Kitchen and bath showroom software in Baltimore: “add installation” can make you a contractor, and January 1 is set to double the cabinet duty

A cabinet dealer in Timonium has sold kitchens for nineteen years and has never picked up a drill. Customers always ask who can hang the boxes, so the owner keeps a card for a two-man crew. Last spring a marketing freelancer pointed out that people want one number, and the website gained an “add installation” checkbox. Now the crew bills the dealer, the dealer bills the customer, and everybody is happier. Nothing about the store feels different. But Maryland’s home improvement law leaves out a sale of materials only if the seller “does not arrange to perform” any of the work, and no court opinion or Home Improvement Commission document we could find says what “arrange” means. On one side of that word the dealer is a store, and on the other it may be an unlicensed contractor whose contracts a court won’t enforce. The owner found out about the word only when a customer’s lawyer asked for a license number.

In Hamilton, in the first week of November, a couple signs for a $38,000 kitchen in a popular imported line. The designer pulls the price from a catalog updated last week. The factory in Vietnam will take a few weeks to build the boxes, and the container will reach the port sometime in January. On January 1, the federal duty on imported kitchen cabinets is scheduled to go from 25% to 50%, and the rate follows the day the goods enter the country, not the day anybody signed. The dealer doesn’t file the entry and doesn’t know the date. What the dealer will get is a price letter, probably in December. The couple’s contract says $38,000, and if it’s a special order, Maryland’s layaway statute says that number can’t go up.

And at a bath showroom in Federal Hill, somebody is finally putting the fixtures online. A kitchen faucet that’s been selling for years turns out to pour 2.2 gallons a minute with no reset, which Maryland doesn’t allow to be offered for sale, and a tower with two showerheads on one valve counts as a single showerhead under a state definition that no store template knows about. One brand’s policy forbids the “see price in cart” trick a web agency suggested, and another voids its warranty if the buyer’s seller isn’t authorized. Google’s feed wants a price for each of the 3,000 cabinet boxes the owner also hoped to list, and it won’t take an installation charge bundled with anything. The floor models, the statute says, need tags.

Each of these businesses has a design tool and a set of books that work fine. The trouble is that a kitchen runs on facts no design tool or retail system was built to hold: who arranged the work, where a box was made and when it came in, what a deposit becomes on a given day, and what a product page is promising and to whom. They sit in a manufacturer’s dealer terms, a statute from 1962, a Federal Register notice and somebody’s memory, and on the day they matter, they’re rarely in the same place.

We start with the trade in numbers and what its software costs. Then come the word “arrange,” deposits and price freezes, sales tax, the January tariff date, what manufacturers allow online, what a product page legally says, and what Baltimore adds. After that we look at what the area’s showrooms show online, how we’d build the online store, Lithuania, what custom costs and what we’d build.

The trade in numbers

The Census Bureau has no category for a kitchen showroom. It counts a business under whatever it mainly does, and the industry definitions happen to split the trade along the same line the Maryland statute draws. A firm selling “kitchen and bath cabinets and countertops to be installed” is a building material retailer. A firm doing “prefabricated kitchen and bath cabinet, residential-type, installation” is finish carpentry. Design-build remodelers are residential remodeling, and shops that build boxes are cabinet manufacturing. So the closest we can come to a count of real showrooms is an unknown part of the first row below, a bucket that also holds lumberyards, fence dealers and plumbing supply retailers.

About 80% of the remodelers in both jurisdictions have fewer than five employees, and thousands more firms have none: the 2024 nonemployer file counts 949 residential building firms in the City and 1,745 in the County with no payroll. The Maryland Home Improvement Commission’s June 2025 report showed 42,728 current licenses statewide, up from 38,154 in May 2023.

The City’s housing is old. In the 2025 American Community Survey, released days ago, the City’s median year built is 1949 and 51.4% of its homes went up before 1950. Half of the City’s units, 50.5%, are single-unit attached, the row houses, against 6.4% nationally, and 83.2% of its owner-occupied one-unit homes predate 1960. The County is younger and more suburban, with a median of 1974 and 24.1% attached. So a Baltimore kitchen is often narrow, old and in a building that can hide something, and the same showroom can be quoting a 1920s row house in Hampden and a 1970s split-level in Perry Hall. Single-year survey figures do move around (the City’s pre-1950 share was 54.6% the year before), so read them as a shape.

Spending is flat and leaning on price. Harvard’s remodeling indicator of October 22, 2026 has homeowner improvement and repair spending hovering near $525 billion through late 2027. The National Kitchen & Bath Association’s mid-year outlook holds kitchen and bath at about $228 billion, down 0.4%, with inflation supporting revenue and real volume soft. If the City and County spent in proportion to their homes, by value or by count, that would be roughly $0.8 billion to $1.0 billion a year. That’s a proportional allocation that includes new construction and do-it-yourself work, not a measurement. Nationally, Houzz’s 2026 kitchen study of its own users, a self-selected group, reports median spending of $55,000 on a major remodel and $20,000 on a minor one, with 87% hiring a professional, 34% a cabinetmaker and 22% a kitchen designer.

The price pressure shows up in the federal producer indexes on FRED. The index for domestic custom cabinets and vanities sat at 159.000 from June 2025 to May 2026, apart from one month’s dip, then jumped 8.5% in June 2026 and was up 9.1% over the year to September. Cut stone rose 8.0%, plumbing fixtures 5.8% and stock cabinets just 1.6%, against 3.7% for consumer prices. These are domestic producer prices with imports left out, so they aren’t a direct measure of the tariff. They do show that a step of several percent can arrive in a single month, which is what a quote with no expiry date can’t handle.

We also looked for local volume in the City’s open permit data, and it’s an instructive trap. Permits mentioning a kitchen appear to surge from 2,110 in 2024 to 2,794 in 2025, but descriptions that mention a kitchen only in passing in a trade permit jumped from 51 to 1,261 after a change in the permit system, so most of that growth is recording. Permits naming a kitchen next to cabinets or counters, January through October with duplicate text removed, ran 705, 686, 680, 733, 745, 823, 715 and 858 from 2019 through 2026. Apart from a high reading this year that’s a fairly flat line, and it undercounts the real thing, because as we’ll see, cabinets and counters don’t need a building permit. Many of those permits also read as investor rehabs.

What the software costs, and what costs more

A showroom buys a design tool with manufacturer catalogs, usually a job management tool, an accounting package and something for payments, and it sometimes adds an ERP or a fabrication scheduler. We read 50 products’ public pages on November 1, 2026. Of those, 25 publish a price a five-person showroom can work out alone, four publish part of one, and 21 want a conversation. All four commerce platforms publish, and seven of ten design tools do. None of the six dealer ERP systems does: Epicor BisTrack, ECI Spruce and the rest ask for a demo. Of four financing companies, only Wisetack prints a merchant fee.

2020 Design Live is now Cyncly Design Flex, and 2020’s old pricing address just forwards to Cyncly’s home page. Design Flex is $2,495 a year, or $1,895 for the Foundation tier without manufacturer catalogs. ProKitchen Online is $2,395 with catalogs or $1,795 without. So manufacturer catalogs cost the same $600 a year at both, which is about as close to a market rate as this trade offers. Chief Architect Premier is $1,995 a year, and KCD, aimed at shops that build their own boxes, runs from $99 to $295 a month. On job management, JobTread is $199 a month plus $20 per internal user, which can include your accountant, and Contractor Foreman and Knowify publish their ladders. Houzz Pro’s page sets its $199 plan against a competitor, Buildertrend, whose own pricing page offers a quote form. Countertop shops have Moraware at $100 a user a month for quoting and $120 for scheduling with a three-user minimum, and ActionFlow from $99.

The payment rail is the bigger number

Take the same $2.1 million on a schedule of three equal payments, 180 payments of about $11,667, and the rail decides the rest.

Cards on everything would cost 4.5 times the typical stack, and moving just 13.4 of the 60 kitchens from card to capped bank transfer would pay for the whole stack. The odd line is the one we’d draw an owner’s attention to: Square’s own invoice on the Free plan costs $116.67 on a bank transfer we can make through its API for $5, and cards through the API cost less too. So a small custom payment page can beat a vendor’s own invoice on that vendor’s rails. QuickBooks’ rate page prints 1% for bank transfers and no cap, while older Intuit help says otherwise, so ask before you assume. Customers will often want a card for points, and on a deposit-only arrangement the card fee comes to $20,318 a year in this model, with $600 more for the rest by bank transfer.

Financing costs more per kitchen. Wisetack charges 3.9% with no subscription, and 4.9% to 9.9% for 0% offers. On 12 financed kitchens that’s $16,380 at the base rate. It also raised its limit to $65,000 only in June 2026, and its progress payments allow two payouts with up to 50% first and $25,000 in total, which doesn’t sit comfortably with a three-part schedule on a $35,000 kitchen, or with a one-third signing limit if the payout lands at signing. GreenSky publishes no fee. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit allege an average of 7%, and competitors quote wider ranges. Lenders also tend to describe their products for firms that offer services, so a truly retail showroom may find fewer of them available, and that’s another thing the “add installation” checkbox may change.

The hardest part isn’t any one tool

We couldn’t find anyone who carries a kitchen from the design file through the purchase order, the deposit, the change order and the invoice. Each vendor claims a link or two. Cyncly’s LiveORDER generates electronic purchase orders from design files. ECI Spruce imports takeoffs from 2020 and ProKitchen. JobTread syncs both ways with QuickBooks and Houzz Pro one way. But Cyncly Payments’ route into QuickBooks is a CSV you upload as a bank file, and Buildertrend sends a deposit only once fully paid, as an unapplied payment. No job management vendor we read names Design Flex or ProKitchen as an integration, and none connects a manufacturer’s order acknowledgment back to the quote. Moving a total is easy. Keeping priced lines, deposits and later changes linked across versions, for a job that takes three months, is the real work.

There’s also a small tax trap in the design tool itself: Cyncly’s help page describes a per-design tax value where “to obtain a 7% tax, enter 700.00 %,” with sales tax and installation in the same dialog, while Maryland’s answer can differ by line. A Design Flex license needs renewing every 12 months to keep using the software, and we found no vendor saying another program reads its KIT design files directly. If you may need to reorder a door three years from now, store a PDF and an XML snapshot of the approved design when the customer signs, in a place you control.

The one word that separates a store from a contractor

Kitchen work falls under Maryland’s home improvement law. The Commission’s own list of what counts has a heading, “Kitchen and Bath,” and under it cabinets, shower and bath enclosures, sinks and countertops, tile and vanities. Anyone who performs or sells that work for a homeowner needs a license. What keeps a cabinet store out of the law is a single clause, at Business Regulation 8-101(g)(3)(iv). “Home improvement” does not include:

“sale of materials, if the seller does not arrange to perform or does not perform directly or indirectly any work in connection with the installation or application of the materials”

A showroom can end up on either side of that clause without ever deciding which, because its own work drifts. A designer hands over an installer’s card, the card becomes a “preferred installer” page on the website, the installer starts taking the showroom’s calendar invites, and one day a line reading “installation” appears on the quote because the customer wanted one number.

We went looking for what “arrange” means, and as far as we can find, nobody has said. Among Maryland opinions on CourtListener, one quotes this clause at all, and it’s in a footnote. We searched the Commission’s 83 published meeting agendas and minutes from 2013 through December 2025, five newsletters and its FAQ pages, and none of them mentions materials sellers, cabinet dealers, preferred installers or referral fees. We don’t have Westlaw or Lexis, and the Office of Administrative Hearings’ decisions portal, which is where a contested Commission case would surface, wouldn’t take our queries from where we work, so an unpublished decision may exist. A careful lawyer in Baltimore should run those searches before relying on anything here.

The clause used to be clearer. From 1962 through at least 1989, session laws excluded “the sale of goods or materials by a seller who neither arranges to perform nor performs directly or indirectly any work or labor” on installation. By 1994 it read as it does today, “does not arrange to perform or does not perform.” Read literally, the modern “or” would let a seller who arranges but doesn’t perform slip through. We wouldn’t lean on that. The older wording says a seller must do neither, and we found no sign the legislature meant to change the substance when the words changed.

The closest case stopped short of an answer

The nearest thing to a ruling involved a firm that looks a good deal like a modern design-build shop. In Fosler v. Panoramic Design, decided in 2003, a couple in Chevy Chase signed a “Construction Consultant Agreement” under which the company would “bid or negotiate the complete project to individual subcontractors, vendors, and suppliers,” coordinate them on site, and take 20% of the cost of materials and labor plus a 20% markup on procured materials. The company had no home improvement license and said it didn’t need one. The trial court disagreed, the intermediate court sent the question toward a jury, and the state’s highest court declined to reach it. “The General Assembly charged the Commission with the duty, and with having the required expertise, to determine whether an entity was engaged in home improvement and, therefore, needed a home improvement contractor’s license from the Commission.”

So where the facts are disputed, the question goes to the Commission first. The Commission answers scope questions by motion, and its minutes record it doing so on grab bars, sheds and power washing. A written question from a showroom’s lawyer is a real route. A conversation with someone at the counter isn’t protection: in Baltimore Street Builders v. Stewart, a company that said it had relied on talks with Commission staff lost anyway, the court noting that “good faith failure to obtain a license, standing alone, certainly does not establish substantial compliance.”

What the Commission has published comes by analogy, in an FAQ with no entry for cabinets. Its sentence on pole buildings is the best one a showroom will find: “You will need to obtain an MHIC contractor license to sell pole buildings if the buildings will be installed on residential properties, and if the sale includes the installation of the pole building.” A seller who delivers a prefab shed and “simply places it on the ground” needs no license. Carpet is out of the law, and “tile, wood, or other flooring” is in. Reading those together, a sale that includes installation is the clear case, and a sale that stops at the curb is the other clear case. The middle is what a showroom’s website is usually doing.

A referral fee has its own sections

If money moves, the analysis changes, and under provisions that don’t depend on the word “arrange.” The statute’s definition of selling a home improvement includes “to seek to get a home improvement contract from an owner.” A contractor “may not pay or otherwise compensate another person for performing or selling a home improvement” unless that person is licensed or exempt (8-315), and nobody may “perform or sell a home improvement with or through another person who is required to be licensed under this title but is not licensed” (8-612). So on our reading a 10% thank-you from an installer to an unlicensed showroom can put the installer in violation as well as the showroom, and the published fine schedule is $1,500 for a first offense and $5,000 for a repeat. Whether a field measure or installation advice is “work in connection with the installation” is unknown. We would keep a ledger of any fee either way, because a Commission investigator or a homeowner’s lawyer is likely to ask about it.

People often assume that hiring a licensed installer solves the problem. It works the other way around. Since July 1, 2016, the Commission says, subcontractors “may work without a license when performing home improvements for an MHIC licensed contractor,” and “only MHIC licensed contractors may enter into contracts with homeowners.” The party that needs the license is the one holding the contract with the homeowner. A licensed showroom may use an unlicensed sub, and an unlicensed showroom that sells the install doesn’t cure anything by using a licensed one. Borrowing a license doesn’t help either: in Baltimore Street Builders, a 50% owner’s license held through another company didn’t save the LLC, which lost both its contract claim and its mechanic’s lien on a $180,361.47 balance.

What being wrong costs, against what the license costs

An unlicensed seller of home improvements “will not be given the assistance of the courts in enforcing contracts,” said Harry Berenter v. Berman in 1970, which also denied any recovery for the value of work done. A 2025 decision on another licensing regime, SM Landover v. Sanders, frames this as a weighing of interests, so the result may soften at the edges, but we found no case applying that test to this title. Meanwhile section 8-601 makes acting without a license a crime: up to $1,000 or six months for a first conviction, $5,000 or two years after that, and Huffman v. State treats “each transaction” as a violation. The Commission can add up to $5,000 per violation.

The license, for its part, is $281.25 per place of business, a $22.50 processing fee, a $100 Guaranty Fund assessment and a $63 exam (COMAR 09.08.07.02, exam page), for a two-year term, plus $500,000 of general liability insurance, two years of trade experience and net worth or a bond to show solvency. For a showroom that regularly gets involved in who installs, the license is cheaper than the argument, and it brings something to sell: a homeowner whose contractor is licensed can reach a Guaranty Fund worth up to $30,000 per claimant. The reasonable alternative is to stay truly retail and say so everywhere, with a price that doesn’t include installation, no installer on the invoice and no money from installers. What we would not do is stay in the middle by accident.

The designer at the desk, and the ad on the wall

A person who negotiates or sells a home improvement needs a salesperson or contractor license (8-301(b)). The exemption for “a clerical employee, retail clerk, or other employee of a licensed contractor who is not a salesperson” helps the person at the register, and it’s hard to stretch to a designer quoting an installed kitchen. A salesperson license attaches to one individual and a licensed contractor, and a salesperson may not “choose a contractor for an owner” (8-502). There is a software rule hiding in section 8-501(e): “A salesperson or other agent or employee of a contractor may not make a change in a home improvement contract for an owner.” A system where any designer can reopen a signed job and edit it is a compliance problem you can fix with a permission setting.

The Commission’s advertising regulation requires the name and license number in ads placed by a licensee, and says phrases such as “Factory to You,” “Direct to You,” “Buy from the Manufacturer” and “Save the Middleman’s Profit” may not be used unless the advertiser actually makes the goods. Under section 8-503, a contractor may not offer “a gift, bonus award, merchandise” as an inducement to sign, except a tangible item costing up to $25 that isn’t contingent on signing, so “free faucet with every kitchen” is a risk for a licensed showroom while “$200 off” isn’t, according to the Commission’s guidance. The same promotion can be fine for a goods-only store and a violation for a licensed one.

One-third is a signing-day rule, and that matters more than the fraction

We wrote about the deposit rule in our post on home improvement contractors, and we expected the kitchen version to be a collision between a one-third cap and a factory that wants half up front. It mostly isn’t. Section 8-617 says a person may not receive a deposit of more than one-third of the contract price “before or at the time of execution of the home improvement contract,” and the Commission reads the rest of the schedule as open. Its contracts page puts it flatly: “Beyond the initial deposit, the Home Improvement Law does not control the payment schedule.” Its June 2019 minutes say the later payments are “left to the parties to determine through the terms of their contract,” and in February 2021 the then-Chair said a contractor can ask for the whole contract amount the day after signing if the signed contract says so. Those are remarks at meetings and not rulings, and a homeowner’s lawyer would still ask why anyone needed all the money on day two.

The arithmetic is short. A 50% factory deposit exceeds a one-third cap only when the dealer’s cost is more than two-thirds of the contract price. On a $35,000 installed kitchen with $14,000 of cabinets at cost, the cap is $11,666.66 (it has to round down, since $11,666.67 is over a third) and the factory wants $7,000, so there’s room. On an $18,000 cabinet-heavy job with $12,500 at cost, the factory wants $6,250 and the cap is $6,000, and the answer is a dated second payment written into the contract before the order goes in. What the software must never do is send a payment link for the deposit before the signature, since subsection (a) bars “any payment” before the contract is signed, or let a “deposit” field accept more than a third of the price on any job marked as a home improvement. It also has to retest the amount when a change order moves the price. Bills to raise the cap to one-half failed in 2017, 2018 and 2020, and HB 1499 of 2026 ended with its hearing canceled, so an answer that reports a 50% rule in Maryland is reading a bill.

Staying retail swaps the cap for a price freeze

A showroom that sells goods only escapes the one-third cap, and may walk into a stricter law. Our post on bridal shops explains the Layaway Sales Act, which the Maryland high court applied to special orders in Liverpool v. Baltimore Diamond Exchange in 2002. A special order, under Commercial Law 14-1101(k), is goods that “Are ordered by the buyer to the buyer’s unique specifications; Are not carried by the seller, either in the seller’s showroom or warehouse; Are ordered from a manufacturer or supplier; and Are not resalable by the seller at the sale price negotiated with the buyer.” A semi-custom kitchen in a particular finish and layout fits those words closely. No court has applied them to one, so this is our reading and it should stay hedged, but the consequences are worth planning around: a signed writing with the Act’s listed terms, a seller-signed copy handed over, seven calendar days to cancel, and this, at 14-1105(a):

“The seller may not increase the layaway price of the consumer goods sold under a layaway agreement.”

A retailer that raises the price can owe a penalty of three times the amount paid plus attorney’s fees, and if the writing itself falls short, a full refund on top, though showing the violation wasn’t willful removes the penalty and the fees (14-1109). On a $20,000 payment that’s $60,000 to $80,000 of exposure. Compare the supplier’s side of the same order. The public dealer terms of Cabinetworks, which makes KraftMaid, Merillat and Medallion, say a dealer pays prices “in effect at the time of shipment,” and that if tariffs raise the company’s costs it “may immediately pass such cost through to you through a surcharge.” ProKitchen’s catalog log shows how that kind of change reaches a designer’s screen: on October 28, 2026 a 2.25% “Material Surcharge” attribute was switched on for one line, with similar entries for others, though the log doesn’t say why. So a dealer can face a rising cost from above and a frozen price from below on the same order.

A licensed contractor is in a different and less clear position. Section 8-501 requires “the agreed consideration” and “the approximate dates” of performance, and says nothing for or against a clause that moves the price if a named duty changes. Searches of the Commission’s minutes through August 2025 for escalation, surcharge, tariff and material cost turned up nothing on point. Our reading is that such a clause can be written into a signed contract and is untested, and that it’s weaker if the contract is also a special order, because the Layaway Act has no home improvement exclusion and in fact expects “All charges for delivery, installation, or repair” in its writing. Whether a goods-heavy kitchen can be both is a question no Maryland court has answered. Anthony Pools v. Sheehan describes a predominant-factor test for mixed contracts, and that’s as close as the law gets.

Three more clocks a kitchen order can set off

The household goods law is one more place where the word “cabinet” appears. Commercial Law 14-1801 covers “any article or set of articles used to furnish or supply a residential dwelling such as a sofa, cabinet, rug,” and it excludes “any permanent fixture.” We found no decision on a built-in kitchen. Flat-pack and freestanding pieces look covered, built-ins are arguable while still in their boxes, and printing the estimated delivery date and the required notice on every cabinet order costs nothing. We covered the mechanics in our appliance store post.

Showrooms also get a break from the door-to-door law that a window-treatment consultant usually doesn’t. A sale made after prior negotiations and “in the course of a visit by the buyer to a retail business establishment” is outside the Act. But a contract signed at the customer’s kitchen table after the measure isn’t literally in the course of such a visit, so we would treat it as covered. Crystal v. West & Callahan confirms home improvement sales aren’t excluded, and section 14-302.1 then gives the buyer until midnight of the fifth business day to cancel, or the seventh if the buyer is 65 or older. E-signature after a showroom visit sits somewhere uncertain: Commissioners disagreed about virtual sales in August 2021 and we found no follow-up. So the place of signature and the buyer’s age band are fields, and a custom factory order shouldn’t be released until the longest cancellation period on that job has run.

Under Visa’s rules, covered in the bridal post, a deposit for goods not yet delivered can be disputed for a long time, the receipt should say “Deposit” and “Balance,” and the customer has to have agreed to when cancellation rights end. All of which argues for a deposit ledger that holds the signed terms and the dates next to the money, and we come back to it below.

When the showroom closes

Wren Kitchens’ U.S. arm filed Chapter 7 on April 24, 2026, with 15 showrooms and, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, over 30,000 creditors. We read nothing that mentions Maryland customers. The Inquirer’s examples show modest amounts paid up front with far larger balances financed, so a showroom’s ledger should hold the customer’s deposit, the factory’s deposit and the financed amount as three separate things. Bankruptcy law gives a consumer deposit a limited priority, $3,800 for cases filed since April 2025. Maryland’s Guaranty Fund caps an award at $30,000 per claimant and $250,000 per contractor and held about $4.0 million at the end of June 2025. In the Commission’s August 2025 minutes, one unnamed contractor’s $2,097,539.55 of claims would pay out about 11.9% of each award.

The Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division ordered Optimum Construction of Derwood, whose earlier charges mentioned kitchen and bath renovations, to pay at least $2,007,459.27 in restitution and $2,452,000 in penalties in June 2025, and ordered Baltimore-based BOJ & Sons to pay more than $1 million in 2024 over large deposits from at least 35 consumers. A customer who’s read those stories is entitled to ask where the money goes. A showroom that can show a dated ledger, and say what’s been paid to the factory, has an answer many competitors can’t give, and it can say so on its website.

Maryland’s tax rule names the kitchen cabinet

Install flips the sales tax too, and on this point Maryland is unusually direct. COMAR 03.06.01.19 says that “a person who constructs, improves, alters, or repairs real property shall pay the tax on all materials purchased, which will be incorporated into real property in such a manner that the materials will lose their identity as tangible personal property.” The contractor is the consumer. It pays 6% when it buys the cabinets and charges the homeowner no sales tax on the job. A retailer that sells the same cabinets and stops there does the opposite: it buys tax-free on a resale certificate and collects 6% from the customer on its selling price. To settle which goods turn into real property, the regulation gives a test about intent and then, in section C(5), spells out the result for this very trade:

“As a general rule, counters, countertops, and cabinetry installed in commercial spaces will be treated as tangible personal property. Doors, windows, molding, built-ins, and kitchen cabinetry installed in residential or commercial spaces will be treated as realty.”

The paperwork doesn’t change this. Section B says taxability isn’t affected by language such as “tax included” or by “any form of payment under the real property construction contract or subcontract, whether lump-sum, cost-plus, time and material, or otherwise,” and Business Tax Tip 18 says labor to install real property isn’t taxable “whether separately stated or lump-sum billed.” So a showroom can’t turn a furnish-and-install job into a retail sale by printing materials and labor on separate lines. Here is what the two positions do to one job: a $30,000 kitchen in which the goods cost the dealer $12,000 and sell for $20,000, with $10,000 of install and other labor.

The gap between the first two rows is always 6% of the dealer’s markup on the goods, which is $480 here, so the contractor’s position is usually a little cheaper for the homeowner if the dealer prices it honestly. Held at the same $30,000, it costs the dealer 2.4 points of margin. Neither is wrong. What goes wrong is a job quoted one way and invoiced another, and the tool most likely to do that is a store or point-of-sale system set to add 6% to every order. On an installed Maryland kitchen the right tax belongs on the purchase order, where the supplier charges it, and no cart ever looks there.

It’s also decided line by line. Tax-General 11-101(k) makes wall-to-wall carpet personal property “regardless of the purpose, method, or permanency of its installation,” so even a contractor collects tax on it, while Tip 18 treats vinyl, tile and laminate as real property. A built-in residential dishwasher and a disposal are real property; a freestanding range isn’t. In an office break room the cabinets can be real estate and the countertop on them goods. Faucets, toilets, tubs and vanities aren’t named, and we read them as “built-ins” when they’re furnished and installed. One quote can need two treatments, and the field that decides it (residential unit, apartment common area, office, restaurant) usually isn’t on the quote at all.

COMAR 03.06.01.30 treats assembling a piece for the first time as fabrication “on the job site or elsewhere,” and Tip 12 says fabrication or assembly labor is taxable even at a job site. On a retail sale of flat-pack cabinets, then, as we read it, a charge to assemble the boxes is taxable while a separately stated charge to hang them isn’t, and COMAR 03.06.01.08 wants that separate line to exist “at the time of sale,” on paper the buyer has seen, so a split added at the final invoice is late. And a tariff surcharge on a retail invoice goes into the taxable price, on our reading of .08B(1)(d): a $1,500 surcharge carries $90 of tax. Inbound freight passed along is taxable too, delivery to the customer stated separately isn’t, and a design fee that gets credited toward the order looks taxable by analogy, though no Maryland authority addresses kitchens. The state’s bracket also rounds up: Tax-General 11-104 makes a $10.17 sale owe 62 cents, where ordinary rounding would give 61. Test your tax engine on that number.

What an audit of a countertop shop looked like

We found no reported Maryland decision about a kitchen dealer, but there is an unreported one about countertops, and it’s worth reading as a picture of how these cases go, not as precedent (it’s stamped as not citable in Maryland courts). In Continental Surfaces v. Comptroller, decided in 2016, a fabricator sold about 80% of its tops to an affiliated company without charging tax, with resale certificates supplied after the audit, and the affiliate installed them under furnish-and-install contracts with Home Depot and Lowe’s. The court agreed that “the ‘furnish and install’ contracts obviated the applicability of the resale certificates,” and that “Countertops are permanent fixtures that improve a building and are an expected part of a residential space.” The assessment was $408,959.39. The auditor projected one sample quarter from late 2007 over four years. To find that a separate slab customer wasn’t reselling, he relied on his experience with countertop businesses, talks with the fabricator’s staff and that customer’s own website. Apartment interiors didn’t count as commercial spaces.

A fabricator should therefore ask each customer who installs and where, and keep the answer, because a seller’s “knows or should know” is the standard on a certificate. A shop that both makes and installs pays tax only on its raw materials under section 11-101(l)(2), so its labor stays out of the base, but on our reading it probably loses the machinery exemption if everything it builds goes into its own installs, because production must be “for resale.” A 2019 bill that would have fixed this for counters and cabinets appears to have gone nowhere. The display kitchen is unsettled as well, since no Maryland text mentions it. Our reading, which is one for your accountant, is that a kitchen bolted to the showroom wall isn’t resale stock: it owes tax on its cost when it goes up and again on the clearance price when it’s sold as goods. For a dealer wrongly buying on resale certificates, exposure runs four years back, with a penalty of up to 10% and interest of at least 9%. At fifty kitchens a year and $720 each, four years comes to $144,000 of tax before the rest.

The showroom’s service area reaches five other tax systems

A Baltimore showroom’s customers don’t stop at the Maryland line, and a pickup doesn’t help: goods handed over here pay Maryland tax “even if the tangible personal property is to be transported out of this State immediately” (COMAR 03.06.01.25). Installed jobs in neighboring states follow rules that disagree with Maryland’s and with each other, and the District’s turns on the very thing Maryland ignores.

Avalara has a family of construction codes, Stripe Tax has a code for permanent hardware installation, and TaxJar and Shopify have installation categories, but we found no engine where the deciding fact, who contracted to furnish and install, is simply a field on the order. So the quote needs its own fields: whether the job is furnish-and-install, the type of space, a class for each line, the assembly and install charges kept apart, where possession passes, the contract form when the job is in the District, and whether each purchase order may carry the resale number. The same flag shouldn’t drive the license question. Tax turns on who contracted to install, and the license question, as we saw, may also turn on who arranged it, so a referral could change one without changing the other.

January 1 is an entry date, and nobody in a showroom files the entry

Another fact about a kitchen that isn’t on the quote is the day it came into the country. Proclamation 10976, signed in September 2025 under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, put a 25 percent duty on imported kitchen cabinets and vanities from October 14, 2025, and it says the duty “shall apply to completed kitchen cabinets and vanities as well as parts imported for use in kitchen cabinets and vanities.” It scheduled a step to 50 percent for January 1, 2026. On the last day of 2025, Proclamation 11000 moved that step back a year:

“The rates of duty established in this proclamation shall apply with respect to goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on October 14, 2025. Effective January 1, 2027, the duty rate in clause 2 shall increase to 30 percent and the duty rate in clause 3 shall increase to 50 percent, and shall continue in effect, except for countries with which the United States reaches an agreement that addresses the threatened impairment of the national security posed by imports of wood products.”

As of November 1, 2026, we found nothing that changes it. The Federal Register, the White House’s list of actions and the tariff schedule’s October 30 revision are all silent, and MasterBrand’s August 10-Q still warns that the rate “may increase after January 1, 2027.” It could yet move: last year’s delay was signed on December 31 and published on January 9. So a showroom’s system should treat this as a scheduled date in a table somebody can change, not as a certainty or a rumor.

The words that matter are “entered for consumption.” The rate doesn’t follow the day the homeowner signed, the day the dealer placed the order or the day the factory finished. Customs regulations say no entry can be filed “until the merchandise has arrived within the port limits with the intent to unlade,” and goods in a bonded warehouse pay the rate in effect at withdrawal. There is no exception for a container already on the water, which is notable because the July 2026 Section 301 notice carried one. “In a U.S. warehouse” and “entered” are therefore different facts, and a cabinet line’s website can honestly say the first without knowing the second.

Run the calendar backward. Take 36 days on the water from southern Vietnam, a figure from undated forwarder guides that a dealer should confirm with the supplier, plus five days at origin and a week of slack: the goods have to leave the factory by about November 13. Subtract production. A made-to-order kitchen from Vietnam that a couple signs for this week has very likely missed the date already. Stock lines that are already here, or already on their way, may be fine, which is exactly why “imported” isn’t a useful field. The useful fields are origin, importer of record and entry date, and a dealer can only fill them by asking.

The rate depends on where the box was made, and on what the box is

Most of the cabinets sold in this country by count are imported. The U.S. International Trade Commission’s 2025 review found that in 2024 imports were 34.8% of U.S. consumption by value and 72.6% by units, with American plants holding the rest. In the 2025 customs data, which also take in some other kitchen furniture, Vietnam supplied 41.6% of $2.56 billion, followed by Canada at 14.5%, Malaysia at 8.6%, Mexico at 7.1%, Thailand at 6.6%, Italy at 6.1% and Cambodia at 5.0%. China was down to 1.0%: the commission’s tables show Chinese cabinets falling from $1.59 billion in 2018 to $20.5 million in 2024 under the antidumping and countervailing orders. American Woodmark, in a February filing, reported “recent share losses to importers of ready-to-assemble cabinetry” and put its unmitigated tariff cost at roughly 3.5% to 4.0% of annual net sales, before any 50% step. A few months later it merged with MasterBrand, a deal that closed on May 28, 2026, so two of the largest American cabinet makers now sit in one company.

Our reading of the tariff schedule as of its October 30 revision, built from the proclamations and from the headings for each line: 9403.40.9060 for kitchen cabinets, 9403.60.8093 for vanities and 9403.91.0080 for wood parts, which follow the kitchen row. All three have a free base rate. Have a customs broker confirm anything you plan to rely on.

Several rows deserve a comment. USMCA is no shelter, because the note to the heading says the duty “shall be collected in addition to any special rate of duty otherwise applicable,” so a line built in a Mexican or Canadian plant owes it too. The caps split next year’s price list, since the UK, the European Union, Japan, South Korea and, since May, Taiwan don’t step up at all, while at least 87% of 2025 import value came from origins with no cap. That turns an Italian or German kitchen, long the expensive choice on a showroom floor, into one whose duty stays at 15% while its Vietnamese competitor’s goes to 50%. On China, the number that counts is the certificate: Commerce has ruled that cabinets finished in Malaysia or Vietnam with Chinese doors, drawer fronts or frames are in scope of the antidumping order, and an importer who fails to certify otherwise can owe the China-wide rate of 251.64 percent. That is the importer’s paperwork, and a showroom that brings in its own container is the importer.

The strangest row is the Canadian vanity. Proclamation 11048 put a further 50% on a list of Canadian goods, in a separate dispute, and the list names the subheading that holds wooden vanities but not the one that holds kitchen cabinets. Since a September change, only goods on another list can claim the exception for Section 232 goods. Read as written, a wooden vanity from Canada pays 75% today and 100% in January, while a kitchen cabinet from the same plant pays 25% and 50%. We found no ruling on it, and a broker should check it against a live entry. Either way, the vanity and the sink base may sit side by side in one design file, on one purchase order, from one plant.

What the step does to a quote

The math turns on the customs value, which a dealer usually doesn’t know. Call it X. The duty change is 0.25 times X. If the importer passes that through dollar for dollar, the dealer’s cost goes up by the same amount, and if the importer keeps its own margin on it, by more. Here is one dealer order at a $10,000 cost, a 35% gross margin and so a retail price of $15,385. All of these inputs are illustrative, since no public source gives a typical ratio of customs value to dealer cost.

The right-hand column is the one to look at, because of the price freeze we covered earlier. If the sale is a special order under the Layaway Sales Act, Maryland says the seller may not raise the price after signing, and if it’s a home improvement contract, the “agreed consideration” is what the homeowner signed. On the $4,000 line, a dealer who signed in November at the old price and takes delivery of goods entered in January gives up about $1,000 of a $5,385 gross profit, unless the paper said otherwise before the signature. The Associated Press reported on one dealer whose vendors in China and Vietnam raised prices by about 10% around the first step, and the latest quarterly report from Masco, which owns Delta faucets, credits higher net selling prices with lifting company-wide gross profit by 14 percent. The practical answer is dull and valuable: quotes that expire, a price letter date on every line, and a written term signed at the start, reviewed by a lawyer, that says what happens if a named duty changes before a named date.

Showrooms also shouldn’t count on the refunds in the news. After the Supreme Court ended the emergency-powers tariffs in February 2026, Customs said only the importer of record or its broker may file for the money back. MasterBrand booked what it received as a reduction in cost of products sold. A dealer that paid a higher price for those cabinets has no claim to the refund unless a contract with the supplier gives it one, and most cabinet entries after October 14, 2025 were under Section 232 anyway, which the court’s decision didn’t touch.

Countertops got their own date in August

Proclamation 11051, signed July 31, 2026, set a Section 201 safeguard on quartz surface products from August 15: a tariff-rate quota of 3,251,606 square meters a quarter, with an added duty of 25% in quota and 50% over it through August 14, 2027, stepping down to 19% and 47% by 2029 to 2030. The next quarter opens on November 15. The definition is written to catch what a fabricator actually buys: “countertops, backsplashes, vanity tops, bar tops, work tops,” “cut or uncut, fabricated or not fabricated,” and if the top comes attached to a vanity, “only the QSP is covered by the scope.” It “does not cover quarried stone surface products, such as granite, marble, soapstone or quartzite.” Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Israel and a list of other countries are excluded, while China, Vietnam, India, Türkiye and the European Union are not, and existing antidumping and countervailing duties still apply on top. We could not find a public figure for how fast each quarter’s quota is filling, so nobody at a sales desk can say on which side of it a given slab landed.

So a quote for one kitchen can cross four or five regimes. On top of the cabinets and the quartz, stainless sinks, ranges, dishwashers, refrigerators and cabinet hardware pay a metals duty of 25% on full customs value since April 6, 2026, brass and copper sanitary ware pays 50%, and a brass faucet isn’t on that list at all. We wouldn’t ask a showroom to become a customs broker, only for its quote lines to carry the fields a broker would ask for.

A cabinet has no public price, and a faucet has a rulebook

Most advice about “putting your kitchen store online” treats cabinets and fixtures as one catalog. They have almost nothing in common. We read the public sites of 18 cabinet brands and 17 fixture brands on November 1, 2026.

On the cabinet side, none of the 18 prints a cabinet price on its own site. Sixteen route buyers to a dealer locator or form, eight say outright that they sell only through dealers (“Merillat does not sell cabinetry online” is the plainest version), and four sell samples or accessories online. What surprised us is the warranty. Of the 16 warranties we could read, none depends on who sold the cabinet, though 11 send the claim back through the seller, and none requires a professional installer, though many exclude improper installation. So what constrains a cabinet dealer online is the private price book and, in at least one case, a territory. Cabinetworks’ public dealer terms say a dealer may sell online, but anything sold that way “must be received in the Territory by your customer,” and require “suitable offices, showrooms and trained and qualified staff” and that dealers meet purchase goals. No brand we read publishes a dollar minimum, and no manufacturer we found publishes the dealer multipliers. MasterBrand’s latest annual report gives the scale of the channel: over 7,900 dealers, with Lowe’s about 20% of net sales and Home Depot about 13%.

Fixtures work the other way around. Eleven of the 17 fixture brands limit or refuse warranty coverage on goods bought from unauthorized sellers. Delta’s page says its warranty doesn’t cover products from unauthorized sellers, TOTO’s asks for an authorized U.S. seller, and American Standard’s says the warranty is “VOID” if the product “Was purchased from an unauthorized seller.” Two brands post their advertised-price policies publicly. Moen’s and Pfister’s (dated 2023) both list “see price in cart” as a violation, which ends that workaround for those two brands, and Pfister also bars automated replies to a “call for price” request. Moen exempts only personalized, non-automated quotes, so on our reading a chatbot that auto-quotes below the advertised price is on the wrong side of that line. Both say a seller stays free to charge what it likes, because the policy governs advertising and not the sale, a structure that appears designed to stay clear of laws like Maryland’s ban on minimum resale price agreements. Moen’s new-account form adds that it isn’t looking for third-party marketplace sellers, and its policy bars bundling without written consent, which matters to anyone planning a sink-and-faucet package.

Moen also posts a public workbook with list price, advertised minimum and UPC for 3,164 SKUs, the largest such file we found (Pfister posts a list of 673 rows). The median list price is $528.75 and the median minimum is $388.73, with the minimum at 75% of list on most lines. Moen’s own store, going by its public product feed, sells at a median of 80% of list, about 6.7% above its own advertised minimum. One SKU lists at $874.35, has a $656.09 minimum and sells on moen.com for $699.48. So an authorized dealer can advertise below the factory’s own web price without breaking the policy. And the file a shopping feed needs (price, identifier, the rule) already exists for this brand, in a public spreadsheet.

Why a price book can’t simply be published

Google wants a crawlable, priced URL for each variant, and a cabinet line multiplies. Three hundred box sizes times 12 door styles times 10 finishes is 36,000 URLs, all carrying a price that changes when the manufacturer says so and that the dealer may not want a competitor to read. And there’s no shared file to start from. ProKitchen’s page for manufacturers asks for at least five inputs to build a catalog update: a spec book PDF, Excel pricing, an XML or text file for its pricing system, a questionnaire, and a paper order form example “faxed at” a number it gives. Each catalog download needs manufacturer approval. Design tools do export: Cyncly’s Design Flex has an XML route, though its pricing page includes it while the help article calls it an add-on. But we found no public API or standard feed from a cabinet manufacturer or design catalog to a web store.

Meanwhile the national online sellers aren’t waiting.

IKEA and The RTA Store separate goods from installation in ways a Maryland showroom should study, though we reach no legal conclusion about either. A showroom can’t beat a flat-pack seller on price, and it doesn’t have to, but it can publish what it’s able to: a real range per linear foot for a named line where the supplier allows it, a design fee or the absence of one, lead times by line, who installs, and a straight answer on the tariff. As our census below shows, almost no one local does.

What a product page is legally saying

Most of the rules that reach a showroom’s catalog attach at the listing, not the sale. The federal composite wood rule covers products “sold, supplied, offered for sale,” Maryland’s water law says “sold, offered for sale, or installed for profit,” and the Maryland Energy Administration, which investigates complaints under it, names “Retailers, online and in-person” as covered and lists “Screenshots” among useful evidence. A product page is a record, and it should be built from fields somebody has checked, not typed by whoever had a free afternoon.

Composite wood: one sentence on an invoice, kept three years

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rule on formaldehyde from composite wood, 40 CFR Part 770, is easy for a dealer who buys domestically and a real trap for one who imports. A retailer’s main job is to obtain “bills of lading, invoices, or comparable documents” with the supplier’s statement that the goods are TSCA Title VI compliant and to keep them for three years. EPA’s FAQ says this “could be a short and simple statement on the face of the document,” and that “One description per invoice” is enough. A receiving step that flags an invoice without the sentence takes care of it.

Adding installation doesn’t help here: construction trades are outside the retailer definition, but EPA says the rule applies to any renovator who is also a retailer “and who also happens to install, or provide installation services after purchase, including through subcontractors.” Selling a replacement door counts too, and a door over 144 square inches needs the fabricator’s label data, which a retailer must leave intact or make available on request. And “no added formaldehyde” doesn’t mean none: resin-exempt panels may test up to 0.05 or 0.06 parts per million under section 770.17, so “formaldehyde-free” needs its own evidence under the FTC’s Green Guides. A rule published October 28, 2026 updates the test standards from November 27 and leaves retailers’ duties alone.

An importer’s exposure is far larger. The one cabinet and vanity case we found, Global Sourcing Solutions, finalized in 2019, involved a New Jersey construction-products buyer that had a Turkish fabricator build “kitchen cabinets, vanities, and other finished goods” to a European standard for a Nashville apartment job. It learned about Part 770 only when its customs broker asked for a certificate, self-disclosed within a week, and paid $544,064 for 42 violations. The maximum today is $49,772 per violation. A showroom thinking about a direct container because of the tariff should read that order before the purchase order.

Faucets and showerheads: a flow field isn’t enough

Our post on supply houses set out Maryland’s limits under State Government 9-2006 and COMAR 14.26.03: 1.5 gallons a minute for a private lavatory faucet, 1.8 for a kitchen faucet with a temporary 2.2, 2.0 for a showerhead, 1.28 gallons a flush for a toilet. Three things are specific to a showroom and its web store. First, “all display models of products shall be displayed with a mark, label, or tag on the product,” so the showroom floor is in the statute. The regulation and the law don’t line up neatly on which products need that, and a tag on every floor model is the cautious answer. Second, Maryland defines a showerhead as “a device or set of devices” attached to “a single water supply fitting,” so a two-head tower sold for one valve is a single 2.0-gallon-a-minute showerhead here, whatever each head does alone. The federal repeal of the multi-nozzle definition in 2025 changed nothing for a Maryland listing: a 2010 waiver lets the stricter state rule stand, and the SHOWER Act had passed only the House at the last action we found. Third, the kitchen rule requires that the faucet “defaults to a maximum flow rate of 1.8” after each use, so one number can’t describe it. The record needs the default flow, the temporary flow and whether it resets. Bathroom fans are on the list as well.

Proof comes from a short list of databases: California’s, the Northeast partnership’s, ENERGY STAR, WaterSense and any other nationally recognized one. Since California’s limits are stricter on lavatory faucets and showerheads, a current California listing clears Maryland on those, on our arithmetic. Enforcement is mild but sticky: a first violation gets a warning, and then the Attorney General can seek up to $250 per violation per day. The Administration’s own page gives January 1, 2025 as the date sellers became bound, while the statute says 2024 for sales and 2025 for installation. Stock already on the floor before the date is exempt, so the system should remember what came in when. We couldn’t test whether national sites block a Maryland ZIP at checkout, so we make no claim either way, but a showroom shipping to Maryland is the party the rule reaches.

Claims a tariff makes tempting

The tariff has made “American-made” a selling point, and the claim is getting expensive. The FTC’s Made in USA Labeling Rule requires final assembly here, all significant processing here and “all or virtually all ingredients or components” made here, with penalties of up to $53,088 per violation. FTC guidance says wood in a wooden table is “a direct and significant input.” An April 2026 sweep included a $625,000 order against TouchTunes, the largest under the rule, in a case about final U.S. assembly with imported parts, and a March executive order made such claims a priority. A cabinet assembled in Pennsylvania from Vietnamese doors isn’t “Made in USA.” It can say “Made in USA of U.S. and imported parts,” or “Assembled in USA” if the assembly is substantial. We found no FTC case against a cabinet seller, but the risk is real, and the fix is an origin claim generated from a record of components, reviewed once, not typed into a description. The same goes for “eco-friendly,” which the Green Guides tell marketers not to use unqualified, and, on our reading, for “ADA compliant” on a faucet, since the standards cover installed height and clearance as much as the handle. A better field says “operable with one hand, under five pounds of force,” and leaves the rest to the install.

Quartz, and who gets named in the lawsuit

Engineered stone has moved fast in the last six months. Cal/OSHA’s October 22, 2026 discussion draft would ban fabrication of artificial stone at 1% silica or more and asks for a safety data sheet “for each Stock-Keeping Unit” plus a lab report per SKU. It’s a draft, it bars fabrication and later installation but not sale, and Maryland isn’t California. Maryland’s occupational safety program has adopted the federal silica rule, and three searches turned up no Maryland bill naming artificial stone, though we couldn’t run the legislature’s own full-text search. A showroom with a shop behind it is the employer under 29 CFR 1910.1053: exposure assessment, written plan reviewed yearly, no dry sweeping, and medical surveillance at the action level. Sellers have also started appearing in the verdicts. A Los Angeles jury in August 2026 assigned 3% of fault to each of two Daltile companies, one of them a distributing arm. H.R. 5437 would shield “an importer, a distributer, a retailer, or a supplier,” while its Senate cousin, S. 4792, leaves out a seller who employed the injured worker, which is what a showroom with its own fabrication shop would be. Neither is law. Copy that calls an engineered slab “natural quartz” invites an express-warranty claim.

The same logic reaches the cheapest items in the store. On May 29, 2025 the CPSC recalled three brands of kitchen faucet (BASDEHEN, KICIMPRO and VFAUOSIT), about 103,000 units sold only on Amazon at $30 to $40, for lead that could leach into water. Federal law treats whoever imports as a manufacturer, and Maryland’s sealed-container defense, Courts Article 5-405, isn’t available to a seller when “the manufacturer is not subject to service of process” here or when the seller made express warranties. So a Baltimore store that drop-ships an overseas faucet may stand where the manufacturer would. Each SKU should record who can actually be served with a lawsuit, and the catalog should run a nightly check against the CPSC’s free recall API.

What Baltimore adds: permits, row houses and a kitchen in dozens of boxes

A cabinet swap needs no building permit on either side of the city line. Baltimore City’s code exempts “Interior painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, counter tops, and similar interior finish work,” and the County’s Bill 49-24 does the same outside the floodplain, except that a basement alteration involving a kitchen needs one. The trades are what set off permits. In the City, a plumbing permit “may be issued only” to a licensed master plumber or gas fitter, and the housing department’s guideline lists plumbing fixture replacement under “licensed contractor required.” Electrical permits go only to City-licensed electricians. The state’s plumbing title “does not apply to Baltimore County,” which runs its own license and permit, so an installer can be good in one jurisdiction and not the other, and a “Baltimore” mailing address doesn’t say which. In our census, four of the eight dealer listings a major manufacturer files under Baltimore geocode to the County.

Who pulls those permits depends on the same “add installation” decision. The Commission says it is “the obligation of the prime contractor” to obtain permits or make sure they’ve been obtained, and that permits “must include the contractor’s license number.” A retail-only sale leaves that with the homeowner’s contractor, and an installed sale brings it to the showroom. City fees are charged by area, not job value: $0.30 a square foot for alterations in one- and two-family homes, $5 a fixture, $6 a branch circuit, and so on. Running a $30,000 kitchen with 200 square feet altered and demolished, four fixtures, six circuits, a gas line, a 600-cfm hood and plan review through the logic of the City’s own estimator gives about $331, or 1.1% of the job. Skipping it adds a surcharge of “the greater of $1,000 or 50% of the permit fee.” Inspection scheduling closes at 2:30 p.m. the day before, and the work has to stay open until it’s approved, which means cabinet delivery depends on a rough-in date a showroom doesn’t control.

Design rules also differ by address. The City adopted the 2021 codes and the 2020 electrical code. A County page we could see only as a search excerpt says the County enforces the 2026 electrical code for permits issued after August 31, 2026, which, if accurate, can change island outlets and protection on ranges, so an electrician should confirm before a plan is final. The familiar rule that any hood over 400 cfm needs make-up air is also less simple than it sounds: the 2021 residential code applies it only where a fuel-burning appliance that’s neither direct-vent nor mechanically drafted sits inside the air barrier, while the mechanical code that governs larger buildings applies it regardless.

The floor under the cabinets is a date field

Baltimore’s kitchens are old, and two dates sit underneath them. Federal rules presume asbestos in “Asphalt and vinyl flooring material installed no later than 1980.” The state’s environment department says non-friable material can be removed by a non-licensed contractor, but once it “will be made friable” a licensed asbestos contractor must do it. Maryland’s lead chapter also differs from the EPA rule we covered in our contractor post. COMAR 26.16.01 presumes lead in any residential building built before 1950, sets its threshold at three square feet per room against EPA’s six, excludes owner-occupied units, and has a rule with a kitchen in mind: “if the work area includes the kitchen, storage areas for food, dishes, and utensils shall be protected.” So year built, occupancy and rental status belong on the job record from the first visit. Dates also decide another kind of money. A homeowner using the City’s historic tax credit needs approval “before you begin any work,” which “includes interior demolition,” and at the end needs notarized costs “paid in full”: “Estimates of any kind cannot be accepted.” A showroom’s invoice can win or lose that credit.

Rebates moved this week. BGE’s instant rebate on heat pump water heaters ended on October 31, 2026, with purchases and paperwork for mail-in rebates due by December 31, and BGE says it’s awaiting a Public Service Commission decision on 2027. Maryland’s home electrification rebates haven’t launched, the state’s page said on September 30, and the federal 25C credit ended with property placed in service through 2025. A quote that still shows the instant rebate, a state electrification rebate or the 25C credit is out of date.

Will it go up the stairs?

The National Register nominations for East Baltimore are a useful spec sheet. East Monument describes 12-, 12½-, 13- and 14-foot-wide houses, and the Patterson Park and Highlandtown nomination records “narrow streets (10 ft to 20 ft wide)” alternating with wider ones. Baltimore Heritage notes a house less than nine feet wide. We found no primary source for typical stair widths, and the code’s 36 inches binds new work only, so older stairs have to be measured. In our own planning math for carrying a rigid box flat around a right-angle turn, a 24-inch-deep box longer than about 54 inches won’t make it between two 36-inch passages, and at 30 inches the limit falls to about 37. An 84-by-24-inch pantry doesn’t pass flat at any of those widths and stands too tall to go upright under the code’s 80 inches of stair headroom, so somebody needs to flag it for a field check or a knock-down version before it’s ordered. A design tool knows the box sizes. Nothing in the chain we looked at asks about the stairs.

The City’s right-of-way permits take a standard 15 days, and the fee schedule charges $65 a week for a dumpster, a curb lane or an alley. A delivery plan with a permit number and date belongs on the job, and the 15 days count backward from the delivery the factory just moved.

A note on a delivery receipt is not a claim

Then the kitchen arrives, in dozens of cartons, and something is short or broken. Sellers’ terms we read give the customer anywhere from a day to a week to report it, while federal law runs on other clocks. A carrier can’t set less than nine months for filing a claim and two years to sue, and under 49 CFR 370.3 a note “on freight bills, delivery receipts” isn’t by itself a claim: it needs to identify the shipment, assert liability and state a “specified or determinable amount.” The carrier then has 30 days to acknowledge and 120 to pay, decline or offer. A system that stops at “noted on the delivery receipt” has filed nothing. On the consumer side, Commercial Law 2-316.1 makes unenforceable language that tries to limit a consumer’s remedies for breach of implied warranties, so on our reading a “48 hours or you’ve waived it” clause may not hold against a Maryland homeowner. Have counsel check that. And the supplier has its own clock: Cabinetworks’ terms give dealers 15 days for shortage claims. The right record is at the carton level, one box of however many, with door style, finish, photos, the time the damage was found and who the claimant is. A replacement part then needs its own label and, if imported, its own entry date.

What Baltimore’s showrooms show online

We built a list of independent kitchen and bath showrooms, cabinet dealers, countertop fabricators and design-build kitchen firms physically located in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, starting from OpenStreetMap, search results and manufacturers’ dealer locators. Then we checked each address with the Census geocoder, because a “Baltimore” address here so often turns out to be the County. That left 36 independents, 6 in the City and 30 in the County, with 19 of the County’s clustered along two corridors: 12 around York Road and Timonium and 7 around Pulaski Highway and Rosedale. Regional and national showrooms such as Ferguson and Reico we counted separately, along with 19 big-box locations. Twenty-two of the 36 had a website we could read, and we read up to 15 pages of each on November 1, 2026. The list is as complete as we could make it from public sources, and a shop with no web presence may be missing. The note under the chart says which counts are judgment calls.

No consumer-facing independent has a cart. The only cart among the 22 is a trade distributor’s sample shop. None shows a faucet with a price, none shows a cabinet price per linear foot, and none has Product markup. That isn’t a criticism. Most of these businesses are design and installation firms, and a design relationship doesn’t sell through a cart. But regional competitors do have catalogs: at least six of the ten regional and national sites we could read run a cart or catalog, including Architessa’s tile store and Ferguson Home. Nobody on our list has tried the middle ground, which is real pages for small goods and honest ranges for big ones.

Not one of the 22 sites mentions tariffs, though a step in the cabinet duty is two months away, and only one reserves price changes in general terms. None publishes a deposit percentage, and only three state any payment term at all. Six of the 20 that sell and install or arrange installation show an MHIC number on a page we could read. Five more say “licensed” without a number, and nine say neither. A number that appears only in an image or on a page we didn’t crawl would count as not shown, and we couldn’t cross-check anything against the state’s own lookup because it sits behind a reCAPTCHA. So this is a fact about websites and says nothing about anyone’s license. A software system hits the same wall, so license checks have to be done by a person and recorded with a date. By our count, half of the dealers, four of eight, describe more than one install arrangement. That’s the finding we’d most like an owner to sit with, because it turns the choice from one a store makes once into one it makes on every order.

Across ten local queries through a general web search tool (not Google itself, and with no map pack or ads visible), 189 results included exactly 2 from a local independent’s own site, and both belonged to the trade distributor. A consumer-facing showroom’s own kitchen page appeared zero times. Directories and lead marketplaces took 82 rows, or 43%, chains and out-of-area sellers took 42, and cost guides took 26. Twelve looked like spam or off-topic pages parked on unrelated domains. Treat that as a rough picture of the web’s index rather than as a ranking report.

Some local sites are worth copying. TopStone Granite publishes installed costs per square foot by material, with worked examples, and points readers to the state’s license lookup. Charleene’s Houses prints a design agreement fee range, a package starting point and named project costs. Elegant Kitchen & Design answers how ordering works, what’s complimentary and how long delivery takes. Canton Kitchens says plainly how it works with contractors. Kenwood Kitchens lays out an installation day by day and offers a cabinetry-only option. Gramophone Design Build states how long each review stage takes, and Brothers Services says in its terms when a quote becomes binding.

Fourteen of the 22 have business-type structured data, and three have FAQ markup. Two block AI crawlers in robots.txt. Eleven have an llms.txt file, but at least six of those were stamped by a plugin or website builder, so it shows little intent, and at least one names a template rather than the business. Self-booking is absent too: no site had a calendar widget we could detect. We don’t think any of this means showrooms are behind, but the first one to answer three questions on its own website (what does a kitchen cost here, how long does it take, who installs it) will have that page more or less to itself.

The online store: one catalog, four kinds of page

A kitchen and bath showroom’s store shouldn’t try to be a single thing, and the mistake we’d expect is to treat the catalog as one big list with a yes-or-no price flag. The feeds, the markup rules and the law all sort a showroom’s goods into four groups, and the groups differ in what a page can honestly do. We’d give every record a field for this, and let the field drive what gets published where.

Why “add installation” breaks the feeds as well

The same “add installation” option that can make a store a contractor also runs into Google. Google’s Shopping policy bars labor and says: “This includes any services sold bundled with physical goods.” Its checkout protocol excludes bundled services such as installation and special shipping such as freight, and Shopify’s direct checkouts on AI surfaces don’t support bundles or customizable products. We found no installation field in Google’s current product data specification. A price with install can only live on the showroom’s own page or quote, as its own line, which also fits Maryland’s retail tax rule and the Commission’s ad rule. The ad rule, at COMAR 09.08.01.09, asks that if installation is extra the ad says so, clearly.

Cabinets have no availability value that fits. Google’s build_to_order is for vehicle ads only and preorder is for unreleased products, so a special-order item in a cart gets backorder plus availability_date, up to a year out and shown on the page. Schema.org has a MadeToOrder value, but Google’s merchant listing documentation doesn’t use it. And its landing page rules want a price, availability and a buy button, on a page where any user can buy at that price, so a “request a quote” page isn’t an online listing. We searched the Google pages we saved and found nothing addressing quote-only goods at all. The nearest native path for a wall of cabinets is “on display to order,” whose example is large furniture. It needs local listings already running, plus a page with approximate delivery time and shipping cost and policy, and if a different variant is on display, the page must say so.

Variants are better than they were. variant_option, from May 2026, allows up to 30 freely named dimensions, which suits door style, finish and width, while the variesBy markup Google documents allows six values, none of them door style. We’d map door style to pattern, finish to color, species to material and width to size. If boxes times doors times finishes isn’t a number you can keep accurate, that line stays display-to-order or quote-only. For the honest range, schema.org lets a Service carry an offer with a unit price specification using minPrice and unitText of “linear foot.” Google’s feature list shows no rich result for it, and it doesn’t belong in Product.offers on a merchant page, where the rule is one price above zero and AggregateOffer is for many sellers, not for variants. Page text and priceRange do the rest. Never use a deposit as a price, or a placeholder: we saw that in our bridal research, where a designer’s own Shopify catalog listed gowns at $1.

The Maryland line and the small print of freight

A store shipping faucets has to stop some products at the state line, and the obvious feed attribute doesn’t do that. excluded_destination takes Google surfaces as its values, not states. The real tools are shipping settings by region, the shipping attribute with a region, or regional availability, which names regulatory limits as a use but accepts only in_stock and out_of_stock. certification has no WaterSense value in the U.S., so on our reading flow data goes in product_detail, which Google ties to AI Mode and which also suits the TSCA statement and the origin claim. Freight doesn’t map either. The feed’s shipping price caps at $1,000, weight at 2,000 pounds, and anything larger goes to a label; rates to a store aren’t allowed, and pickup-only isn’t supported online. Price must match the page and the checkout, and import-related costs must be in the price or clearly indicated, so on our reading a tariff surcharge that first shows up at checkout is a Google problem as well as a tax and contract one. If you sell below a manufacturer’s advertised minimum, Google says to submit and show the minimum. Its help page even suggests a note such as “Add to cart for final price,” which comes close to what Moen and Pfister bar, so read the brand’s policy first. Door and slab samples have the cleanest route: Google’s price page has a sample rule, and on our reading it fits a $15 door sample, with the title starting “sample.”

What assistants and search can actually read

For this trade, AI shopping is discovery, not checkout. OpenAI says purchases complete on merchant sites, its feed requires a positive price and has no install or quote field, and Google’s checkout is waitlisted and excludes most of a kitchen. Google’s native_commerce attribute has a cart eligibility value that defaults to true, so a showroom using these feeds should turn it off by hand on anything that can’t be carted. And Shopify’s agentic channels are active by default for eligible stores, so a Shopify showroom needs a deliberate hide list for customizable goods and any deposit SKU. Legal disclosures on those surfaces belong in the first 6,000 characters of the description. What matters more to a showroom right now is whether the business gets named at all.

We couldn’t run ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews from a logged-out session outside the U.S., so we can’t tell you what they say about Baltimore showrooms, and we’d be cautious of anyone who claims a stable answer. BrightLocal’s September 2026 study of 200,085 local searches found repeat runs overlapping only 21% to 33%, depending on the system, and a tracked business named in 32% to 38% of answers, against 66% on Google Maps. No study we found breaks out kitchens. But the BrightLocal study has business websites at 42% of all citations, and its August source analysis gives the directory side: for service businesses, Google had 45% of citations and Yelp 12.3%, with the lead marketplaces barely registering (Houzz 0.7%, Thumbtack 0.5%, HomeAdvisor 0.5%). Yext’s 2025 analysis of 6.8 million citations points the same way. So for AI answers, a showroom’s own website and Business Profile look more useful than a paid marketplace listing. Google’s own guide says you can ignore llms.txt for Search, and we’d treat that file as harmless, not as a strategy.

On a Google Business Profile, a hybrid business can show its storefront and set up to 20 service areas, but the location must be staffed with permanent signage. Categories affect ranking and edits can trigger re-verification, so choosing between Cabinet store, Bathroom supply store, Kitchen remodeler and Countertop store is a real decision, and it should follow the same license record as everything else. A store that claims “Kitchen remodeler,” uses GeneralContractor markup and buys Local Services Ads for kitchen remodeling is telling the world it sells installation. Local Services Ads also began migrating into Google Ads in August 2026, and the kitchen category isn’t in the first named phase. Published lead prices are soft, with no rate card from any of the big marketplaces. One guide estimates $45 to $150 for a kitchen lead, and at a 20% win rate a $100 lead costs $500 a job, or about 1.7% of a $30,000 kitchen. That’s our illustration, and it’s the number a showroom’s reports should replace with its own.

The pages nobody has written

We searched for the questions a Baltimore homeowner or dealer would actually type. There’s no search-volume data behind this, since Google’s tools need a login, so we built it from autocomplete suggestions and the page types ranking in a general search index. “Kitchen remodel Baltimore cost” returns cost aggregators almost entirely, with figures that disagree badly: Thumbtack shows $3,830 to $16,662, while Fixr gives an average of $22,725. “Do I need a license to install cabinets” autocompletes to Florida and California, and the Commission’s FAQ has no cabinet entry. “Kitchen cabinet tariff” returns importers and forwarders, none local, and none connecting the entry date to a deposit or a price freeze. “Faucet flow rate” returns statutes and a parts distributor, and no retailer explains it per product. Wrong answers are also easy to find: live pages say Maryland’s home improvement license has a dollar threshold of $100 or $500 when the statute has none, invent a special-order exception to the one-third rule, or say contractors charge sales tax on materials and labor.

Those are the pages a showroom could own, and they don’t need a large budget. A page on what your kitchen costs here, using your own last 20 jobs in ranges. A page on who installs and what your license covers, with the number. A page on the tariff that says which of your lines are affected, updated when things move. A page per cabinet line with door samples you can buy for a few dollars. A faucet catalog with flow data and a tag that matches the floor model. And a plain statement of your deposit schedule, which none of the 22 sites we read has. Our weekend store write-up shows how little of that needs to be heroic. And check whether the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act reaches you: its threshold counts Maryland residents whose data you handle, not just customers.

A note for readers in Lithuania

Part of our team works from Lithuania, so we looked at how a kitchen sells there, and the first thing we checked was the tariff. The American schedule’s 15% heading for wood products of the European Union lists Lithuania by name, and the 50% step doesn’t touch it. It would be neat to say a Baltimore dealer could buy a Lithuanian kitchen instead, but the numbers don’t support that. Eurostat’s export data shows Lithuania sent €191.5 million of furniture to the United States in 2025, mostly living-room and bedroom pieces, and just €24,884 of fitted kitchen units, against €128.4 million from Italy and €41.4 million from Germany. The most visible Lithuanian move in the U.S. is SBA Home’s $70 million factory in North Carolina, and its chief executive calls the timing a coincidence.

We learned the most from how Lithuanian writers handle a kitchen. Their articles do what few American kitchen sites will: they name a unit price, usually per running meter (bėginis metras), they name the wait in months, and they name the advance. One seller asks “Kiek kainuoja virtuvės baldai?” (how much does kitchen furniture cost?) in its title and puts €500 to €1,000 per meter in bold. A Vilnius workshop gives seven steps, a measuring checklist, four to eight weeks of production and a recommended 20% to 40% advance, along with a message a reader can copy and send to a maker. These are sellers’ figures, and a typical flat runs about three meters. Marketplaces such as Pigu.lt print a price on hundreds of ready-made sets. The national press also runs the frightening version, about an advance paid and no kitchen delivered, followed by the consumer authority’s steps. An American showroom could borrow that format tomorrow.

We found no license for selling an installed kitchen like the one Maryland can require: the Construction Law requires attestation for contractors only on “special” structures. Installation still flips something, though. Faulty installation counts as a defect in the goods when the seller is responsible for it (Civil Code Article 6.363(8) and the Sale of Goods Directive). For a consumer the VAT is 21% either way, while the VAT Law’s Article 96 reverse-charges construction work ordered by a VAT payer. The leading European case on made-to-order goods happens to be about a fitted kitchen: in Möbel Kraft (C-529/19, 2020), a kitchen bought at a trade fair couldn’t be withdrawn from even though production hadn’t begun, and Article 6.228¹⁰ carries the same exception. The consumer authority reads it narrowly, so a set assembled from standard parts probably stays returnable when bought online. And the Retail Trade Rules as adopted in 2014 exclude furniture from the 14-day shop exchange altogether.

The deposit logic runs in the opposite direction from Maryland’s. We found no statutory cap on an advance, and Article 6.675(1) lets a customer pay all or part of the material price at signing. But Article 6.675(3) then freezes it: “Jeigu po rangos sutarties sudarymo medžiagos kaina pasikeičia, rangovas neturi teisės reikalauti ją perskaičiuoti.” (If the material price changes after signing, the contractor has no right to demand a recalculation.) A consumer may also end a work contract at any time before accepting the result, paying only for the share of work done (6.673), though whether a made-to-measure kitchen is a work contract or a sale (6.350¹) is less clear. A showroom’s samples, too, count as a public offer even with no price shown unless clearly marked not for sale (6.352).

Two EU dates also fall this year. Since August 6, 2026, REACH entry 77 has limited formaldehyde from furniture and wood-based articles to 0.062 mg/m³, about 0.05 parts per million by our arithmetic, measured on the finished article, where America’s TSCA rule limits the panels. And the EU’s positive lists for materials touching drinking water apply from December 31, 2026, one day before the American cabinet step, with a transition to 2032 for products holding a valid national certificate. We found no plan for an EU water label on taps or showers in the current ecodesign work plan.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For a Baltimore kitchen and bath business, the packages map onto this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none requires you to give up a design tool, QuickBooks or a job system that already works; the demos page shows finished work. In Maryland, the state’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, so the Online Store package starts at $6,180 with tax and a Custom App at $12,360.

Be clear about what custom doesn’t save. A Custom App at $12,360 is about eleven months of the entire $13,415 typical stack, and it replaces almost none of it. Design Flex and ProKitchen earn their fees with manufacturer catalogs nobody else can reproduce. An ERP with no published price may well be right for a showroom with a warehouse, several locations and trade accounts. We wouldn’t build a kitchen design tool, a catalog or an accounting system, and we’d be suspicious of anyone who offered to.

The returns come from three other places. The plainest is the payment rail: a showroom taking everything by card at 2.9% plus 30 cents spends $60,954 a year in our model, against $900 for capped bank transfers, so moving even a fifth of it pays for a Custom App in a year or so, if customers go along. The second is margin at the date. On one $10,000 dealer order with a $4,000 customs value, a 25-point duty step costs $1,000 if the price can’t move, and twelve of those roughly pay for a build. The third is risk, and it’s lopsided: a $408,959 tax assessment on a fabricator, a contract a court won’t enforce or a Layaway Act exposure of three or four times the amount paid are all small-probability, large-loss events, and in each the first question is what your records say. For a two-person cabinet dealer that sells goods only, ships nothing and has never had a dispute, none of this adds up, and we’d tell that shop to keep a good spreadsheet.

What we would build for a Baltimore showroom

If you run Design Flex or ProKitchen and QuickBooks and like them, keep them. What none of them holds is what this article keeps returning to: who arranged this install, what duty this box entered under, what a faucet may say to a Maryland buyer, and what a deposit becomes if the job is canceled. That’s the layer we’d build, connected to the tools the showroom already pays for.

The first part is the sale mode, because everything else reads it. Each job starts by answering a short set of questions: goods only, goods with a referred installer, an installer on our invoice, or our own crew; the type of property and space; where the contract will be signed; the jurisdiction from a geocoded address, not a mailing city. The answer picks the contract template, sets the deposit limit on the payment link, chooses the tax treatment line by line, and decides whether the license number prints. If a designer flips a job from goods-only to installed, the system says what just changed and asks someone with the authority to approve it. A referred job with any money moving between showroom and installer goes to a review queue, and the fee goes in a ledger. We aren’t your lawyers, and the rules behind those answers should come from yours.

The second part is the quote line. It keeps what the design file exports, and adds what the file leaves out: manufacturer, origin, importer of record if known, wood or not, complete or part, the price-book version, the supplier’s latest price letter, any material surcharge as its own value, the expected entry date, and an expiry on the quote itself. The duty table is effective-dated and easy to change, since last year’s change came on the last day of December. A Monday report lists every open quote and every unshipped order by exposure, so an owner can see, in November, which kitchens sit on the wrong side of January 1 and how much margin that is. For fabricators, a slab record holds origin and entry quarter, because the quartz quota opens again on November 15.

The third part is the contract and the deposit ledger. The paper is generated from the job, so it can’t print without what the law asks of that mode: the license and salesperson numbers, approximate dates, agreed consideration, notices and a door-to-door form if it’s being signed at home, or for a retail special order, the Layaway Act’s items and a seller-signed copy. No payment link exists until a signature does. Payments are rows with date, amount, rail, fee, what they’re for, and the terms in force. A factory order isn’t released until the longest cancellation period on that job has run. Contract edits are limited to the people the statute allows. When a customer calls to cancel, one screen shows which rules apply, what the showroom has committed to the factory and what the numbers say, and when a card dispute arrives, the file is already assembled. A payment page on the showroom’s own processor sits on top of this, defaulting to bank transfer and showing each fee honestly.

The fourth part is purchasing and receiving, where most of the daily pain lives. Design exports become purchase orders with the right resale or tax-paid status on each, and supplier acknowledgments come back onto the quote so a changed price or a changed ship date shows up at once. The delivery plan carries the permit number, the 15-day clock and the stair check on the largest box. Receiving happens carton by carton on a phone, with photos, and a damaged door turns into a claim with a dollar amount, the bill of lading and the invoice attached, so that “noted on the receipt” never gets mistaken for “filed.” The supplier’s 15 days and the carrier’s nine months are both on the screen. The TSCA sentence on each invoice gets checked at the same moment, which is the one time anybody looks at that paper.

The fifth part is the store, and it reads the same records. A faucet gets published only if its flow data, proof source and brand rule are all present. A cabinet line page shows what the supplier allows and the lead time the system already knows. Samples get real carts, display models get a tag printed from the same data as the page, and a product that can’t be sold into Maryland can’t reach a Maryland checkout.

Behind all of this are the reports an owner actually reads: margin by job after tax mode and surcharges, deposits held against factory commitments, card cost by rail, open claims and their clocks, quotes about to expire, and install arrangements that have drifted from what the license covers. Most of it can be built on a showroom’s own exports in a matter of weeks, and the first useful piece, the tariff exposure list, can usually be done in one.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most Baltimore kitchen and bath businesses shouldn’t build anything, and we’d tell yours so on the first call if it’s one of them. Decide by where your time, money and risk actually go, not by how dated your website looks next to the showroom down York Road.

• Leave it alone if you sell goods only, or run a small licensed crew with a handful of jobs at a time. Do five things this month and stop there: have a Maryland lawyer read your order form and tell you which side of 8-101(g)(3)(iv) you’re on; put an expiry and a price letter date on every quote; ask each supplier in writing where your open orders are made and who imports them; have your accountant confirm how your installed jobs are taxed; and move deposits to bank transfer where customers will accept it.
• Buy if your problem is schedules, change orders and customer messages. JobTread, Knowify, Contractor Foreman and Buildertrend are built for that, and a fabricator should look at Moraware first. Test them on your worst week before you sign: a change order after the factory order, a short delivery, a deposit refund, a job in Pennsylvania, and a designer who needs to edit a signed quote. Ask how a deposit arrives in QuickBooks, and export your data once before you need to.
• Build the layer if you mix goods-only and installed jobs, import or buy from several origins, sell small goods online alongside cabinets you can only quote, or run a shop and a showroom together. That’s where one job’s facts have to travel from the design file to the contract, the purchase order, the tax line, the website and the claim, and where a missed rule costs more than the software.
• Wait for the right month if the tariff date is your only worry. Don’t start a software project to solve December 31. The exposure list takes days, and it’s the only part you need before New Year. Then look at the rest after New Year, with a list of everything that went wrong in the meantime.

Whichever way you go, keep the data portable. Any tool, ours included, should let you leave with your design files, approved quotes, deposit records and customer histories in a format something else can read, including a plain PDF and item list of each approved design, stored where a lapsed license can’t lock it.

Questions Baltimore showrooms and homeowners ask us

Do I need a license to sell kitchen cabinets in Maryland?

Not if you only sell the goods. Business Regulation 8-101(g)(3)(iv) leaves out a “sale of materials, if the seller does not arrange to perform or does not perform directly or indirectly any work in connection with the installation or application of the materials.” If the sale includes installation, the Maryland Home Improvement Commission’s reasoning on similar goods points to a contractor license, and anyone negotiating that sale needs a contractor or salesperson license too. This is general information, so have a Maryland lawyer look at how your business actually works.

Does recommending an installer make a showroom a contractor?

Nobody has publicly decided. We found no Maryland opinion or Commission document on what “arrange” means for a materials seller, though we couldn’t search administrative hearing decisions. Our reading is that a bare list with no money and no scheduling is the safest version, and that a referral fee, booking the installer or running the job should be treated as needing a license. A fee raises separate problems under sections 8-315 and 8-612. In Fosler v. Panoramic Design (2003), the state’s highest court said this kind of dispute goes to the Commission first.

How much deposit can a Maryland kitchen company take?

On a home improvement contract, no more than one-third of the contract price before or at signing, and nothing before the contract is signed, under section 8-617. The Commission says later payments are left to the contract. There is no exception for special orders or factory deposits, and bills to raise the cap to one-half have failed, most recently HB 1499 in 2026. A retail sale of goods only isn’t under this cap, but a special order may fall under the Layaway Sales Act.

Can a kitchen dealer raise the price after signing because of a tariff?

On a retail special order, probably not: Commercial Law 14-1105 says the seller “may not increase the layaway price,” with heavy penalties, though no court has applied the Act to a kitchen. For a licensed contractor the question is open. Section 8-501 requires the agreed consideration and neither allows nor bans an escalation clause, and we found nothing from the Commission on one. A clause should be signed at the start and reviewed by a lawyer. Quote expiry dates do most of the practical work.

Is there sales tax on a kitchen remodel in Maryland?

Not as a line on the invoice when one business furnishes and installs the kitchen. COMAR 03.06.01.19 treats kitchen cabinetry installed in residential or commercial spaces as real property, so the contractor pays 6% when buying materials and charges the customer no sales tax, however the contract is itemized. A retailer that sells cabinets without installing them collects 6% on the goods price. Wall-to-wall carpet and freestanding appliances stay taxable goods even on a contractor job, and countertops in commercial spaces are generally goods.

Is the tariff on kitchen cabinets going to 50% on January 1, 2027?

That’s the current schedule. Proclamation 11000 of December 31, 2025 says the Section 232 rate on kitchen cabinets and vanities increases to 50 percent effective January 1, 2027, except for countries with an agreement. As of November 1, 2026 we found no later change in the Federal Register or the tariff schedule, but last year’s delay came on the last day of December. The rate depends on when goods are entered for consumption, and there’s no exception for goods already on the water.

Does the cabinet tariff apply to cabinets from Canada, Mexico or Europe?

Canada and Mexico: yes, and USMCA doesn’t help, because the duty is collected on top of any special rate. By our reading, a wooden vanity from Canada also owes a separate 50% under Proclamation 11048, a Section 338 action, for 75% now and 100% in January, while a Canadian kitchen cabinet doesn’t, though we found no ruling and a broker should check. The European Union, Japan and South Korea are capped at 15% all-in and the United Kingdom at 10%, and those don’t step up. Parts count, and wood countertops appear to classify elsewhere.

Is there a tariff on quartz countertops?

Yes. Proclamation 11051 set a Section 201 safeguard from August 15, 2026: a tariff-rate quota with an added 25% in quota and 50% over it through August 14, 2027, stepping down later. It covers slabs and fabricated tops, and only the quartz part if attached to a vanity. It doesn’t cover granite, marble, soapstone or quartzite. Canada, Mexico, South Korea and others are excluded; China, Vietnam, India, Türkiye and the EU aren’t, and antidumping duties on Chinese quartz still apply on top.

Do I need a permit to replace kitchen cabinets in Baltimore?

Not for cabinets and countertops alone: Baltimore City’s code and Baltimore County’s Bill 49-24 both exempt them as finish work (the County excepts floodplain work and has separate rules for basement kitchens). Moving or replacing plumbing fixtures, new circuits, gas lines, hoods and demolition of walls or flooring are different, and the trades need their own licensed people and permits.

Which faucets and showerheads can’t be sold in Maryland?

Under State Government 9-2006 and COMAR 14.26.03, new products sold, offered for sale or installed for profit in the state must meet limits: 1.5 gallons a minute for a private lavatory faucet, 1.8 for a kitchen faucet (a temporary 2.2 is allowed only if it resets to 1.8 after each use), 2.0 for a showerhead and 1.28 gallons a flush for a toilet. A set of showerheads on one fitting counts as one. Tag display models: the statute calls for it, though it’s unclear on which products. The 2025 federal change to the showerhead definition doesn’t alter any of this.

Why don’t kitchen showrooms show prices online?

Mostly because a cabinet’s price comes from a private price book and a dealer’s multiplier, and depends on hundreds of boxes, door styles and finishes. None of the 18 cabinet brands we read prints a cabinet price itself, and only 4 of the 22 Baltimore sites we could read publish a real price or range. A showroom can still publish honest ranges per linear foot for a named line where its supplier allows it, along with lead times and what affects the number.

Can I list cabinets on Google Shopping?

Only with a real price per product that matches the page and a way to buy it, which suits stocked flat-pack and small goods. Google has no made-to-order availability for cabinets, so a special order uses backorder with an availability date. A cabinet line on your wall fits local inventory with “on display to order” better, and a price-book line is usually quote-only with no feed row at all. Google bars services bundled with goods, so installation can’t be part of a listing.

What does kitchen and bath showroom software cost?

Design tools with manufacturer catalogs run about $2,400 to $2,500 a seat per year (Cyncly Design Flex $2,495, ProKitchen $2,395). A modeled stack for a five-person showroom doing $2.1 million on 60 kitchens a year came to about $8,500 for a light setup and $13,400 for a typical one. Dealer ERP systems don’t publish prices. On that revenue, card fees at 2.9% plus 30 cents are about $61,000, against $900 for capped bank transfers, so the payment rail usually matters more than the software.

What happens to my deposit if a kitchen company closes?

Less than you’d hope. Wren Kitchens’ U.S. arm filed Chapter 7 in April 2026 with, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, over 30,000 creditors. A consumer deposit has a limited bankruptcy priority of $3,800 per person. In Maryland, a claim against a licensed contractor can reach the Guaranty Fund, capped at $30,000 per claimant and $250,000 per contractor, so a large failure gets prorated. A goods-only sale has no Fund behind it. Card protection may help, and a dated contract and ledger help with all of these.

Should a kitchen showroom build custom software?

Usually not the design tool, the catalog or the books. A goods-only dealer or small licensed crew can do well with a job tool, a spreadsheet and five careful habits. Custom work earns its place when a showroom mixes goods-only and installed jobs, buys from several origins, sells small goods online or runs a shop behind the showroom, because then one job’s facts have to travel across tools. We build that layer at fixed prices, starting with a one-week prototype at $3,500.