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What reupholstery actually costs in California

Reupholstering a dining chair in California runs roughly $450 to $700, an armchair $1,500 to $2,500, and a three-seat sofa $4,000 to $6,500, before fabric. Fabric is charged separately by the yard. Almost no shop publishes these figures, so treat any number you find as a starting point rather than a quote.

Here's the first thing to know, and it's annoying: of the 185 furniture workrooms listed here, not one publishes a price list.

I went looking. That's what this site is built to find out, what each shop says about itself, in its own words, and on price, the answer across the whole of California is silence. A handful mention a free estimate. Nobody says what a sofa costs.

That silence isn't shops being cagey. It's the job. A sofa's price depends on the frame underneath it, how many yards it eats, whether the springs are sound, and whether somebody has been at it before with a staple gun and bad intentions. Quote that blind and you either lose money or scare off a customer who'd have been fine.

But you still need a number to plan around. So here are the ones that exist.

The published figures

These come from Valley Studio in Los Angeles, trading since 1985, one of the very few California shops to put ranges in public:

All of these exclude fabric.

Why that sofa number is double what you read somewhere else

If you have already searched this, you have seen figures like $600 to $4,000, or an average around $1,800. Those are national numbers and they are not wrong. They are just answering a different question.

Three things pull them apart.

They blend piece types. A national average includes loveseats, wing chairs and dining seats. Small pieces drag the mean down hard. A separate San Francisco metro average puts a mid-range job at $873 to $1,219, which looks like it contradicts the sofa figure until you notice it is an average across piece types rather than a sofa price.

They blend job depth. "Reupholstery" covers pulling old fabric off and stapling new fabric on, and it also covers stripping to the frame, re-tying springs, replacing foam and rebuilding the deck. Same word, three times the labour.

Geography does most of the rest. The published spread runs roughly $700 to $1,500 for a basic three-seat sofa in a low-cost market, $1,000 to $2,000 in a typical suburban one, and $1,600 to $3,000 and upward in expensive cities. California is the third bucket, and the Los Angeles workroom quoted above is at the deep end of it: an established shop doing full rebuilds rather than recovers.

So use the national averages to know you are not being robbed. Use the California figures to plan.

Fabric is a separate bill, and it's not small

Upholstery is quoted as labour plus materials, and materials means yardage. A three-seat sofa can take 14 to 18 yards. At $40 a yard that's another $560 to $720; at $90 a yard for something heavy and woven, closer to $1,600.

Published yardage guides run 5 to 18 yards for loveseats and smaller pieces and 18 to 36 for large sofas and sectionals, so if a shop quotes you 30 yards for a sectional, that is the trade being normal rather than the trade being greedy.

Fabric itself spans $30 to $350 a yard once you include the designer books, though $30 to $60 covers most of what people actually choose.

You can supply your own, the trade calls it COM, "customer's own material", and where shops charge a handling fee for it, published figures sit around $15 to $20 per yard. That fee exists because your fabric arriving short, flawed or railroaded the wrong way becomes the shop's problem, and they'd rather it didn't become their loss too.

The lines people forget to budget for

Why the estimate matters more than the range

Given all that, the number that actually governs what you pay is the estimate, not any figure on this page. Some useful arithmetic from the shops listed here:

That last one is worth more than it sounds. Getting an armchair into a car to collect four quotes is most of a Saturday. Sending four shops the same three photographs is twenty minutes, and the shops that accept photos have decided that's a reasonable way to work.

The catch is that a photo quote is provisional by definition. Nobody can see a cracked rail or perished webbing in a phone picture. Expect the number to move once somebody has the piece on a bench.

What makes a quote go up

Roughly in order of how often it bites:

  1. The frame needs work. 32 of the 185 shops here do frame repair and 27 do spring replacement, which tells you it's common enough to be a named service rather than a rarity.
  2. Somebody got there first. Stripping a previous bad job is billable time before the real work starts.
  3. The fabric has a pattern that has to line up. Matching a repeat across a sofa back costs yardage and hours.
  4. It's an antique. 71 shops here name antique restoration as a specialism, and they charge for the care it needs.
  5. The springs are hand-tied. Counterintuitive, this one. Eight-way hand-tied springs are the mark of a good frame, and re-tying them is slow skilled work that costs more than dropping in new serpentine wire. Good news about the sofa, worse news about the invoice.

So is it worth it?

That's a different question with a real answer, and it's the one worth asking before you collect any quotes. I've written it up separately: reupholster or replace.

When you're ready to get numbers, the shops are listed by city with what each one takes on and how it quotes.