Sofas, beds, mattresses, dining tables, rugs and dressers carry real prices read at the shop that sells them, with the date on every row. Every other category is still sample data.

Apartment furnishing cost calculator: the sums it does

The calculator is the front page. It takes one input — how many people live in the home — and returns two numbers: what the 21-item list costs to buy new, and what the eight powered items cost to run each month. This page is the arithmetic behind both, so you can check it or redo it yourself.

A calculator you cannot check is a number with a button on it.

Start it at1 person 2 people 3 people 4+ people

The two sums

total = sum over 21 items of ( price of the chosen option × quantity for this household ) monthly power = ( sum of each powered item's kWh per year ) × $0.1834 ÷ 12 Nothing else enters either line. No delivery, no assembly, no sales tax, no financing, no allowance for a room being an odd shape.

What changes when you change the household size

Two things, and they are worth keeping apart. Size changes which option is picked by default: a bigger household gets a bigger fridge, a wider sofa, a longer table. Quantity changes how many of the item the list holds. Eight of the 21 items change in number, and they are not the same eight that draw power — the lamp is the only item on both lists.

Item	Rule	1	2	3	4+
Lamp	Three light sources per living space	1	2	2	3
Chairs	One chair per seat at the table	2	4	6	8
Mattress	Queen for one, king for two, plus a single bed per extra person	1	1	2	3
Bed	One frame per mattress	1	1	2	3
Bedside Table	One beside each sleeper	1	2	3	4
Dresser	About three drawers per person	1	1	2	2
Sheets	Two sets per bed	1	1	2	3
Towels	Two per person	1	2	3	4

The other 13 items stay at one per home however many people live there. The sizing rules that decide which option is picked — 14 of them — are on the method page, together with what we could and could not find behind them.

Four lists, worked through

These are the four lists the calculator draws before anyone touches anything: the cheapest option that fits, in every category. Open one and every line is yours to change.

Household	Items	Buy new	kWh a year	Power a month	Open it
one person	21	$4,444	1,260	$19.26	Open
two people	21	$5,456	1,723	$26.33	Open
three people	21	$9,567	2,067	$31.59	Open
four or more people	21	$14,630	2,445	$37.37	Open

The buy-new column is the one number people come here for, and it is the one to trust least far: it is the sum of 21 lines of which 6 categories carry a price read at the shop and the rest are samples. The kWh column is our own category assumption for each powered item, not a label reading from a specific model.

What it will not do

It will not tell you whether the sofa fits. We hold the width of the sofas we carry and the size of the box they ship in, but we never ask for your doorway, so nothing is checked against your home. Measure the door.
It will not price the used market, delivery, assembly or sales tax.
It will not compare a product across shops in most categories. Furniture is rarely the same item at two retailers, so a price comparison would mostly be an illusion; where we do hold more than one shop for the same item, the row shows them.
It will not keep your list. The list lives in your own browser and in the link you copy. There is no account and no server copy. What we do count is six anonymous events, listed one by one on the privacy page.

Questions

What does the calculator ask for?

One thing: how many people live in the home. Everything else follows from that. It never asks for room measurements, a door width, an address, an email or an account, and the list you build stays in your own browser.

How does it work out the total?

For each of the 21 items it takes the option you picked, or the cheapest one that fits your household size if you have not picked, multiplies by how many of that item the household needs, and adds the 21 lines up. The monthly power figure is a separate sum over the eight items that draw power.

Are the prices live?

No, and nothing on this site updates by itself. 6 of the 21 categories carry a price read by hand at the shop's own page, with the date on every row; the rest are sample figures and say so. Shops change prices daily, so the price at the till is the real one.