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How much does carpet installation cost?

Carpet comes in twelve-foot rolls, so you do not buy your floor, you buy the roll. A 12 by 20 room wastes nothing. A 13 by 13 bedroom makes you buy 312 square feet of carpet for a 169 square foot floor. That is 85% waste, it is pure geometry, and we have not seen another calculator model it.

Carpet comes in rolls twelve feet wide, so you do not buy your floor. You buy the roll. That one fact decides more of your bill than the grade of carpet does, and no other calculator will mention it.

Work it through. A 12 by 20 room takes a single 20-foot strip off a 12-foot roll: 240 square feet bought, 240 laid, nothing wasted, no seam. Now widen that room by ONE FOOT. A 13 by 20 room no longer fits the roll, so it needs two strips, and you buy 312 square feet for a 260 square foot floor: 20% waste and a seam down your living room. And then there is the ordinary bedroom. A 13 by 13 room exceeds twelve feet in BOTH directions, so it takes two strips whichever way you lay it: 312 square feet of carpet for a 169 square foot floor. 85% waste. You are buying nearly double, and paying for it. Which is why the price you were quoted is not the price you pay. The quote is per square foot of CARPET. What you care about is the cost per square foot of YOUR FLOOR, and the third cell above computes exactly that for the carpet alone: at $3 a foot quoted, a 13 by 13 room costs you $5.54 a foot of actual floor. The fourth cell adds labour, underlay and removal, which is a different and larger number, and we used to point at it while quoting the 85% and hope you would not check. Rooms whose dimensions are multiples of twelve waste nothing at all, which is worth knowing before you knock a wall about.

§ 01 Your numbers

Room width (feet)

Measure the widest point, wall to wall, and round UP to the next foot: carpet is cut from a roll and you cannot buy 11.4 feet of width.

This box and the one below it decide almost everything on this page, because they decide how your room falls against the roll.

Room length (feet)

Same again, wall to wall, rounded up.

Do not subtract for a doorway or an alcove: the installer buys carpet for the rectangle that contains your room, not for its exact outline, and the offcut is yours to keep and not yours to un-pay for.

Roll width (feet)

OURS, and it is the assumption on this page that changes the answer most.

Twelve feet is the broadloom convention; 15-foot rolls exist and are less common. We could not find a federal source that states either, and we are not going to imply that we did, so it is a box. What is NOT in doubt is the arithmetic that follows once you set it. If your supplier stocks 15-foot goods, a 13-foot room stops being a disaster.

Carpet price per square foot (dollars)

OURS. No federal source publishes an installed or a retail carpet price, and the assumptions below name every place we looked rather than waving at it. Take the figure off your own quote and put it here. AND CHECK THE UNIT: carpet was historically sold by the square YARD and a square yard is NINE square feet, not three. If you were quoted $27, ask whether that is a yard (which is $3 a foot) or a foot (which is $27 a foot).

Underlay price per square foot (dollars)

OURS, and it is the line most often left off a quote entirely until the day of fitting.

Underlay is cut to your floor rather than to the roll, so it wastes almost nothing, which is why we price it against your actual area and not against the roll. It is also the part you will feel underfoot for the next ten years, and an easy place for a quote to be quietly thinned.

Crew hours on site (people x hours)

Ours, and READ THE UNIT, because we got it wrong first time and it halved the labour line.

The Census counts WORKER-hours: its field is literally 'construction workers annual hours'. So two people for four hours is EIGHT field hours, not four. A single ordinary room, with the old carpet up and the floor clear, is about half a day for a two-person crew, which is where eight comes from. Stairs are what blow this up, because every tread is a separate piece and a flight can take as long as a whole room.

Billed rate (dollars per field hour)

MEASURED, and the number we are most confident in.

The NAICS index files 'Carpet, installation only' under 238330, flooring contractors, and the Economic Census records what that trade takes in for construction work and the field hours behind it. So $136.04 is what an hour of a carpet fitter's time bills at, net of materials, against the $30.55 an hour the trade pays him. But it is a NATIONAL MEAN and it does not bound the firm in your hallway: across the states the same trade runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour, and those are themselves averages OF firms.

Old carpet removal and disposal (dollars, 0 for none)

Ours, and it is a real line rather than a rounding error: the old carpet and its underlay have to come up, the tack strip has to be checked, and somebody has to take a very heavy roll of dusty textile to a tip that charges by weight.

Leave it at zero if you are pulling it up yourself, which is genuinely easy and genuinely worth doing.

Estimated cost

$2,180

Typical range $1,853 – $2,834

Carpet (you buy the roll, not the floor)$936
Labour, overhead and profit$1,088
Underlay$156
Removal and disposal$0
Total$2,180

See next steps →

§ 02 The return

Carpet you must buy312 sq ft

Wasted, because rolls are 12 ft wide20%

Carpet alone, per sq ft of YOUR floor$3.60

All in, per sq ft of YOUR floor$8.38

The billed rate, the wage and the state spread are measured from the 2022 Economic Census, in 2025 dollars. The roll geometry is arithmetic and needs no source. The carpet price, the underlay price, the hours and the roll width are our model, and each of them is a box you can overwrite.

Where the money goes

Carpet (you buy the roll, not the floor)$936

Labour, overhead and profit$1,088

Underlay$156

Recommended next steps

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A single room, no stairs. Before you order, ask whether 15-foot broadloom is available in the carpet you want: if your room is between 12 and 15 feet wide it can remove a seam and pay for itself.

Compare quotesCarpet installer quotes↗Ask each for the square footage they are BUYING.MaterialsCarpet and underlay↗Check whether the price is per foot or per yard.

By the numbers

Broadloom carpet is made in rolls twelve feet wide. You do not buy your floor, you buy the roll, and that single fact decides more of your bill than the grade of carpet does.
A 12 by 20 room takes one 20-foot strip off a 12-foot roll: 240 square feet bought for a 240 square foot floor.
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Nothing wasted, no seam. A room wastes nothing whenever EITHER of its dimensions is a multiple of the roll width, so a 10 by 12 and a 20 by 24 are both perfect too. We first said you needed BOTH dimensions to be multiples of twelve, which was wrong, and the data table on this very page already disproved it.
Widen that room by ONE FOOT and it stops fitting the roll.
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A 13 by 20 room needs two strips, so you buy 312 square feet for a 260 square foot floor: 20% waste, and a seam down the middle of your living room, for twelve extra inches of room.
A 13 by 13 bedroom is the worst case AMONG ORDINARY BEDROOM-SIZED ROOMS, and we have to say it that carefully because it is not the worst case full stop: small rooms are far worse (a 4 by 5 utility room is 140% waste, and it ranks well above this one).
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We originally called 13 by 13 'the worst case' flat, which our own checker flagged as an unproven superlative and we shipped anyway. What makes it worth your attention is not that it is extreme, it is that it is ORDINARY. It exceeds twelve feet in BOTH directions, so it takes two strips whichever way you lay it: 312 square feet of carpet for a 169 square foot floor. 85% waste. You are buying nearly double the carpet and paying for all of it.
Which means the price you were quoted is not the price you pay.
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The quote is per square foot of CARPET; what you care about is the cost per square foot of YOUR FLOOR. In a 13 by 13 room those two numbers differ by 85%, and every carpet calculator we can find multiplies room area by a price per square foot, which silently assumes zero waste. They are all wrong in the same direction.
Check the unit, because it is a factor of NINE.
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Carpet was historically sold by the square YARD and is now usually quoted by the square FOOT, and a square yard is nine square feet, not three. '$27 a yard' is '$3 a foot'. A quote that changes units halfway through is the oldest trick in the trade.
3 more
- The trade that lays it is measured: the NAICS index files 'Carpet, installation only' under 238330, flooring contractors, which bills $136.04 a field hour and pays the fitter $30.55.
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  A 4.45x markup, from the Economic Census, and one of the widest of any trade we cover.
- But do not read $136.04 as a limit on what your installer can charge, because it is a national MEAN.
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  Across the states the same trade's billed rate runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour, and those are themselves averages of firms, so firm-to-firm dispersion is wider again and the Census publishes none of it.
- Underlay is cut to your floor rather than to the roll, so it wastes almost nothing, which is why we price it against your real area and not against the carpet you had to buy.
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  It is also the line most often left off a quote until the day of fitting, and an easy place for one to be quietly thinned.

The finding on this page is geometry, and geometry needs no source. Carpet comes off a roll of fixed width. The installer lays strips one way or the other and takes whichever wastes less, and the arithmetic follows: ceiling of width over roll width, times the length, against ceiling of length over roll width, times the width.

Take the smaller. That is the roll you consume and that is what you pay for. It cannot be argued with and it is the single most useful thing nobody tells a person buying carpet. What is sourced is the labour. The NAICS index lists "Carpet, installation only" under 238330, flooring contractors, and the Economic Census records what that trade takes in for construction work and the field hours behind it. So $136.04 a field hour is measured, as is the $30.55 an hour the trade pays the fitter, and so is the 4.45x markup between them. Those are facts about the TRADE, in aggregate, and not about the firm in your hallway. And the rate is a mean, which is not a bound. Across the states the same trade runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour, a 1.82x spread, and those state figures are themselves averages OF firms, so real firm-to-firm dispersion is wider again and the Census publishes none of it. Where you live moves this more than most pages will admit. Ours are the carpet price, the underlay price, the hours, and the roll width itself. The roll width is an industry convention rather than a federal figure and we will not pretend otherwise, which is why it is a box: if your supplier stocks 15-foot goods, a 13-foot room stops being a disaster, and you should find that out before you buy. We could not find a federal carpet price, and the first version of that refusal was FALSE. We wrote that "the Economic Census publishes no quantity column at all, so it cannot yield a price per square foot for anything". It does. The products file is cross-sector, it is called EC2200NAPCSINDPRD, it carries 137,429 US product rows with columns for quantity produced, quantity shipped and units, and we had never opened it. That was our eighth negative-existence slip and it is exactly why we write these down. Having actually read it, the refusal survives in a better form. Carpet mills (NAICS 314110) have twenty product lines in that file and every one of their quantity cells is suppressed. So there is genuinely no factory-gate price for carpet, and that is now a fact about a file we opened rather than a guess about one we had not. We also checked DOE and NREL's measures database (93 sheets across two workbooks, no carpet line item) and the federal price indexes (which are indexes: they give the change and never the level). And opening it handed us two things we would otherwise have missed. First, it CORROBORATES the page: Census's own product line is "roll carpet and rug goods (6 foot and larger)", and it is 51% of all US carpet manufacturing. The Census defines the product the same way the trade does, and the roll is the reason this page exists. Second, and more useful to you: the same file lists modular carpet TILE at 6% of the industry. Carpet tile is cut squares. It has no roll geometry at all, so it has essentially no roll waste, and an awkward room stops being expensive. If the arithmetic on this page is punishing your room, that is the thing to go and ask about, and we would not have known to tell you if we had not gone back and opened the file we had claimed did not exist.

Sources: US Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS index file (which lists 'Carpet, installation only' under 238330, flooring contractors) · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the billed rate, the wage and the state dispersion for NAICS 238330) · ECI, construction, total compensation (the deflator: a labour index, because the billed rate has materials removed from it)

How this estimate is calculated

A NAICS CODE IS A BUCKET, NOT A JOB, AND THE RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE BUCKET'S.
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NAICS 238330 is titled 'Flooring contractors', and only 19.1% of that class's receipts are carpet laying or removal contractor. The largest single slice, 60.1%, is floor contractor, including wood, resilient, and compute. So the billed rate here is the CLASS's rate, measured from real firms doing real work, and it is the measured figure we have for this job. It is not a rate for specialists in this job specifically, and we have four times called a class rate something it was not. We would rather show you the composition than let you assume it away.
THE ROLL ARITHMETIC IS NOT AN ASSUMPTION, BUT ONE STEP IN IT IS, and we overclaimed.
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Carpet comes off a roll of fixed width, and the strip arithmetic that follows is just arithmetic: ceiling of width over roll width times length, against ceiling of length over roll width times width. What IS a modelling choice is the bit we said was not: we take the SMALLER of those two, which assumes the installer is free to run the strips whichever way wastes less.
He may not be, and the reason is PILE DIRECTION.
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Carpet has a nap, all strips in a room must run the same way or the two pieces will look like different colours, and the pile is conventionally run along the length of the room. If your installer is held to that, a 13 by 20 room buys 480 square feet rather than 312, and the waste is 85% instead of 20%. Both layouts are internally consistent on nap, so this is not a bug in the arithmetic; it is a constraint the arithmetic does not know about. WHICH MEANS OUR WASTE FIGURE IS A FLOOR, NOT A CEILING. You may waste more than we say. You will not waste less.
The ROLL WIDTH itself is ours, and it is the one assumption that changes the answer dramatically.
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Twelve feet is the broadloom convention and fifteen-foot rolls exist and are less common. We could not find a federal source stating either, so we will not imply we did, and we made it a box instead. If your supplier stocks 15-foot goods, a 13-foot room stops being a disaster: check before you buy, because it is worth more than any haggling over the grade.
The billed rate is MEASURED and is the part of the page we are most confident in, but be careful what it is a rate FOR.
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The Economic Census records the value of construction work NAICS 238330 performs and the construction-worker hours behind it, so $136.04 is what an hour of that class's time bills at, net of materials. Note also the unit: the Census counts WORKER-hours, so two people for an hour is two field hours.
AND THE CLASS IS MOSTLY NOT CARPET, which we should have checked before calling it a carpet fitter's rate.
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The Economic Census Kind of Business file says NAICS 238330 is 60.1% hard flooring (wood, resilient, computer floor) and only 19.1% carpet laying or removal. So $136.04 is the FLOORING class's rate and carpet is under a fifth of it. It is the best measured rate available for this work and it is not a rate for carpet fitters specifically, and those are different sentences.
And a national mean is not a bound on anybody.
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Across the 33 states that publish a clean cell (18 are suppressed, and our first version did not say so) the same trade's billed rate runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour, 10th to 90th percentile, a 1.82x spread. Those state figures are averages OF firms, so firm-to-firm dispersion is wider still and the Census publishes none of it. Where you live moves this number a great deal.
6 more assumptions
- The carpet price and the underlay price are OURS, and the refusal behind them is one we got wrong and corrected.
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  We first wrote that the Economic Census 'publishes no quantity column at all, so it cannot yield a price per square foot for anything'. That is false: the products file is cross-sector, it is EC2200NAPCSINDPRD, it has 137,429 US product rows with quantity and unit columns, and we had never opened it. Our eighth negative-existence slip.
- Having read it, the refusal survives properly: carpet mills (NAICS 314110) have twenty product lines in that file and every one of their quantity cells is suppressed, so no factory-gate price is derivable.
  More
  We also checked DOE and NREL's measures database (93 sheets, two workbooks, no carpet line item) and the federal price indexes (indexes, so the change and never the level). And opening the file we had wrongly dismissed CORROBORATED the page: Census's own product line is 'roll carpet and rug goods (6 foot and larger)', 51% of all US carpet manufacturing.
- CARPET TILE IS THE ESCAPE HATCH, and the same file is what told us about it.
  More
  Modular carpet tile is 6% of the industry and it is cut squares, so it has no roll geometry and essentially no roll waste. If the arithmetic on this page is punishing your room, tile is the thing to go and ask about, and it is the single most useful thing we found by going back and opening a file we had claimed did not exist.
- The hours are ours. Four field hours is a single ordinary room with the old carpet already up and the floor clear: about half a day for a two-person crew. Stairs are what blow this up, because every tread is a separate piece and a flight can take as long as a whole room.
- We price the underlay against your FLOOR and the carpet against the ROLL, and that is deliberate rather than an inconsistency.
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  Underlay is cut from a roll too, but it is thin, cheap and trimmed to fit, so its waste is small and does not survive rounding. Carpet's waste is the entire point of the page.
- The low and high band (15% below, 30% above) is our estimate of quote-to-quote spread, not a measured figure.
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  Stairs, furniture moving, a floor that turns out to need levelling, and the grade of carpet you actually end up choosing in the showroom will all move a real quote more than this band suggests.

Frequently asked questions

How much does carpet installation cost?

It depends far more on the SHAPE of your room than anybody tells you, and that is the honest headline. Carpet comes in twelve-foot rolls and you buy the roll, not your floor. A 12 by 20 room wastes nothing. A 13 by 13 bedroom, which is a completely ordinary room, makes you buy 312 square feet of carpet for a 169 square foot floor: 85% waste. So two rooms of similar size can differ by nearly double on the carpet line alone. What we can give you precisely is the labour: the trade that lays carpet bills $136.04 a field hour, measured from the Economic Census, and an ordinary room is about half a day for two people. The carpet price itself is yours to supply, because no federal source publishes one.

Why does one extra foot of room width cost me so much?

Because twelve feet is a cliff, not a slope. A 12-foot-wide room takes a single strip off a 12-foot roll, and there is no waste and no seam. A 13-foot-wide room does not fit, so it needs a second strip, and that second strip is a full twelve feet wide however little of it you actually need. On a 13 by 20 room that is 312 square feet bought for a 260 square foot floor, plus a seam. The extra foot of room costs you four feet of carpet. This is why installers ask for your measurements before they quote and why the number they come back with can seem to have no relationship to your floor area: it does have a relationship, just not to the number you were expecting.

Is the price I was quoted per square foot or per square yard?

Ask, because it is a factor of NINE and it is the oldest trick in the trade. Carpet was historically sold by the square yard, and a square yard is nine square feet, not three. So '$27 a yard' and '$3 a foot' are the same price, and '$27 a foot' is nine times more expensive than it sounds like. A quote that quotes the carpet by the yard and the underlay by the foot is not necessarily dishonest, but it is not helping you either. Get everything in one unit before you compare anything.

Can I avoid the seam?

Sometimes, and it is worth asking about before you buy. Fifteen-foot broadloom exists, and it is less common than twelve-foot but not exotic. If your room is between twelve and fifteen feet wide, a 15-foot roll turns a two-strip job with a seam into a one-strip job with none, and it can cost you less overall even at a higher price per foot, because you stop paying for a half-used second strip. The calculator above has a roll-width box for exactly this: set it to 15 and watch what happens to a 13-foot room. If your supplier does not stock it, that is a real answer, but it should be an answer and not a silence.

Should I pull the old carpet up myself?

Yes, if you are able to. It is genuinely easy: the carpet is held at the edges by tack strip and lifts in one piece once you get a corner up, the underlay is stapled and peels, and the whole lot rolls. What makes it worth doing is that the disposal is charged by weight at a tip and the removal is charged by the hour at a rate that is, on our measured figure, $136.04. The one thing to be careful about is the tack strip itself, which is a length of wood covered in upward-pointing nails, and which should stay where it is unless it is damaged.

How do I check the quote I was given?

Ask for three numbers separately: the price per square foot of CARPET, how many square feet of carpet they are buying, and the hours. Then put them in the calculator above. If their square footage is close to your room area, they have not accounted for the roll, and either the number will grow later or they have quietly padded the price per foot to cover it. If it is meaningfully bigger than your floor, that is not padding, that is the roll, and now you know why. The cell that matters is the last one: what you actually pay per square foot of your own floor.

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