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.