What a shell form fit-out costs in Malta

Most property in Malta is sold in shell form. The building is structurally finished, the services reach the door, and everything inside is bare. What you have bought is a volume, not a home, and the gap between the two is the number this article is about.

The figures below are the rate card behind the budget calculator on this site. They are our own published rates for our own work, which is the only honest thing to call them — they are not a Malta-wide market average, because no such published figure exists.

The trades, per square metre

A shell form fit-out is ten trades in sequence. Each has a rate per square metre of floor area, and each has four tiers.

Those are apartment rates. A villa costs more per square metre for the same specification, for two separate reasons: every trade carries a 15% uplift, and above Basic a villa also picks up external works, which an apartment has none of.

The villa row is what the calculator shows as its Shell Form Subtotal, so those are the figures to compare a quote against.

The spread is the point. The same apartment finished at Basic and at Ultimate Designer differs by roughly 3.6 times on the fit-out alone, and the two tiers describe the same list of trades doing the same jobs.

Where the money actually goes

Two lines carry most of the variance. External doors and windows run from €78 to €300 per square metre, and floor and wall tiling from €66 to €300. Between them they are about 43% of the Basic total and about 50% of the Ultimate total.

That has a practical consequence. If a budget is tight, the trades to economise on are not the ones people usually pick. Insulation moves €38/sqm across the whole range; screed moves €18. Neither will rescue a budget, and insulation is the one line you cannot revisit later without taking the finishes off again.

Aperture specification is where the number is really decided — and it is also the decision that most changes how the property feels day to day.

What is not in the per-square-metre figure

Three things are priced on their own footprint rather than on the property's floor area, because they do not scale with it:

• Kitchen — €960, €1,920, €3,360 or €6,000 per square metre of kitchen. The room is

assumed to be 15 sqm in a property of 100 sqm or more, which at Luxury is €28,800. Below 100 sqm it scales with the floor area — 15% of it, with a 6 sqm floor — because a 15 sqm kitchen in a small apartment is a run of units along one wall of an open-plan room, not a room of its own.

• Bathrooms — €720, €1,440, €3,000 or €5,400 per square metre, against an assumed

6 sqm room, per bathroom. At Luxury that is €8,640 a bathroom.

• Pool — €1,440 to €5,400 per square metre for a villa; €2,160 to €8,400 for an

apartment terrace pool

A terrace pool costs more than a ground-level one at every tier, and by a wide margin at the top. Access and structural loading are the reason: the slab has to carry the water, and everything arrives through a building rather than across a garden.

Villas also carry an external works rate of €0 to €96 per square metre depending on tier. At Basic it is zero, which is honest rather than generous — Basic assumes you are not doing the outside yet.

Working an example

A 120 sqm apartment, Luxury tier, two bathrooms and a kitchen:

1. Fit-out: 120 sqm × €480 = €57,600
2. Kitchen: 15 sqm × €1,920 = €28,800 (120 sqm is above the 100 sqm threshold, so the full 15 sqm applies)
3. Bathrooms: 2 × 6 sqm × €1,440 = €17,280

That is €103,680, and it is a budget rather than a quote. Note how much of it is not the fit-out: the kitchen and two bathrooms are 44% of the total on their own. The calculator will do the same arithmetic with your own numbers in about a minute.

Why a survey still changes the figure

Rates per square metre assume a shell that behaves like a shell. The things that move a real project away from the calculation are all site conditions: how level the slab actually is, whether the openings are where the drawings say, how services arrive, and — in an apartment — what the condominium will allow and when deliveries can use the lift.

None of that is visible from a floor area. It is why every number on this site is described as a budget, and why the next step is someone standing in the property.

The honest limitation

These rates are ours. We publish them because a contractor who will not tell you the rate until after the survey is asking you to commit before you can compare. But they are one firm's rates, and we have no independent benchmark to set them against, because nobody in Malta publishes one.

If you get a quote that differs sharply from these figures, the useful question is not who is right — it is which trades and which tier the other quote assumes. Most large discrepancies in Malta fit-out pricing turn out to be specification differences that nobody wrote down.