What will a house cost in 2025? Construction costs/square metre

What will a house cost in 2025? Breakdown of construction costs per square meter

How can I save costs and still build to a high standard? How can I cleverly reduce the construction costs per square meter for a house in 2025? These are crucial questions when building a house and only very few builders who have a real insight and a lot of experience in dealing with the individual trades and their costs succeed in answering them.

We use examples to show how high the construction costs of a detached house or apartment building can be and where there is immense potential for savings. This is particularly true today, when prices in the house building sector are falling again after years of sharp price increases from 2017 to 2022.

If you want to build your house cost-effectively, you need to plan consciously and optimally from the outset. You need to know the costs for all the details (really all of them!) and not let the construction budget get out of hand with overpriced offers from different tradesmen.

This is because additional costs of 25% to 30% are quickly reached, which for some private builders break the already tight budget and make house building impossible. How do we know this? From years of experience with clients who have realized their personal dream of an individual detached house.

What does it cost to build a house in 2025? Basic questions

How do we create as much space as possible for as little shell costs as possible?
How big should the building be in square meters?
How many storeys (full storeys) should it have?
Is a basement floor absolutely necessary?

Basement vs. floor slab: Immense cost savings by omitting?

The most expensive floor of a house is the basement! So what could be more obvious than to leave out the basement and save on the expensive excavation work, which can be very costly depending on the location (slope, level ground, area with high groundwater etc.). Depending on the size of the structure, this amounts to between 90,000 and 150,000 euros.

But it’s not that simple! A house with a basement quickly has 30% more usable space than a house without a basement. For a standard house with 150 to 200 square meters of living space, the additional costs amount to just 15% to 18% of the construction costs. At least that is our experience with many clients who have built their KNX Smart Home.

Especially in areas where the land price (price per square meter of building land) is above 1,000 euros/sqm or even higher, it always makes sense to build a basement. Why is that the case? Because there is usually no more land available to build the “width” of the lost basement area. After all, a replacement area must be created for the unbuilt cellar, including a utility room, laundry room, utility room and fitness room, for example.

In the greater Munich area in Upper Bavaria, for example, i.e. the city of Munich itself, the district of Munich and, for example, the districts of Starnberg, Fürstenfeldbruck, Ebersberg and Miesbach – where we are frequently on the road – it always makes sense to build a basement. This is because prices for building land in the greater Munich area often exceed 1,000 euros per square meter.

Overview: What does it cost to build a house in 2025

Almost every builder asks themselves the question before building a house: How much does it cost to build a house? The table above provides a basic overview of the individual construction phases and their construction costs per square meter in 2025.

We must always bear in mind that house construction costs per square meter (construction costs) have risen by around 80 percent in the last 10 years. At the same time, building quality and the quality expectations of most builders are significantly higher than they were 12 years ago! So the demands could also have risen by this percentage.

As far as construction costs are concerned, much of the information provided by banks and insurance companies is completely out of date and is based on statistical data from 3 to 5 years ago.

The background: The sharp rise in prices in recent years is not yet included.
Added to this is the very high demand for construction services and the still limited number of skilled workers available in Germany.
We will come to the details of what is included in the individual construction costs later.

The four basic construction phases

The individual construction phases are subordinate to the various trades involved in building a house. Trades are sub-areas of house construction that can vary slightly depending on the degree of equipment, the desired level of comfort and future viability (our KNX Smart Home know-how!). In principle, every individual house construction should proceed as shown in the table.

In our examples, we have deliberately kept the “furnishing” or fitting out construction phase somewhat “smaller” in order to stay within the cost framework of around EUR 3,000 construction costs per square meter (see chart above).

Prices for building land and plot: 30 euros to 5000 euros per square meter

In principle, the construction costs have nothing to do with the price of building land or the plot of land per square meter. However, when deciding whether to build a house with or without a basement, the price per square meter of the plot is crucial.

Because it makes a big difference whether the house is to be built far away from a strong economic region or in one of the expensive districts in Upper Bavaria or even in Munich itself.

Overview: Basement types and house without basement

There are basically three different ways to build a house: Without basement only with a base plate (floor slab), with basement outside the groundwater and inside the groundwater. If the basement is to be completely watertight, it must be built with waterproof concrete (watertight concrete with a steel structure). In common parlance, watertight concrete is also referred to as a “white tank”.

A waterproof basement is never included in the basic costs of a house or the basic calculation and is comparatively more expensive than a “normal” basement.

Shell construction: cost savings without compromising on building quality

This is also very important: making the best possible use of the living space. This means that the simpler and more compactthe shape of the house, the cheaper it will be. A building without projections is cheaper than a house with lots of projections and bay windows. The same applies to dormers and additional entrance areas: These are always additional costs compared to a simple house shape.

Minimize exterior walls (house shape: avoid bay windows and dormers at all costs)
Minimize interior walls (clever room layout, architecture)
Minimize interior doors, applies to bathrooms, kitchen, living room
Open floor plans: combined rooms, multiple use, no corridors help to save construction costs. Interior walls and interior doors can also be saved.
Number of storeys: Bungalow or multi-storey is also a question of money: a staircase requires additional space, if the house is built at ground level this can be saved. At the same time, there are no intermediate ceilings.
Stairs: External stairs are cheaper if no stairwell is built around them and therefore no living space is taken up
Sanitary facilities: clever arrangement saves costs. If bathrooms and kitchens are located above or next to each other, pipe lengths can be optimized.
Technology shaft: If you pack all the pipes for all trades into one technology shaft to save space and optimize costs, you save an enormous amount of money
Roof shape: Pitched or gabled roofs are the simplest and cheapest roof shapes. If the span is not too large, the roof construction is also cheaper.
Expansion: Savings without loss of quality,with almost all components you are faced with the decision between cheap and expensive solutions.
Windows: take the cheap double-glazed windows or expensive triple-glazed windows
Floor covering: Inexpensive linoleum or high-quality oak?
Building fabric: Under no circumstances should the quality of the house be compromised and certainly not the “building fabric”. Always think about resale!
A high-quality construction scores with a better indoor climate and the value of the building is maintained for 75 to 100 years

Expansion: savings without compromising on construction quality

This raises the question: How is it actually possible to keep the costs within an absolutely low framework despite the high construction quality? The solution is to opt for the following points here to decide on a favorable variant. Especially when it comes to things that can be replaced later in further expansion stages.

Floor coverings can vary greatly in price. Inexpensive alternatives to classic floor coverings include industrial parquet, industrial screed, screed with paint or linoleum flooring. But solid oak floorboards can also be inexpensive. It’s worth comparing. And the quality does not have to be inferior to expensive wood or designer flooring.
Tiles: Tiled areas in the bathroom and WC can be reduced to the bare essentials. An inexpensive solution is not to tile the walls in less critical areas, but to paint them with waterproof paint.
A lot can also be saved when fitting out the kitchen and bathroom. The fabric of the building is not affected and retrofitting is always possible at a later date.
Windows: it is better to have a few large windows than many small and different windows. However, you should not save on the quality of the double or triple glazing and the window frames.
Ceiling and wall surfaces can also be left open and unplastered. This saves a lot of money. Exposed concrete ceilings or exposed wooden beam ceilings also look good.
Interior walls made of plasterboard can be cheaper than solid interior walls. If the impact sound insulation of the individual rooms is not quite so important, the plasterboard walls can also be placed on the finished floor and the room layout remains flexible.

Savings through own work and gradual expansion

Depending on your willingness and ability to organize the planning and construction of the house yourself and how much time you want to invest in it, you can save a lot of money by doing it yourself and building in stages. This in turn pushes the construction costs per square meter below the 3000 euro mark.

Price comparison: solid house, prefabricated house and architect's house

The table below compares the construction costs per square meter when building a house. It is quite clear that prefabricated house construction has no price advantage over the construction of a solid house – quite the opposite: due to the high demand in recent years and the so-called“turnkey construction“, the construction costs are higher than for the other types of house construction.

So if you don’t want to worry about “anything” yourself, you pay a significantly higher price (!) for building your house “from a single source”. The construction company or provider also only contracts out a whole series of trades to external companies, as it cannot carry out everything itself.

When it comes to assessing the costs of a detached house, the construction costs per square meter are always the decisive factor. This is the key parameter that every builder should use to make an assessment.

An example calculation: An average detached house should contain 150 sqm of living space with an 80 sqm basement. So we can calculate on average: 230 sqm x 3000 euros/sqm = 690,000 euros.

In the above calculation, an average house with medium equipment is calculated completely finished with the building standard of the year 2025. More on this in the rest of this article.

Why is a small house more expensive than a large house?

We see it again and again and for many people it is certainly not a new observation: a small house costs more per square meter than a large house. So it’s all about the construction costs per square meter again. Why is that? On the one hand, the infrastructure and technology per square meter (this applies to all building services, heating, ventilation, shading, lighting, etc.) is slightly cheaper if it is rolled out over a larger area or volume. On the other hand, the costs for the sub-trades are also somewhat lower. At least that is our experience.

Exact figures will follow here shortly once we have prepared the calculation example.

Why construction costs in Germany are almost the same everywhere

Even if it doesn’t seem logical to most people at first glance when it comes to construction costs in Germany. The building material (bricks, concrete, sand-lime brick, etc.), the fittings (windows, doors, interior fittings, etc.) and the labor cost the same everywhere in Germany. This is our experience from many projects and regions where we have compared and analyzed prices.
While the prices for building materials are somewhat lower in the south of Germany (where we are based) than in the north and east of Germany, the labor costs are somewhat higher.

Conclusion: In total, building a house or a detached house with the same fittings costs roughly the same in all regions of Germany. This is the result of competition among construction companies.

A comparison of the average construction costs per square meter with our neighboring countries shows: Building a house is more expensive in Austria and considerably more expensive in Switzerland than in Germany. Even in Italy, builders pay more for the construction of a single-family home – always in terms of “construction costs per square meter”.

Development of construction costs per sqm from 2010 to 2025

A review of the past 14 years clearly shows one thing: construction costs per square meter have risen significantly in Germany. Compared to the average construction costs, which were around 1450 euros per square meter of living space in 2010, construction costs today are at least 3500 to 4500 euros per square meter of living space. That is an increase of 141 percent!