How to Start a Furniture Restoration Business

How do you start a furniture restoration business from scratch?

Pick a lane, refinishing or upholstery, set up a ventilated shop space, buy sanding and finishing basics, price by the hour, then take paid repair work while you build a photo portfolio.

The fastest path to money is not a full refinish. It is small repair work: scratches, water rings, wobbly chairs, a snapped leg. Those jobs pay $30 to $500, need almost no equipment, and get you a customer list you can sell bigger work to later. Refinishing and reupholstery come next, once you know how long your own hands actually take on a piece.

Decide early whether you work in a shop or in the customer's home, because it changes which rules apply to you. Shop work is unlicensed in most states. On-site refinishing of cabinets and built-ins is a different business, and in California anything over $500 in construction services pulls you into CSLB contractor licensing.

• Choose your core service: wood repair and refinishing, reupholstery, chair caning and wicker, or on-site cabinet refinishing. Pick one to start.
• Find a space with real airflow. Sanding and solvent work in a closed garage is how people get hurt.
• Buy the repair kit first: random orbital sander and abrasives, benzyl-alcohol stripper, pipe and band clamps, glue (hide glue on antiques, because it is reversible), and Mohawk color-match toners for touch-up.
• Register the business, open a separate bank account, and get a general liability quote plus bailee's coverage for customer property.
• Set an hourly rate between $40 and $100 based on your region and skill, then build flat prices for common jobs from that number.
• Do three practice pieces you own or buy cheap. Time yourself with a stopwatch, not a memory. Photograph before and after in good light. That is your portfolio and your first real cost data.
• Call estate sale companies, antique dealers, interior designers and moving companies in your zip code. These are repeat referral sources, not one-time customers.
• Take small paid repairs for the first month. Deliver fast, ask for a review, and quote the bigger piece while you are standing in their dining room.

How much does it cost to start a furniture restoration business?

Add the line items and a garage start comes to about $1,500 to $2,850. A leased shop with an HVLP turbine, stocked finishes and dust control runs $8,500 to $16,600 in year one.

Nobody publishes a credible itemized startup total for an independent shop, so anyone quoting you one is guessing. The table below adds up real street prices item by item instead. The lean column totals $1,480 low and $2,836 high, which is where the $1,500 to $2,850 comes from. The shop column totals $8,497 low and $16,572 high, and that is before you pay yourself a dollar.

The one filed, verifiable number in this trade is the franchise route. Furniture Medic's total initial investment is $80,355 to $90,732, with one source citing $87,000 to $145,000, for a van-based, fully packaged build-out. That is the ceiling, not the target.

Buy the sprayer out of a job, not out of savings. Brush and wipe-on finishes will carry you for months, and a $1,000 turbine is a purchase you make the week after a customer who needs sprayed lacquer has already signed.

• Line items with a named model behind them are published prices. The generic ones are budget allowances, not quotes. Price them locally before you commit.
• Mohawk toner has no published list price. It is a per-can consumable that recurs every month, so treat any starter figure as an opening balance.

What licenses, certifications and insurance does a furniture restorer need?

Most states do not license shop work. California licenses custom upholsterers through BHGS, with a $420 biennial renewal. Carry general liability near $630 to $686 a year, plus bailee's coverage for customer property.

The honest summary: shop-based restoration is unlicensed in most of the country, California regulates the trade by name, and on-site refinishing can pull you into painting-contractor licensing wherever that class exists. No reliable state-by-state table for this trade exists in published form, so anyone handing you one is filling in blanks. Call your own state before you quote.

In California, the Bureau of Household Goods and Services licenses the home furnishings and bedding industry, and you must hold the license before you provide the service, not after your first job. BHGS enforces the Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation Act, which sets flammability and labeling rules for upholstered furniture and bedding, and it issues a registry number that identifies who built or rebuilt the piece. Custom upholsterer renewal is $420 every two years. If you refinish cabinets in a customer's home instead of in your shop, CSLB licensing applies to construction services over $500, and the C-33 Painting and Decorating class explicitly covers scraping, sanding and applying varnishes, shellacs, stains, fillers and waxes. That class needs four years of journeyperson-level experience within the last ten, a $450 application fee, a $200 initial license fee for a sole proprietor or $350 otherwise, and a contractor bond that rose to $25,000 on January 1, 2023.

• EPA Lead-Safe Certified Renovator: required for paid work that disturbs paint in pre-1978 homes, child care facilities and preschools. Strip a painted built-in or an old painted piece on site in a pre-1978 house and you are inside the RRP rule. Cleanup means HEPA vacuuming surfaces and objects, furniture included.
• The Professional Refinishing Group (prorestorers.org) is an accrediting body for restoration training. The AIC Wooden Artifacts Group, roughly 350 members, is the conservation side and the credential that opens museum and high-end antique work. Neither publishes a cost, so ask before you budget one.
• General liability has no published class for furniture refinishing itself. The two nearest classes are furniture stores at $57 a month and carpet and upholstery cleaners at $53 a month, so $630 to $686 a year. A business owner's policy that bundles liability and property averages $106 a month at $1 million per occurrence, $2 million aggregate, $1,000 deductible.
• Bailee's customers insurance is the one people skip and regret. Standard general liability explicitly excludes damage to property in your care, custody or control, which describes every piece in your shop. Bailee's is the inland marine policy that actually covers it, and its cost is quoted job to job rather than published.
• Workers' compensation is required from the first employee in 36 states. A few set higher thresholds: two in Virginia; three in Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, New Mexico and North Carolina; four in South Carolina and Florida outside construction; five in Alabama and Tennessee. Texas is the only state where a private employer may opt out entirely.

What should you charge for furniture restoration work?

Bill $40 to $100 an hour and quote flat rates from it. Minor touch-ups run $30 to $75, dining tables $150 to $1,200, and sofa reupholstery $900 to $2,500.

Every flat price you publish should start as an hours estimate. Labor is roughly 85 percent of a refinishing job, so materials cannot rescue a bad quote. Refinishing labor bills at $40 to $100 an hour and upholstery labor at $50 to $100. Metro pricing is a separate ladder: New York City refinishing averages $862 to $1,195 against national averages of $500 to $644, so 1.5x to 2x for identical work.

Take Maria, who brings in a 3 foot by 5 foot oak dining table with a hazed, ring-marked top. You quote $575, inside the $500 to $600 that a full strip, sand, four topcoats on the top and touched-up legs normally runs. Materials are $12 of Citristrip out of a $50 gallon, $20 in abrasives and $35 in stain and finish, so $67 total. That leaves $508 of labor. At 9 hands-on hours spread across four days of dry time you realized $56 an hour. At 12 hours you are at $42, the floor of the band. At 15 hours you are at $34 and you worked the week for less than your own posted rate.

Treat the published national averages as a sanity check, never a target. Three sources put refinishing at $500, $631 and $644 because their job mixes differ, and none of them knows how fast your hands are.

• Hand caning bills by the hole, which surprises every customer: $6.50 to $12.00 per drilled hole plus materials. On a 74-hole seat that is $481 to $888. A second published rate of $4 a hole puts the same seat at $296, so state which one you use before you start. Some caners bill hourly at $100 to $250 plus $50 to $150 in materials.
• On-site cabinet refinishing is priced per linear foot: $40 to $100, with one owner-operator publishing $38. A typical kitchen totals $1,500 to $5,000, around $3,100 average.
• Do not confuse refinishing with refacing. Refacing is a separate, higher service at $100 to $250 per linear foot and $4,000 to $9,500 for a typical kitchen.
• Antique restoration spans $40 to as much as $3,800 depending on the piece. Quote these hourly with a not-to-exceed, never flat.
• Take a 50 percent deposit on anything over $300. On the $575 table that is $288 up front, which covers your $67 in materials four times over.

How do you get your first furniture restoration customers?

Work the local channels first: estate sales, antique dealers, interior designers, moving companies and Facebook Marketplace. Photograph every before and after in good light. One $300 flyer run can return over $1,000 in bookings.

Say you spend $300 printing 2,000 door hangers and walk them through two older neighborhoods over three weekends. Five people call and three book: two $65 touch-ups and a set of four dining chairs at $250 each. That is $130 plus $1,000, so $1,130 of work. Materials across all of it run under $120, so $1,130 minus $300 minus $120 leaves about $710 clear. The chair customer is the one that matters. A family that trusts you with four chairs calls you about the table in the same room six months later.

Referral partners beat advertising in this trade because they see the damaged piece before the owner has decided what to do with it. An estate sale company works houses full of furniture that sells for more restored. A moving company breaks something most weeks and needs a repair person who answers the phone. Give both a stack of cards and a same-week turnaround promise on small repairs, then actually hold it.

• Estate sale and auction companies: they need pieces cleaned up before a sale and they see volume you never will.
• Antique dealers and consignment shops: standing repair work, and they refer their own customers.
• Interior designers: the highest-ticket referrals in the trade. One designer can carry a shop.
• Moving companies and van lines: damage claims are a steady, unglamorous income floor that pays on invoice, not on emotion.
• Facebook Marketplace and local buy-sell groups: list restored pieces you bought cheap. Every listing is an ad for your service.
• Google Business Profile with 20 real before-and-after photos. This trade sells on images, and lighting is the number one photo problem people have.
• Ask every finished customer for a review before you unload the piece from the truck, not by email three days later.

What tools and equipment does a furniture restoration shop need?

A good random orbital sander, benzyl-alcohol stripper, clamps, and color-match toners cover repair work. Spraying is the real jump: a Fuji Q4 Platinum HVLP turbine runs $1,000 to $2,000.

The methylene chloride ban changed the shop. EPA finalized it on April 30, 2024, consumer use ended May 5, 2025, and most commercial applications became prohibited on April 28, 2026. Furniture refinishing got a narrow carve-out that lets specific uses continue with workplace protections until May 8, 2029, and then that ends too. At least 88 people have died from acute exposure since 1980. The replacement is a benzyl-alcohol gel like Citristrip, no methylene chloride and no NMP, at about $50 a gallon. It works, and it works far slower, which lands directly on labor hours in a job that is already 85 percent labor. Add the hours to the quote or eat them.

Dust is the other regulated hazard. OSHA sets a permissible exposure limit of 5 mg per cubic meter as an 8-hour average for hardwood and softwood dust, a 10 mg short-term limit, and 2.5 for western red cedar. NIOSH and ACGIH both recommend 1 mg. The awkward part: sanders, shapers and routers produce the most dust, and conventional exhaust is least effective on exactly those tools. Your busiest tool is the one your extraction fights.

• NFPA 33 covers woodworking finishing rooms directly. Nitrocellulose lacquer overspray can spontaneously ignite, so the standard requires either a water-wash booth or daily cleaning of dry filters and baffles. Daily, not seasonally.
• Only the amount of flammable material needed for immediate use may sit in the spray area. Everything else belongs in an approved cabinet or room.
• Mohawk Finishing Products moves through Pro Cabinet Supply, The Woodworking Shop and Heritage Finishing Products. Open a distributor account early; toners are a per-can consumable, not a one-time buy.

What should the first 90 days of a furniture restoration business look like?

Weeks one and two set up the shop and price list. Weeks three to six chase small paid repairs. Weeks seven to twelve land your first full refinish and reupholstery jobs.

The milestone that matters at day 90 is not revenue. It is knowing your real hours per job type. Once you can predict that a dining chair takes you 3 hours and not 5, every quote you write after that is profitable. On a $250 chair, 3 hours is $83 an hour and 5 hours is $50, and the only difference between those two outcomes is data you either collected or did not. Track hands-on time on every single piece from day one.

What mistakes kill new furniture restoration businesses?

Underpricing labor is the big one, because labor is about 85 percent of a refinishing job. Close behind: restoring worthless pieces, bad photos, no bailee's insurance, and an unsafe spray setup.

One shop owner's stated reason for quitting refinishing was blunt: it always took more work to do than he could charge for. That is the structural trap of an 85 percent labor business. There is no material margin to absorb a bad hours estimate, so a job you quoted at 6 hours and finished in 10 does not earn less, it earns nothing.

• Underpricing against labor intensity. Time yourself on real pieces before you publish flat rates, and add hours for the slower benzyl-alcohol strippers you are now required to use.
• Taking pieces whose finished value can never cover the labor. Stripping a cheap laminate bookcase burns the same hours as stripping an oak dresser worth ten times more. Say no out loud.
• Ignoring that the market is shrinking. US furniture repair and reupholstery was about $2.0 billion in 2025, spread across 17,917 firms counted in 2023, and IBISWorld projects decline over the next five years. Modern furnishings are in style and material rules got tighter. You need a niche, not a general shop.
• Not budgeting for lumpy cash flow. Projects vary wildly in size and timing, so income is inconsistent at the start. Keep three months of personal expenses aside before you quit anything.
• Bad photography. Scroll-stopping images are how refinished furniture sells, and lighting is the single biggest problem most people have. A $150 light kit pays for itself on one listing.
• Assuming general liability covers customer property. It explicitly does not. The antique sitting in your uninsured shop is a loss you carry personally until you buy bailee's coverage.
• Running a non-compliant spray operation. Most small woodworking and cabinet finishing shops are not fully compliant, commonly spraying solvent material in spaces never designed for it, or in booths that have not been inspected in years.

Is a furniture restoration business worth starting?

It works if you sell hours well. Industry revenue is about $2.0 billion across 17,917 firms, roughly $112,000 each. Year one is usually modest, and the market is projected to shrink.

Be honest with yourself about year one. The most concrete first-hand account available describes a two-person operation working an average of 60 hours a week between them and netting about $15,000 in year one, with the author noting a hardworking beginner should match or beat that. It is an old account, so read it as a shape rather than a dollar figure. Owner-income claims of $50,000 to $150,000, or a solo shop at $7,000 a month, circulate widely but come from unverified business-plan content sites. Treat them as ceilings some people reach, not forecasts.

The math that is solid is simple. Labor is about 85 percent of job cost, so revenue tracks bench hours almost linearly. At $60 an hour realized, 25 billable hours a week is $1,500 a week and $78,000 a year before overhead. You cannot bill 40 of 40, because quoting, pickup, delivery and dry time are all unpaid. That capacity ceiling is why the shops that make real money either push their rate into the metro band or specialize into antique and designer work where the rate is not questioned.

• Revenue is capacity-bound, not demand-bound, in the first two years. Your constraint is hours, not customers.
• Metro pricing is a real lever. New York City refinishing averages $862 to $1,195 against roughly $500 to $644 nationally, on the same table.
• Materials are a small fraction of revenue, which means a well-run shop keeps most of what it bills, and also that there is nothing to cut when a job runs long.
• The $112,000 per firm figure combines 2025 revenue with a 2023 firm count, and it averages 30-year-old shops with month-old ones. It is a landscape number, not a target.
• The ceiling with a crew is higher but unquantified in published data. What is certain is that each added bench hand adds billable hours in a business where hours are the product.

Is furniture restoration work seasonal, and when is the busy season?

There is no reliable month-by-month data for this trade. Nearby restoration industries ramp in March and peak near Memorial Day, and winter is slow for most service trades. Plan for lumpy cash flow.

Anyone who tells you exactly which month is dead in furniture restoration is guessing, because no trade-specific demand curve has been published. What follows is drawn from adjacent industries and from how customers behave, so use it as a planning frame and overwrite it with your own booking data after year one.

How do you compete with a franchise like Furniture Medic?

Not on price. A Furniture Medic franchise costs $80,355 to $90,732 to open and pays 7 percent royalty forever. Match their rate, keep the overhead difference, and beat them on turnaround and niche work.

Run the numbers the franchisee has to cover. Total initial investment is filed at $80,355 to $90,732, with one source citing $87,000 to $145,000. The franchise fee alone runs up to $33,000, the royalty is 7.0 percent of revenue, and signing requires $25,000 liquid and $100,000 net worth. On that same $575 table refinish, 7 percent is $40 off the top before a single hour is billed, and it comes off every job for the life of the agreement. Your $1,500 garage start carries none of it.

What the money buys is a system, a van build-out, brand recognition and up to 80 percent financing on the franchise fee plus equipment. Those are real advantages on insurance and moving-company contract work, where a claims adjuster wants a national name on the invoice. They are weak advantages with a homeowner who found you through her designer and scrolled eleven before-and-after photos of dressers exactly like hers.

• Win on turnaround. A solo shop can quote in a day and finish a repair in a week. Franchise dispatch cannot always match that.
• Win on the niche they do not staff for: hand caning, period-correct finishes, high-end reupholstery, museum-adjacent conservation work.
• Do not undercut. Their floor is set by overhead you do not carry, so price at their number and bank the 7 percent they send upstream.
• Take the work they decline. Franchises optimize for volume repair. Complex antique restoration and one-off pieces route to independents.