Smart home cost

Smart home pricing is unlike most home services because the range is genuinely enormous. A doorbell camera and two smart plugs is a weekend and under a hundred dollars. Whole-home lighting control with in-wall switches, motorized shades, wired cameras and a rack in the basement is a five-figure project with a design phase. Angi's 2026 figures of roughly $200 to $1,525 describe the middle of that spread, not the ceiling.

The line item that surprises people is electrical labor. Anything that replaces a wall switch or outlet is line-voltage work. Many smart switches also require a neutral wire in the switch box, and older homes frequently do not have one — adding it means running new cable and often patching drywall. Get a walkthrough with an electrician before you buy a box of switches.

The second surprise is recurring cost. Camera cloud storage, professional monitoring, and some ecosystem features are subscriptions. Add them up annually before you commit to a platform — over five years the subscriptions can exceed the hardware.

One genuinely good-value purchase: an ENERGY STAR certified smart thermostat. ENERGY STAR states savings average approximately 8% of heating and cooling bills, or about $50 per year, and notes that heating and cooling is almost half of the typical household energy bill at more than $900 a year. That is a modest but real return on a comparatively cheap device.

How to choose

Start with one room, not the whole house

Buy a small set, live with it for a month, then expand. Most abandoned smart home gear was bought all at once.

Separate device cost from labor cost

Ask any installer to quote hardware and labor separately so you can shop the hardware yourself if you want.

Price the subscriptions over five years

Camera storage and monitoring fees are the real long-term cost of most systems.

Get an electrician to check switch boxes first

Missing neutral wires are common in older homes and turn a cheap switch swap into a wiring job.

Budget for the network

Dozens of devices need reliable Wi-Fi coverage. A mesh upgrade is often a prerequisite, not an extra.