How Much Does a Modular Home Cost? The Factory Price Is Not the Delivered Cost

Ask three manufacturers what a modular home costs and you will get three numbers that measure different things. One quotes the building ex-works. Another quotes the building delivered. A third quotes it assembled, connected and ready to move into. The gap between the first and the last is not a rounding error — it is tens of percent.

That gap widens in North America, because the items added on top of the factory price are local. Haul distance, soil conditions, frost depth, the permitting process in that jurisdiction and the run to the nearest utility connection all change from lot to lot.

So the useful question is not "how much does a modular home cost" but "what is in the number you just gave me". Here is how the line items actually split.

ifHaus turnkey starting prices run from $20,000 for a 48 m² (517 sq ft) single-storey model up to $45,000 for a 100 m² (1,076 sq ft) two-storey 3+1. That covers the building itself: light gauge steel frame, envelope, insulation, services and interior finishes.

These figures are on our production and delivery basis in Türkiye. To reach a total for a lot in the United States or Canada you have to add the lot-dependent items in the table above. Presenting a factory price as though it were the delivered cost of a finished house in North America would be misleading, and we are not going to do that — the difference is large enough to matter to your budget.

What we can do is put a realistic range on the whole picture once we know the location, because that is what determines the items we cannot price from Istanbul.

If a finished building is exported from Türkiye, duty enters the calculation. Steel modular building units are classified under HTS 9406.20.00, which falls within the Section 232 steel derivative regime in the United States. Following the April 2026 restructuring, the metals-content method was eliminated and the duty is assessed on the full customs value.

In Canada the same tariff line carries an MFN rate of 6 percent, and since 26 December 2025 a 25 percent surtax applies to steel derivative products from all countries. Rates depend on origin and classification and the rules move quickly, so this has to be confirmed with a customs broker before anyone quotes a price. In the United States a binding classification ruling can be obtained from CBP.

This is the arithmetic behind our preference for local manufacturing partnership on North American projects. Producing locally removes duty, ocean freight and transport damage risk from the cost table entirely, and what remains is engineering, the production system and assembly.

Per-square-foot figures are the most quoted and least comparable numbers in this industry, because they almost never describe the same scope. A shell-only quote and a turnkey quote reduced to dollars per square foot look like the same product and are not.

Three questions make two quotes comparable. What does the price include. Which items are billed separately because they depend on the lot. Where exactly does the handover end. Until those match, the per-square-foot number tells you nothing useful.

The same applies when comparing a modular home to a site-built one. A site-built cost per square foot usually includes the foundation and site work; a factory price usually does not. Comparing them directly makes the factory option look cheaper than it is.