"How much does a home theater room cost?" This is one of the most common questions we get, and it can be difficult to estimate a budget without knowing the details of the project. Just as it would be difficult to tell someone how much a house costs. They come in all different shapes and sizes, and nearly every aspect of a home can be customized. In order to calculate how much it will cost to build a home theater, you first need to nail down some of the specifics.

This article is part of our Home Theater Design Series that covers virtually everything about designing a home theater. In addition to our world-class home theater design tool, we've given you everything you need to begin your home theater journey in our Home Theater Central.

What is a True Custom Home Theater Room?

A home theater is a dedicated room in your house built for the purpose of enjoying movies, television, sports, and gaming. These rooms are designed to provide a true cinema experience -- they’re typically a closed room (to give you complete control of light and sound) and feature a front-projector instead of a TV. Essentially, this is just a consumer version of what you would expect to find at your local movie theater.

If you’re looking for a more multi-purpose family room with a TV, perhaps something open to your kitchen or used in a variety of ways other than entertainment, this is typically referred to as a Media Room. We have plenty of thoughts and experience when it comes to media room design, but that is a discussion for another day.

As we’ve heard from thousands of customers over the years, a well-designed home theater room will quickly become your favorite room in the house. As with anything, the devil is in the details. Let’s take a look at what it will take to help you start putting a budget together for your dedicated home theater.

Room Design, Layout, and Acoustics

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you already have a finished room picked out. Perhaps it’s a bonus room above the garage, a spare bedroom, or a finished basement. If you do not have a finished room, you can probably expect between $50 to $250 per square foot to build out a room from scratch. Of course, this also depends on your location, the level of construction needed, and the quality of materials you choose.

Once you’ve picked the room, you may be excited to jump straight into picking out all of the gear and the popcorn machine, but you’re forgetting the most important and most often overlooked aspect of any custom home theater project–the room design.

It never ceases to amaze us when we find a room full of great equipment that was put in the wrong places or in a room that sounded awful acoustically! Getting this right requires knowledge of how the speakers will react with the room and usually requires taking measurements, doing some tests, and creating some drawings to make sure everything is perfect.

(Keep in mind that if you want multiple rows of seating, expect riser construction to cost in the $1,800-$3,000 range.)

This includes determining:

• Placement of your screen and front projector (and choosing the right size screen)
• Seating configuration (using sight lines to ensure optimal viewing for all)
• Speaker placement and acoustic needs

Acoustic Treatments

While it’s nice to have a beautiful picture and loud booming sound effects, when it all comes down to it, the most important part of a movie is the dialogue. If you can’t understand the dialogue, you can’t follow along with the plot. If you can understand the dialogue AND hear all the subtle emotions in the characters' voices, you will be magically transported to feeling like you are part of the movie.

Acoustic treatments can make average equipment sound great and great equipment sound amazing! You can spend as little as $500 for some basic panels up to $10,000-$30,000, depending on the size of your room and how far you want to take it. At Audio Advice, we have been designing home theaters for over 25 years. In that time, we have never had a client tell us they could not hear a huge improvement after we installed their acoustic treatments.

Work With a Professional to Design Your Room

Historically, home theater companies would charge between $1,000 and $3,500 to design most home theater, with the exception being top of the line theaters or screening rooms that cost $15,000 or more for professional design. However, several years ago Audio Advice released its patented home theater design tool for free to the public, thus allowing anyone to do a design on their own that used to cost $1,000 or more.

Even if you use our Home Theater Design tool, we highly recommend working with a professional company to customize the design and details. There are two options for doing this. For most theaters, there are usually several qualified companies in each state, including a growing number of Audio Advice local showrooms around the country. The other option is to work with the Audio Advice online team. In this case, we have world-renowned specialists who can remotely work with you to design your perfect theater with full specifications and 3D design.

For ultra high end theaters and private screening rooms, we have a specialized team that is able to design and deliver anywhere in the world. Whether you use Audio Advice or another reputable theater specialist, it’s money well spent to ensure that you’re getting the right layout and equipment for the room.

Once you have a great design, you can jump back into picking out the equipment, furniture, and decor.

Choosing Your Home Theater Equipment

Let’s start in our favorite place – the equipment! If you’ve ever been to a big box store and seen low-end “home theater in a box” (HTIB) systems for a few hundred dollars, you probably realize that prices for this stuff are all over the map. We wouldn’t recommend putting the time and money into a custom home theater if you’re going to put a cheap system in, but you can probably expect to spend anywhere from $7,500 up on all of the equipment.

While you may be expecting us to start with the projector itself, this technology tends to become outdated more often than some of the other components in your system. Instead, we are going to start with the areas we think are the best investments and move down from there.

The Projector Screen

We can not stress enough how important the screen is. You will probably have it for decades if you get a good one. It’s as important as the projector to produce a great picture.

As an example, a decent 120” 16:9 screen is typically going to start around $2,000. The really good ones of the same size will be a little above $3,000- and worth every penny. Typically, anything less and you are not going to get all of the performance your projector is capable of.

Surround Sound Speaker System Cost

Right along with the projector screen, another area we highly recommend you invest in is the speakers. We are constantly remodeling 20+ year old theaters and reusing the great speaker package they’ve always had, just adding more speakers and newer components to give them the latest surround sound effects. Money spent here is well worth it. No one has ever told us they spent too much on speakers!

When you designed your theater, you determined the speaker configuration. Depending on which you selected, you may have anywhere from five speakers and a sub in a traditional 5.1 surround sound system all the way up to 13 speakers and 8 subs for the newest object-based surround sound systems like Dolby Atmos or DTS-X.

Front and Center Channel Speakers

For the average theater we recommend spending at least $500 per speaker for the main front three. These are more important than your surrounds (or rears). The center channel is particularly important because it’s where 80% of the dialogue comes from in movies and TV shows.

Get in the $1,500 each price range, and you will start to be able to recreate the impact of those big special effects.

Subwoofers

Decent subwoofers can approach $1,000 each and can go as high as you can imagine. If you are a big action movie buff, the sub is not the place to pinch your pennies. As we explain in our subwoofer placement video, two is also always better than one for the best and most, even bass around your room.

Effects Channels (Side and Surround Speakers)

For the effects channels, which include Atmos in ceiling speakers, your side speakers and rear speakers, pick something in the $500 per pair range and up. Again, there is a wide range of choices out there, and quality usually goes up with the price. Typically, we do not think you need to spend as much on the surrounds as the front three, unless you are doing a very high performance theater.

Home Theater Projector Costs

Each year brings a slate of new projector models offering better performance than their predecessors.

It has been really fun to see how front projection technology has improved over the years. The $5,000 projectors available now surpass the $20,000 models of 10 years ago! The top-selling laser projectors with good lumens, contrast, image, and motorized zoom currently retail for just under $10,000. Consumers who do not understand projector technology wonder why less expensive projectors with high lumen levels online will not work. Manufacturers can produce less expensive commerical projectors with high lumen levels by using cheaper chips and no focus on good images, motion, and contrast. There are only a few manufacturers and models that are specifically designed to excel in home theaters. If you want to know what that current list is, you’ll find them all in drop down in the free Home Theater Design Tool and Throw Distance Calculator. We keep this list up to date with all of the top home theater projectors at each price point, which will save you a bunch of time in your search.

If you’re interested in the latest and greatest and your budget allows for it, you can expect to pay from $5,000 all the way up to $100,000 or more on a front projector that includes features like widescreen or 2:35 aspect ratio, 4K, and great video processing.

Home Theater Receivers

Your home theater receiver is the brain of your system. All of the surround sound processing, video switching, and amplification for your speakers happens inside your home theater receiver. The amps inside a home theater receiver are very important. To get the full impact of the dynamics of special effects, they need to be able to control your speakers very well. Yes, you can buy an all-in-one home theater receiver for as low as $250, but this type of unit will have a very low-quality amplifier section and will not do justice to the speakers if you took our recommendations in the previous section. To get something that sounds great, you should expect to pay around $800 and up.

If you’re into a more high-end system and it fits into your budget, you can purchase a separate home theater processor and multi-channel amplifier. This will not only give you better sound but is also scalable in the sense that you can probably keep the amps for 20+ years and only switch out your processor every 5-10 years as technology improves. These components will typically start out in the $3,000 range and go up depending on how many channels of amplification you get and the power levels.

Home Theater Automation and Control

Another thing to consider is how you want all the gear in your room to work together. We often have customers overlook using a universal remote or system such as Control4. This allows you to use one remote, your phone, or tablet to control everything in your room. You can have it control the lighting, control shades if you have them, adjust your screen, and navigate all of your sources without using multiple remotes. You can even set scenes on the remote and also have them on physical keypads on your wall so you can easily press one button and go into movie mode with all the lights off, press a different button to turn the lights on to clean, and press another to dim the lights when you want people to see their surroundings but still enjoy a game on the screen.

While this may seem like a small step, it’s actually very important because it allows you to sit back and relax without spending time setting everything up with multiple remote controls every time you go to watch a movie.

Now that we’ve picked out your equipment, your next consideration should be the seating.

Home Theater Seating Cost

Before we discuss your seating options, we want to make sure we circle back to the design stage for a second. If you are planning on having multiple rows of seating and didn’t work with a professional to design your theater, you may wind up having sightline issues once you get your furniture in the room. There is nothing worse than someone’s head blocking your view. The flip side of this is having a screen that is too high off the floor, which causes neck pain when you strain to look up at it.

We’ve seen all kinds of furniture in the home theaters we’ve designed, from your typical home theater chairs to large, comfy couches. Of course, the two factors that determine how much you will spend on seating are the prices of each piece of furniture and the number of pieces you will buy.

Luckily, if you want to go with home theater seats that feature everything you need, like dual motors to recline and adjust your headrest, quality material that will last for years and allow for easy cleanup, adjustable LEDs, charging ports, and removable tray tables and so much more, we’ve done all the work for you. We’ve taken our years of customer feedback and designed the ultimate home theater chair, which sells more than every chair we sell combined. You can check it out here.

While we would recommend going with a home theater chair for a dedicated theater room, if you want to consider couches or other furniture, our team of experts can help you find the best fit for you.

Professional Installation and Calibration

Just as the design of the room is often overlooked when building a custom home theater budget, so is the installation and calibration of the components.

We suspect more than half of the nice home theaters in America today have the home theater receiver set to the factory defaults. We see this all the time when we go in to upgrade our customer's theaters. Calibrating all of the options available on today’s home theater receivers is critical to getting what you paid for. Properly calibrating the settings on your projector, how the speakers are placed, and all of the settings involved are where the difference is made between a room full of equipment and a true movie theater experience.

Of course, home theater installation costs will vary based on your room specifications, the equipment involved, the acoustics of the room, and many other factors. Keep in mind that most professionals opt to only install equipment that they sell. By helping you select the equipment, we can guarantee that everything will work together as expected. Having to piece together a system that may or may not be ideal (and taking responsibility for the end result) is risky. We want our customers to be happy, and working with you to choose the right elements is a critical piece of the process.

Bringing Your Home Theater to Life

Now that you have the room design and all of the critical components chosen and installed, all that’s left are the details that really bring your room to life. Details like the carpet you choose, curtains on either side of the screen, walls sconces on the side walls, and a popcorn machine can make all the difference.

As you can see, there is a wide range of options that make the answer to “What does a home theater cost?” really difficult to pin down. As a starting point, you can expect to spend around $10,000.

At Audio Advice, we have designed award-winning, high-end theaters and private screening rooms in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, but most of the custom theaters we build range from $10,000 to $50,000. A well-designed home theater is an investment that will bring incredible fun and entertainment to you and your family for years to come.

If you already have a setup and you are looking to upgrade your Home Theater Receiver, be sure to check out our Best Home Theater Receivers article.

Our Home Theater Buyers Guide is also available. This guide is a deep dive into how to purchase a new Home Theater System.

We’re here to help!

If you have further questions, contact our experts via chat, phone, or email. Or simply visit one of our world-class showrooms to experience speakers, projectors, TVs, and everything in between for yourself before you make a purchase!

If you’re planning your home theater or media room, check out our Home Theater Design page, where we have everything Home Theater related, including our FREE Home Theater Design Tool.

When you buy from Audio Advice, you’re buying from a trusted seller since 1978. We offer Free Shipping, Lifetime Expert Support, and our Price Guarantee. We look forward to serving you!