Ziggu Research · Flanders and Brussels · Choice decisions 2021 to 2026
The Upgrade Benchmark 2026
How much buyers of new-build homes in Flanders and Brussels spent on upgrades, what budget developers included in the sale price for the kitchen, the bathroom and the floors, how much buyers added on top of that budget, and how both moved between 2021 and 2025, with a first look at 2026.
About the data. All data in this study is anonymised. Figures were computed on aggregated records from the Ziggu platform; no developer, project or person is identified anywhere on this page. All amounts are excluding VAT.
In 3,084 new-build homes from 150 projects in Flanders and Brussels whose buyer guidance ran through Ziggu, a deliberate selection from more than 35,000 homes on the platform, the median home carried €12,965 of upgrades on top of the sale price, excluding VAT, and 91.9% of homes carried some. For the kitchen, buyers added a median of €5,476 on top of a median included budget of €12,000. How high that budget was explained little of what buyers added: in the middle half of kitchen budgets, buyers added about the same amount.
In Belgian new-build sales, the sale price includes a budget for the finishes a buyer chooses: a kitchen, sanitary ware, floor and wall tiles. Whatever the buyer picks above that budget, and every option outside it, is billed as upgrade work. A hundred homes produce several thousand of these decisions, each with an included budget, an approved quote and a status.
This benchmark measured those decisions as developers recorded them in their buyer portal: what was included in the sale price, what the buyer approved, and therefore what the buyer paid on top. It answers four questions. How much upgrade work did a home carry in total? What budget was normal per package and home type, and did a higher budget change what buyers added? How did budgets and surcharges move between 2021 and 2025? And did the total per home rise with them?
The figures at a glance
Method
A selection, not the whole platform. More than 35,000 homes in multi-unit projects run their buyer guidance through Ziggu. This benchmark used 3,084 of them, from 150 projects in Flanders and Brussels: homes whose choice phase was complete and whose developer recorded both the included budget and the approved price. Only those homes show what a buyer actually paid on top. Developers who record their prices this consistently may differ from the rest, so the figures may sit slightly above the market average.
Upgrade value. The approved quote minus the budget included in the sale price, excluding VAT. Where there was no budget, the full quote counts. Only approved choices count, and summary totals were left out so that nothing was counted twice. Medians are taken across homes, never across developers.
Completed homes. A home counted once none of its choices had changed for nine months and its first choice fell between 2021 and 2023. The deed is no end marker: in Belgium, buyers keep choosing after it.
Packages, trends and options. Package figures for the kitchen, bathroom and floors use homes where every choice in that package was closed, from 2024 on, so they cannot be added up into a per-home total. Trends compare developers present in both years, so newer projects of the same companies, and 2026 is treated as a running year. Options where a single developer dominates are not reported.
Finding 1
How much did a new-build home carry in upgrades?
€12,965 at the median home, excluding VAT, across 3,084 homes from 150 projects, and 91.9% of homes carried some upgrade value. The distribution was skewed: a quarter of homes stayed under €4,350, a quarter went above €27,269, and the top tenth above €49,817. The mean, €20,519, was pulled up by that tail and describes few actual buyers.
Upgrade value per home by percentile, excluding VAT. Bars are scaled to the 90th percentile. Base: 3,084 homes, first decision 2021 to 2023.
Finding 2
What budget did developers include for the kitchen, the bathroom and the floors?
For decisions from 2024 to 2026, the median included kitchen budget was €12,000 and the median sanitary budget €4,993, excluding VAT. Both rose with the size of the home. The kitchen budget went from €7,469 in a one-bedroom home to €12,000 with two bedrooms and €14,500 with three. For floors and wall tiles, most developers set no lump-sum budget at all; where they did, the median was €5,712.
Median included budget per package and number of bedrooms, excluding VAT, decisions 2024 to 2026. Homes with a budget for that package only.
The middle half of kitchen budgets lay between €9,917 and €15,000. The sanitary budget also rose with the home, from a median of €4,132 with one bedroom to €6,000 with three, and its middle half lay between €4,004 and €6,500. The floor figure covers only homes with a lump-sum floor budget. Homes with four or more bedrooms and penthouses are not reported separately: too few homes.
Finding 3
How much did buyers add on top, and did a higher budget change that?
Most buyers paid something on top: 82.0% for the kitchen, 77.6% for sanitary ware and 85.0% for floors and tiles. The median surcharge was €5,476 for the kitchen, €1,063 for sanitary ware and €2,038 for floors and tiles, excluding VAT. How high the budget was explained little of it. The correlation between budget and surcharge per home was weak for every package, between 0.17 and 0.26, and stayed weak when each developer was compared only with itself (0.13 to 0.20).
In the middle of the market, buyers added about the same amount whatever the budget. Homes in the second quarter of kitchen budgets (median budget €10,331) added a median €5,850; homes in the third quarter (median budget €12,500) added €5,502. Only at the edges did it move: the lowest quarter added €4,132, and the highest quarter, with a median budget of €20,661, added €10,198. For sanitary ware the surcharge stayed between €1,316 and €1,948 in every quarter except the lowest. Floors and tiles were the exception: there the surcharge rose with the budget, on a small base.
Median kitchen surcharge per quarter of the included kitchen budget, excluding VAT, decisions 2024 to 2026. Homes with a kitchen budget only.
What did move the surcharge was the size of the home. The median kitchen surcharge was €2,337 in one-bedroom homes, €5,341 with two bedrooms and €7,821 with three.
Caveat. This is a pattern across homes, not a test of what happens when one developer changes its budget. A developer that raises the budget may also change its range, its showroom or its buyers.
The spread was wide. For the kitchen, the middle half of buyers added between €986 and €12,748, and one in ten added more than €22,670. These figures cover decisions 2024 to 2026; homes without a budget count with their full quote. The comparison by budget quarter uses homes with a budget only.
Finding 4
How did budgets and surcharges move between 2021 and 2025?
With the same developers, the kitchen cost the buyer almost 30% more in 2025 than in 2021, and most of that rise came through the budget. For homes with a kitchen budget, the median total kitchen value, budget plus surcharge, went from €15,500 in 2021 to €20,081 in 2025 (+29.6%). The included budget rose from €10,000 to €12,500 (+25.0%), while the surcharge on top moved between €4,258 and €5,569 with no clear direction, ending at €4,463 in 2025. For sanitary ware the budget stayed at €4,500 and the total rose from €6,398 to €7,218.
These figures compare only developers whose homes appear in both 2021 and 2025, so each year shows newer projects of the same companies, and only homes with a kitchen budget, so budget, surcharge and total describe the same homes. Across all developers the kitchen surcharge more than doubled, from €2,566 to €5,485, but that mainly reflects developers with higher upgrade levels who started using Ziggu later. It describes who was in the data, not a market trend.
Median included kitchen budget, median surcharge on top and median total kitchen value (budget plus surcharge) per year of the home’s first kitchen decision, excluding VAT. Developers present in both 2021 and 2025, homes with a kitchen budget. The median total is not the sum of the two other medians. 2024 is not shown: too few homes from these developers that year.
For floors and tiles the later years rest on too few homes from these developers to call a trend. For 2026, a running year, too few kitchen choices are finished to say anything yet.
Finding 5
Did the total upgrade value per home rise as well?
Barely. For homes whose whole choice phase was finished, the median upgrade value per home across all developers was €11,806 for homes that started in 2021 and €12,530 for homes that started in 2024. Within those homes the kitchen took a slightly larger share of all upgrade value: 27.2%, against 24.4%.
Two other shifts were checked. Developers did build more into the sale price: with the same developers the kitchen budget rose by 25.0%, and buyers kept adding about the same amount on top, so the kitchen as a whole cost more. And buyers did not take fewer paid options: paid choices outside the three packages went from 3.44 to 3.71 per home.
Homes that started in 2024 are only partly finished, so their figure describes the faster choice phases of that year. Homes that started in 2025 are left out: too few were finished.
Finding 6
Which options did buyers choose when a developer offered them, and what did they pay?
Take-up depended heavily on the option. More than half of the buyers who were offered solar panels took them (56.6%), as did 53.0% for insect screens and 47.7% for an EV charging point. Painting was chosen less often (28.0%) but was one of the larger single options, at a median of €6,544 per home that chose it.
Share of buyers who chose the option when their developer offered it, with the median amount per home that chose it, excluding VAT. Homes with a completed choice phase.
The share is of the buyers to whom the developer offered the option, not of all buyers. Options offered at only a few developers, such as lighting packages, built-in wardrobes, roller shutters, home automation, a fireplace or garden landscaping, are not reported here as market figures.
What this study does not show
- It does not show that any software raises upgrade revenue. Every developer here used the same platform. There is no comparison group and no before-and-after, so nothing on this page says what changes when a developer starts using a tool. To see where your own projects stand against these figures, use the Upgrade Benchmark tool.
- The sample is developers who record their upgrade prices. Many developers record their buyers’ choices in Ziggu but not the prices; those homes cannot be measured. Recording prices consistently is plausibly a habit of the better organised, so the figures may sit slightly above the market average. Lowering the threshold from half to a quarter of decisions with a recorded price moved the median per home from €12,965 to €11,130.
- Packages were identified by name. A kitchen decision named only by its supplier or by a number was not counted as a kitchen. The package figures describe the decisions that carry a recognisable name.
- No recent total. Homes that started their choice phase in 2025 or later were mostly not finished, so the study does not say how the total upgrade value per home moved in the most recent years.
- No share of the sale price. The study does not express upgrades as a percentage of the price of the home.
- Prices, not margin. Every figure is an approved price excluding VAT. What a developer earned on an upgrade after paying the supplier is not in this data.
- One region. These were multi-unit residential projects in Flanders and Brussels.
Why Ziggu publishes this
Many developers hold back on offering upgrades. Proposing options, collecting the buyer’s choices and following up every approval is extra work, and they are not sure it will pay off. Ziggu makes it easier to propose upgrades and manage them in one place, from the first offer to the approved quote. We hope these figures show that the extra work does pay off: 91.9% of the homes in this benchmark carried upgrade value, with a median of €12,965 per home. That helps developers get more margin from the same project. Even more important to us, it gives homebuyers a carefree journey that takes no extra effort.
Resources
- Upgrade Benchmark tool: compare your own budgets and surcharges with the figures in this study.
How to cite this study
Ziggu (2026). The Upgrade Benchmark 2026. Upgrade decisions in 3,084 new-build homes from 150 projects spread across Flanders and Brussels whose buyer guidance ran through Ziggu, choice decisions 2021 to 2026, amounts excluding VAT. https://ziggu.io/research/upgrade-benchmark-2026
