Why it matters
Lighting separates tiers more reliably than almost any other fit-and-finish item, because it is the one that takes an electrician. A builder-grade house has one light in the middle of each ceiling, and every photo of it looks flat and shadowed. A mid house has pot lights. A genuinely premium house has layers: pot lights for general light, pendants over an island, undercabinet strips, sconces, and dimmers on everything. That layering is expensive because every layer is another circuit, another switch, and another hole in a finished ceiling. This is also the change most buyers of a dated home actually want to make, and they are usually surprised by what it costs, in both directions. Pot lights are $150 to $300 each installed, and a typical project of 8 to 15 lights lands at $1,200 to $4,500. That is more than people expect for "just some lights" and far less than they expect once they have seen the difference it makes. Volume helps: a single light might be $250 to $300, but fifteen of them can drop toward $150 each.
How to spot it
Value tells: a single flush-mount dome (the one everyone calls a boob light) in the centre of the ceiling in every room; a fluorescent box in the kitchen; track lighting from the 1990s; a bathroom strip of bare bulbs over the mirror; brass or dark bronze fixtures. Mid tells: pot lights on the main floor, a pendant or two, brushed finishes. Premium tells: multiple lighting layers in one room, undercabinet lighting, dimmers, sconces, and fixtures that look chosen rather than supplied. Lifespans. Light fixtures last about 40 years; lighting controls and dimmers 10 to 30. LED bulbs run 30,000 to 50,000 hours. So the fixture is rarely the thing that fails. It is simply the thing that dates.
What it costs
Toronto, 2026: pot lights $150 to $300 each installed, $1,200 to $4,500 for a typical project. A straight fixture swap is $100 to $650 depending on the fixture and whether the wiring has to move. An electrician in the GTA bills $90 to $140 per hour, and ceiling height and access drive the number.
What to do
Monitor. Price the rooms that matter to you, per light. It is one of the highest-impact, lowest-risk changes you can make to a home you have just bought.
Education and triage, not a home inspection. Casaroo names the lighting tier from your photos. It cannot tell you what is behind the ceiling, or whether the circuits can take more. Warning. Old knob-and-tube or aluminum wiring changes this conversation completely. Adding pot lights to circuits like those is not a lighting job, it is an electrical one, and that lives on the mechanical side.