What this flooring calculator does — and its lane
This is a non-tile flooring estimator: carpet, laminate, vinyl plank or LVP, hardwood and engineered wood, plus a generic mode for anything else sold by the square foot. It turns your room measurements into a square footage with waste, a box count for plank materials, an optional underlayment figure, and a cost estimate you control. Tiled floors are a different job — they need tile counts, grout and thinset, so the tile calculator handles those — and a concrete floor belongs in the concrete calculator, measured in yards and bags.
Instant, and nobody gets your email
The loudest complaint about flooring and carpet calculators online is that they are not really calculators at all — they are lead-generation forms. You enter your room, and instead of a number you get a box demanding your name, email and phone so a sales rep can call you. This tool is the opposite: it computes as you type, captures nothing, and sends nothing anywhere. Use it anonymously, offline, as many times as you like.
- Area — length × width per room, summed across as many rooms or rectangles as you add, in square feet and square metres.
- Boxes — for laminate, vinyl and hardwood, the area with waste divided by your box coverage, rounded up.
- Carpet — area with a note on the 12 ft broadloom roll width, which drives seam planning.
- Cost — material per square foot plus installation per square foot, with optional removal and disposal, all editable, all estimate-only.
area = Σ (lengthft × widthft)
boxes = ceil( area × (1 + waste) ÷ boxCoverage )
cost = area × (material/ft² + install/ft² + removal/ft²)
Carpet, broadloom and the 12 ft roll
Carpet behaves differently from plank. It comes off a roll that is almost always 12 ft wide (sometimes 13′2″ or 15′), so a room wider than the roll needs a seam and extra material to match the pile direction. That means usable carpet is rarely a clean length × width, and an installer measuring the actual room and planning seams earns their fee on a big space. The calculator gives the carpet area and flags the broadloom width so you can plan; for cost it accepts a price per square foot, and you can convert your per-square-yard quote by dividing it by nine.
| Material | Sold by | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Laminate | Box (sq ft) | Click-lock planks; needs underlayment |
| Vinyl plank / LVP | Box (sq ft) | Often has pad attached |
| Hardwood / engineered | Box (sq ft) | Acclimate before fitting |
| Carpet | Roll / sq yd | 12 ft broadloom; seams matter |
Any 2026 prices people quote — a few dollars a square foot for laminate or vinyl material and a similar amount for fitting — are rough public ballparks only. Your local numbers are the ones that count, which is exactly why every cost field is blank and editable rather than pre-filled from a price list.
Waste, underlayment and several rooms
Around 10% waste suits most plank jobs; a busy or diagonal layout or a room full of cut-ins wants more. Tick underlayment to add the same area for laminate or click-vinyl that needs a foam or cork layer beneath. Flooring a whole floor of the house? Add a row per room and the areas sum into one total before boxes and cost are figured, so you order once.