How much flooring do I need?

Type the rooms. This works out the floor area, adds the waste your laying pattern really costs you, and tells you how many boxes to put in the van — the same arithmetic FloorQuote runs on a LiDAR scan.

Laying pattern Waste % Coverage per box (sq ft) Price per box

Coverage and price are printed on the box, or on the product page — a pack of laminate is usually 18–26 sq ft (1.7–2.4 m²).

How the box count is worked out

Three steps, in this order — and the order is what decides whether you come up a plank short on the last row.

Area first, per roomLength × width for each room, added up. Closets and bays are their own row.
Waste on the area, not on the boxesThe pattern's percentage is added to the area before anything is divided. Adding it afterwards, to a box count that has already been rounded up, quietly buys you an extra box.
Then round up, onceArea-with-waste ÷ coverage per box, rounded up to a whole box. You cannot buy 11.3 boxes.

Written out: boxes = ceil(area × (1 + waste) ÷ coverage per box).

One detail worth naming, because it is where calculators go wrong. When the fit is exact — 200 sq ft at 10% waste is 220, and a 20 sq ft box divides into that exactly 11 times — a computer working in binary stores that division as 11.000000000000002, and a plain round-up sells you a twelfth box. FloorQuote snaps a result that close to a whole number before rounding up, and so does this page, against the same test vectors.

Waste by laying pattern

Waste is decided by how the floor is laid, not by what it is made of. Laminate cut on the diagonal wastes the same as hardwood cut on the diagonal.

Pattern	Waste	Why
Straight, plank or tile	10%	Off-cuts from the end of one row start the next.
Diagonal, 45°	15%	Every row meets the wall at an angle; the triangles rarely fit anywhere else.
Herringbone or chevron	18%	Both ends of most pieces are cut, and the border eats short lengths.

Raise it if the room is cut up by pillars, hearths or an island, if the planks are long and the room is small, or if the product is discontinued and a second order is not an option. Lower it only when you are laying a plain rectangle out of a product you can re-order next week.

Square feet, square metres and packs

The same floor, three ways of describing it. Switch the toggle and the page converts everything, including the coverage printed on the box.

You have	You want	Multiply by
Square metres	Square feet	10.7639
Square feet	Square metres	0.092903
Metres	Feet	3.28084

A pack and a box are the same thing — the word changes with the country, not the maths. UK and Irish packs are usually quoted in m², around 1.7–2.4 m² for laminate; US boxes are quoted in square feet.

What this does not do

Stairs. Treads, risers and nosings: stairs are counted by the piece, not by area. Price them separately.
Carpet and sheet vinyl. Those come off a roll of a fixed width, and the number that matters is how the seams fall, not the area.
Layout. It tells you how much to buy, not where the first plank goes.
Local prices. Whatever you type is what it uses. It does not know what your supplier charges this week.

For the parts it does cover, the numbers are the app's own: the box arithmetic, the pattern waste and the money rounding on this page are ported from FloorQuote's estimating engine and checked against the same test vectors.

The same maths, from a scan

FloorQuote does this on site: scan the room with the iPhone's LiDAR instead of typing it, pick the product out of your own price book, and it prints a quote with your company on top before you leave the house.

Get FloorQuote on the App Store What the app does

Last reviewed 22 September 2026