How much does flooring installation cost?

Price a floor by the square foot, using the labor rate the Census actually measures rather than a markup somebody guessed. Then check it against what US households told the government they really paid.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

Floor type

Sets the install hours and the material price. The hours are our estimate; the hourly rate they are multiplied by is measured by the Census.

Floor area

Square feet. A large living room runs about 300. A main floor is nearer 1,000. Measure each room and add them up, then order about 10% extra material for cuts and waste.

Material price per sq ft

The floor itself, at the price you pay in the store.

This one is our estimate, and it is the weakest number on the page. We used to tell you that no federal source publishes what a plank costs, and for SOLID HARDWOOD that was false: the Economic Census products file publishes hardwood flooring shipments in dollars AND in board feet, so a factory-gate price is derivable from it and we have not yet built it into this page. For tile and carpet the refusal holds, because Census never collected a quantity for either. In every case a factory-gate price is not a store price, and you have a real store price in front of you. Use it.

Contractor's billed rate per hour on site

A TRADE-WIDE AVERAGE, not a quote for your job, and this page used to present it without saying so.

Measured from the 2022 Economic Census: what the flooring trade takes in per field hour its construction workers work, net of materials and subcontracting. Where you live moves it a lot: across the states the same trade's rate runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour (10th to 90th percentile), and those are themselves averages OF firms, so your own installer can sit outside even that. What the customer pays for each hour a worker is actually on your floor, in 2025 dollars. Measured from the 2022 Economic Census, not guessed: $136 for flooring contractors, $83 for tile setters. It covers wages, overhead, insurance, vehicles, waste and profit.

Removing the old floor

Tear-out and disposal, per square foot. What is coming up matters far more than what is going down. Glued-down vinyl and old tile are the slowest jobs to pull up.

Subfloor prep

The single most common reason a bill comes in over the quote. We could not find out what is under your floor until the old one is off, including the contractor who quoted you.

Trim and transitions

Baseboard, quarter-round, thresholds and the strips between rooms. Small per square foot, real on a whole house, and routinely left off a quote.

Estimated cost

$4,736

Typical range $3,676 – $7,354

The floor itself (materials)$1,750
Installation labor$1,836
Removing and dumping the old floor$425
Subfloor prep and underlayment$275
Trim, thresholds and transitions$450
Total$4,736

See next steps →

Flooring contractors bill 4.45 times the wage they pay their own installers. That is the widest markup of the 19 specialty building trades, and the Census measures it. Take the 2022 Economic Census file for flooring contractors, strip out materials and subcontracted work, and what is left still bills at $122.24 for every hour a worker spends on your floor, against $27.45 an hour in wages.

Both numbers come from the same file. We checked it against all 19 specialty trades the Census covers, and flooring tops the list: wider than roofing (4.28x), wider than finish carpentry (3.69x), wider than plumbing (3.09x), and well over half again the tile trade's 2.71x. Now look at the same fact from the household's side. The American Housing Survey asks people what a completed job cost. Those who hired a contractor paid a median of $4,567. Those who did it themselves paid $1,522. Roughly 36% of these jobs are done by the household, which is a lot of people looking at that gap and deciding to spend the weekend on their knees. Two honest caveats, because they matter. The markup is not profit: it pays for trucks, insurance, waste, warranty, non-billable time and the office. And the people who take on a floor themselves pick the easy ones, so the 3.3x gap is not all markup. But it is not nothing either, and it is the reason to get three quotes.

§ 02 Your floor, against the ones people actually bought

Your cost per square foot, all in$9.47

What US households paid a contractor (median)$4,567

What households who did it themselves paid (median)$1,522

Installer's wage vs what the firm bills, per hour on site (2022 Census)$27.45 vs $122.24

Job costs and the $136 and $83 billed rates are in 2025 dollars, the latest complete year. The $27.45 and $122.24 wage-against-billed pair is quoted in the 2022 dollars of the Economic Census that measured it, because that is the year the two numbers share. AHS costs are self-reported and recalled up to two years later, and the survey fuses flooring with drywall, paneling and ceiling tiles into one code that records no scope. The Economic Census covers firms with payroll only, so the large solo-operator end of the flooring trade is not in the billed-rate figure and generally charges less. Material prices and install hours are our estimates and are labelled as such.

Where the money goes

The floor itself (materials)$1,750

Installation labor$1,836

Removing and dumping the old floor$425

Subfloor prep and underlayment$275

Trim, thresholds and transitions$450

By the numbers

American Housing Survey (Census/HUD, 2023, n=3,274, the largest sample of any job type in the survey): the median contractor-hired job cost $4,567 in 2025 dollars, a quarter came in under $2,412 and a quarter over $8,332.
More
Households who did the work themselves paid a median of $1,522. Every one of these is what somebody told the federal government they actually spent, not a quote and not a contractor's average. The category fuses flooring with drywall, paneling and ceiling tiles, and records no scope, so read it as a reality check on the size of the bill rather than as a price for your floor.
The cost of a floor is in the hours, not the hourly rate, and this is where most advice goes wrong.
More
Tile setters have the narrowest markup of any specialty trade the Census measures (2.71x) and bill the cheapest hour of any flooring trade, about $83 against $136 for a flooring contractor. Tile still carries the biggest labor bill of any floor here, roughly $9.07 a square foot against $6.80 for solid hardwood and $3.67 for vinyl plank, because it takes about four times the hours of vinyl plank. It is not quite the dearest floor overall on our model, because solid hardwood's material costs more, but it is the one whose bill is mostly labor. Hunting for a cheaper installer moves the small number. Choosing a floor that installs faster moves the big one.
The whole flooring trade is barely visible to federal statistics, and that is worth knowing before you go looking for someone.
More
BLS can see only 13,780 carpet installers and 3,720 floor sanders in the entire United States, because its wage survey excludes the self-employed, and flooring is overwhelmingly a solo-operator trade. The 17,513 flooring establishments the Economic Census counts are the ones with payroll. The person who will actually be on your knees-worth of floor is often not in either file, and is usually the one you can negotiate with.
Material prices, and the honest caveat every time: these are indexes, so they tell you the direction and can never tell you the level.
More
Hardwood and laminate materials are up 48.5% since 2019 but have gone nowhere since 2022, down 0.9%. Carpet is up just 8.0% over the same six years. Tile is up 27.4% since 2019 and is still climbing, up 10.2% since 2022. A price index can never tell you what a plank costs, which is why we ask you to type it in. What we should not have told you is that NOTHING can: the Economic Census products file publishes hardwood flooring in dollars and in board feet, so a factory-gate price for solid hardwood is there to be built, and we have not built it.
Where you live moves the bill by about a third.
More
Contractor-hired jobs in the West run a median of $5,591, against $4,567 in the South, $4,349 in the Midwest and $4,349 in the Northeast: a premium of roughly 30% for the West. That swamps the difference between a mid-range laminate and a good one, though not the difference between laminate and hardwood, which on our model moves the total further than the region you live in does. The other three regions are within a few dollars of each other and well inside the survey's own margin of error, so treat them as one number, not three.

What is sourced here, and what is ours. Be exact about this, because the category is fused. The headline is sourced.

The Census/HUD American Housing Survey asks households what a completed job actually cost, and 3,274 of them answered for this one. But the survey code is JOBTYPE 25, "installed carpeting, flooring, paneling, ceiling tiles or drywall", and that is not a typo on our part. Flooring, drywall, paneling and ceiling tiles are a single code with no sub-code. We cannot separate them, so $4,567 is the median cost of an interior-surfaces job, not specifically of a flooring job. Anyone quoting that number as "the average flooring job" is overclaiming, and we are not going to. AHS also records one cost per job and no scope: "recarpeted a bedroom" and "re-floored the house" are the same code. So it can never yield a price per square foot. That means the per-square-foot build-up above is our model. Two of its three parts are still sourced: the billed rate of $136 an hour is measured from the Economic Census, not a markup we invented, and tile is priced off its own trade (2.71x, $83 an hour) rather than the flooring rate. What is genuinely ours is the material price per square foot and the install hours. And the reason we used to give for that was false, so here is the corrected one. This page told you flatly that no federal source publishes what a plank costs. For solid hardwood it does. The Economic Census products file, which this page's own assumptions already named and claimed to have read, publishes the line "manufacturing of oak, maple, and other hardwood flooring" with a dollar value AND a shipped quantity in board feet, and neither cell is suppressed. A factory-gate price per board foot of solid hardwood is derivable right now. We have not built it into this page yet, and that is a gap in this page rather than a gap in the data. What survives, and this time we screened the file instead of assuming it: tile and carpet really do have no derivable price, because Census marks their quantity cells X, which means it never collected a unit for them, as opposed to D, which is what it writes when it is withholding a number it has. Vinyl plank and laminate have no rows in the file at all. And a factory-gate price is never a store price, so the material field stays editable either way: you are standing in the store with the number that actually bills you, and we are not. What we have deliberately not cited: Angi, HomeAdvisor, Fixr and Modernize all publish "national average flooring costs". Those are contractor lead-generation businesses that are paid when you hire someone. Their numbers come from jobs booked on their own platforms, they profit when the figure is large, and there is a federal number to use instead.

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau / HUD, American Housing Survey 2023 National PUF (JOBTYPE 25, what households actually paid)
census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Construction sector, file EC2223BASIC (flooring contractors NAICS 238330, tile and terrazzo 238340: the measured billed rate and markup)
www2.census.gov
Wage data

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 national file (floor layers 47-2042, carpet installers 47-2041, tile and stone setters 47-2044). The per-occupation HTML pages now redirect to an index with no wage data on it, so we cite the flat file we actually read.
bls.gov
BEA via FRED, price index for residential improvements (used to restate every job in 2025 dollars)
fred.stlouisfed.org
BLS PPI, Other Millwork Including Flooring (price change only, never a price level)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN THE CLASS WE PRICE FROM. NAICS 238330 is 60.1% 'floor contractor, including wood, resilient, and computer flooring (except fireproof flooring)'. NAICS 238340 is 40.9% 'tile, terrazzo and mosaic contractor'. A NAICS code is a bucket, not a job, and the rate here is the bucket's.

WHERE WE LOOKED, AND HOW BIG EACH PLACE IS, AND THE ONE WE GOT WRONG AGAIN.

We name the universes rather than wave at them, because a refusal is a claim and we have got eight of them wrong: DOE and NREL's measures database is 93 sheets across two workbooks and we read the sheet list; the American Housing Survey asks the cost of 37 named improvement job types (36 of which occur in the 2023 data) and we read all 37; the Economic Census products file (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD) carries 137,429 US product rows with quantity and unit columns, of which 789 publish a quantity and 669 also publish a dollar value, so prices ARE derivable for many building materials. THIS ASSUMPTION USED TO END BY SAYING that for our material every dollar-or-quantity cell was suppressed. That was false, and worse, we had never opened the industry we said it about. Screening it properly: Census publishes 'manufacturing of oak, maple, and other hardwood flooring' at NAICS 32191, 383 establishments, with the dollars AND the board feet both unsuppressed, so a factory-gate price for solid hardwood exists and we simply have not built it into this page. Ceramic and porcelain tile (NAICS 327120, 19 product lines) and carpet (NAICS 314110, 19 product lines) carry X on every quantity cell, meaning no unit was ever collected, which is a genuine refusal and a narrower one. Alongside those: the Kind of Business file has 96 categories, and the 2022 NAICS index has 20,398 entries. If it is not in those, we have not found it, and that is a fact about us rather than about the world.

The billed rate is measured, not assumed.

We divide the value of construction work by construction worker hours in the 2022 Economic Census, strip out materials and subcontracted work, and get $122.24 an hour for flooring contractors and $74.13 for tile setters. Escalated to 2025 with the construction employment cost index, that is $136 and $83. It is what the customer pays for an hour of somebody being on the floor, and it covers wages, overhead, insurance, vehicles, waste and profit.

Install hours are ours: 1.6 hours per 100 sq ft for carpet, 2.4 for laminate, 2.7 for vinyl plank, 3.8 for engineered hardwood, 5.0 for solid hardwood and 11.0 for tile.

Tile carries backer board, layout, a wet saw and a separate grout day, and a small room is nearly all cuts. Unfinished hardwood that has to be sanded and finished on site takes considerably longer than the prefinished figure above.

Material prices are ours and are the weakest number on the page, and the refusal we used to justify them with was too wide.

DOE's efficiency database holds no flooring, and a producer price index measures change and not level, both of which are true. What was NOT true is the sentence we hung on them: that no federal source publishes an absolute price for flooring. For solid hardwood the Economic Census publishes one, in dollars and in board feet, and we owe you it. Two honest reasons it is still not on this page: we have not pulled it into our data file yet, and turning board feet into square feet needs a nominal-thickness convention that would be OURS and not the Census's, exactly like the gutter coil width we flagged elsewhere. Our defaults are mid-range. Replace them with the price you are actually looking at.

The tear-out, subfloor and trim lines are our estimates.

Subfloor prep is the usual reason a final bill beats the quote, because nobody knows what is under the old floor until it comes off. If the number matters to you, ask the contractor in writing what happens to the price if the subfloor needs levelling.

The do-it-yourself figure is materials plus about 45 cents a square foot for underlayment, adhesive, fasteners, blades and a skip, plus $250 for tool hire.

It assumes your labor is free, which it is not. The crew-hour count shown is a professional's pace: budget two or three times that for your first floor.

The low and high band is not decorative.

Material within a single floor type runs from roughly two thirds to nearly double our default, and hours swing with layout, cuts and how many separate rooms the crew has to set up in.

Frequently asked questions

How much does flooring installation cost?

US households who hired a contractor reported a median of $4,567 in 2025 dollars to the American Housing Survey, with half of all jobs falling between $2,412 and $8,332. Read that as the size of a typical interior-surfaces bill rather than a price for your floor, because the survey fuses flooring with drywall, paneling and ceiling tiles into one code and records no scope. For your actual job, price it by the square foot: our build-up puts vinyl plank near $7.17 a square foot installed, carpet near $5.43, and tile or solid hardwood between $14 and $15.

Why does the labor cost more than the flooring?

Because the markup in flooring is the widest of the 19 specialty building trades the Census measures, and it is measurable rather than a matter of opinion. The 2022 Economic Census says flooring contractors bill $122.24 for every hour a worker is on site while paying those workers $27.45 an hour. That is 4.45 times, ahead of roofing at 4.28 and well ahead of tile at 2.71. The gap is not profit. It pays for trucks, insurance, waste, warranty, the office and all the hours nobody is billing for. But it is wide, it is the widest, and it is why three quotes on a flooring job are worth getting. Be careful with that inference though, because we first made it from the wrong statistic: a markup is a ratio of two industry AGGREGATES and it bounds nothing about the two firms quoting you. What actually justifies shopping around is DISPERSION, so we measured it. Flooring's billed rate runs $96.02 to $174.73 a field hour across the states (10th to 90th percentile), a 1.82x spread, and firm-to-firm is wider still.

Is it cheaper to install flooring yourself?

Substantially, on the survey evidence. Households who did the job themselves reported a median of $1,522 against $4,567 for those who hired someone, and about 36% of these jobs are done by the household. Be careful with that 3.3x, though. People who take on a floor themselves pick the easy ones: a bedroom of click-together vinyl, not a tiled kitchen. The honest way to think about it is the hour count. Our model says 500 sq ft of vinyl plank is roughly 13.5 crew-hours at a professional's pace, so plan on double or triple that for your first floor, and be realistic about whether you own a wet saw.

What is the cheapest flooring to install?

Carpet, by a wide margin, and it is not because carpet is cheap material. It is because carpet is fast: about 1.6 hours per 100 sq ft against 11 for tile. Labor is the biggest line in a flooring job, so the fastest floor is the cheapest floor. Laminate and vinyl plank come next. If you are trying to move the total, changing the floor type does far more than haggling over the hourly rate.

Why is tile's labor so expensive if tile setters have the lowest markup?

This is the most useful thing on the page. Tile setters really do have the narrowest markup of any specialty trade the Census measures, 2.71 times their wage against 4.45 for flooring contractors, and they bill the cheapest hour in the flooring world at about $83. Tile still carries the biggest labor bill of any floor on this page, roughly $9.07 a square foot against $3.67 for vinyl plank, because it takes about four times the hours: backer board, layout, a wet saw, cuts around everything, and then a separate day for grout. To be exact about it, tile is not quite the dearest floor overall on our model. Solid hardwood is, at $14.80 a square foot installed against tile's $14.07, because hardwood's material costs more. But tile is the floor whose bill is mostly labor, and the cost lives in the hours, not the rate, which is exactly why looking for a cheaper installer is the wrong lever.

Does this calculator know what my flooring costs per square foot?

Not yet, and the reason we used to give was wrong, so here is the true one. We told you there was no federal source for the price of a plank, a tile or a yard of carpet. For the plank that was false. The Economic Census products file publishes hardwood flooring shipments in dollars and in board feet, which is a factory-gate price waiting to be divided out, and we had never opened the industry we were refusing on. We have not built that figure into this page, and we would rather tell you it exists and that we are behind on it than keep pretending it does not. For tile and for carpet the refusal is real: Census records their dollars but never collected a quantity, so there is nothing to divide by. Two things to keep in mind even once we do publish it: a factory-gate price is what leaves the mill, not what the store charges you, and the DOE database that prices windows for our window calculator contains no flooring at all. The material defaults here are our own mid-range estimates. You have a real price in front of you. Type it in and the rest of the model is honest.

Why did my quote come in higher than the estimate?

Almost always the subfloor. We could not find out what is under your old floor until it is off, including the contractor who quoted you, and levelling compound or a rotten patch of subfloor can add a few dollars a square foot on its own. The other usual suspects are trim (baseboard and transitions get left off a lot of quotes) and moving furniture. Ask, in writing and before you sign, what happens to the price if the subfloor needs work. Most disputes in this trade are about that sentence not existing.

Is flooring getting more expensive?

It depends entirely on which floor, and the answer is less alarming than you would expect. Producer price indexes, which track change and never level, put hardwood and laminate materials up 48.5% since 2019 but flat over the last three years, down 0.9% since 2022. Carpet has risen just 8.0% in six years. Tile is the outlier, up 27.4% since 2019 and still climbing, 10.2% of that since 2022. For carpet and tile at least, the bigger mover is not the material at all. It is where you live: contractor-hired jobs in the West run a median of $5,591 against $4,349 in the Northeast, a gap of about 31%.

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