-mount runners | Usually | Cycle rating and load rating in kilograms |
| Soft-close and undermount runners | Often an upgrade | Priced per door and per drawer, or included |
| Drawer stacks instead of doors | Averaged or extra | Cost of adding one more stack later |
| Lift-up doors and gas struts | No | Which doors, and how many mechanisms |
| Wire baskets, pull-outs, corner units, waste bins | No | Listed one by one with sizes |
| Countertop and cut-outs | No, quoted per square foot | Area, thickness, cut-outs, up-stand, edge build-up |
| Sink, tap, hob, hood, oven | No | Who supplies, and who cuts the openings |
| Moving plumbing and power points | No | Who does it and when in the sequence |
| Wall tiling and skirting | No | Tiled before or after cabinet installation |
| Appliance housing and fridge gap | Drawn, often not costed | Dimensions taken from the actual appliance model |
| Delivery, installation, removing the old kitchen | Varies | Named explicitly in the quotation |
PropertyGuru Malaysia also suggests holding back 10 to 20 percent of a renovation budget as contingency, and a kitchen is exactly where that gets used, usually on plumbing that turns out to be somewhere other than the drawing said.
The countertop is priced per square foot, not per foot run
The countertop is the line where a kitchen budget slips, because it is measured in a different unit from everything under it. Quartz is published at RM70 to RM190 per square foot by AmpQuartz for 2026, and granite at RM10 to RM500 per square foot. The surface area of an average L-shaped kitchen is not large, so people assume the top is a small line, and then discover what surrounds it.
The extras are geometric, not decorative. A sink cut-out and a hob cut-out each cost work and each weaken the slab, so their positions matter. An up-stand or a stone backsplash is priced by its own area. A doubled front edge that makes the top look thicker doubles the visible edge material and the polishing. Joint positions are decided by slab size, not by preference, so ask where the joint will land before it lands over the sink. If the top forms part of a larger job, we cover the sequencing on our full renovation page.
Fifteen questions that make two quotations comparable
Print this and put it against every quotation. Any workshop that can answer all fifteen without hesitating is a workshop that knows what it costed.
- How many running feet in the base run, and how many in the wall run, written separately?
- How is the corner counted, once or twice?
- Which board is the carcass, and what thickness in millimetres?
- Is the carcass the same board on the wet side and the dry side?
- How are the cut edges sealed, and are the pipe cut-outs inside the sink cabinet sealed as well?
- Is the back panel a grooved structural panel or a stapled sheet?
- How many hinges per door, and what is the stated cycle rating?
- What is the load rating of the drawer runners in kilograms, undermount or side-mount?
- How many drawer stacks are inside this price, and what does one more cost?
- Are lift-up mechanisms, pull-outs, corner units and waste bins listed individually?
- Are the base cabinets on adjustable legs with a removable skirting?
- Is the countertop in this quotation, with area, thickness, cut-outs and up-stand priced separately?
- Who moves the plumbing and power points, and at which point in the sequence?
- Is the appliance housing drawn from the real appliance dimensions?
- Who is actually building it, and can I see the machine it will be cut on?
The last one matters more than any of the numbers. A rate quoted by somebody who will subcontract the carpentry carries a margin you cannot see, and the specification you agreed is not the specification the fabricator receives.
Getting a real number for your kitchen
Every RM figure on this page is a published third-party market range from AmpQuartz and PropertyGuru Malaysia, dated 2026. None of it is a Fatt Interior quotation, and no honest workshop can price your kitchen from a rate table. A real number needs your wall lengths, your wet and dry split, your board and thickness, your drawer count and your appliances.
We are a two-person workshop in Galla Industrial Park, Seremban, cutting and installing our own work across Seremban and beyond. Send your floor plan or a few photos of the empty kitchen to WhatsApp +60 13-338 6813 and we will come back with a line-by-line quotation that answers all fifteen questions above, or contact us here. For a Seremban kitchen we publish a band of RM15,000 to RM50,000, and we will tell you where inside it you sit once we know what you actually want built.