How to work out how much laminate flooring you need
Laminate is sold by the pack, not the square metre, so the answer you need at the till is a pack count. This calculator takes the room’s length and width, adds a wastage allowance for cuts, divides by the coverage printed on the pack and rounds up — then adds the underlay rolls and the lengths of beading that finish the edges.
Step 1: the area, then the order area
Length × width gives the floor area. Add 10% for a straight-laid rectangular room, 15% if you are laying diagonally or the room has bays, alcoves and awkward angles that force more cuts. A 5m × 4m room is 20 m², so you order 22 m². For an L-shaped room, split it into rectangles, work each one out with the square metre calculator and add them together.
Step 2: packs, not square metres
Pack coverage is printed on the end of every box and it varies by board size — 2.13 m² is common for a 1285 × 192mm board, but a narrow board pack can be under 1.8 m² and a wide-plank pack over 2.5 m². Always divide by the figure on the pack you are actually buying, which is why that number is an editable field here rather than a fixed assumption.
Step 3: buy it all in one go
Laminate is printed in batches, and two batches of the same product can differ enough in shade to show across one room. Order the whole job at once, including the wastage, and keep one unopened pack back for repairs — a plank damaged in two years’ time cannot be matched from a discontinued batch.
Pack coverage by board size
Packs for a 20 m² room ordered with 10% wastage, so 22 m² of board.
| Board size | Planks per pack | Pack covers | Packs for 22 m² |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1285 × 192mm (standard) | 8 | 1.97 m² | 12 |
| 1285 × 192mm (thicker core) | 7 | 1.73 m² | 13 |
| 1380 × 193mm | 8 | 2.13 m² | 11 |
| 1200 × 198mm (narrow) | 10 | 2.38 m² | 10 |
| 1830 × 244mm (wide plank) | 6 | 2.68 m² | 9 |
Pack counts are 22 m² divided by the coverage, rounded up. Check the box: the same nominal board size comes in different pack quantities.
The quantities people forget
Beading, scotia and threshold strips
A laminate floor is laid floating, with a gap all the way round, and something has to cover that gap. Scotia beading pins to the skirting — never through the floor — and is sold in 2.4m lengths. Measure the perimeter, take off the doorways, divide by 2.4 and round up. A 5m × 4m room has an 18m perimeter, so after one doorway you need eight lengths. Each doorway gets a threshold or T-bar instead, matched to whatever is on the other side of it.
The expansion gap is not optional
Leave 8–15mm at every wall, every pipe and every door frame. The boards take up moisture and grow across the room in summer; a floor fitted tight to the skirting has nowhere to go and lifts in the middle, which cannot be fixed without taking it up. Spacers cost almost nothing and this is the single most common DIY laminate failure.
Underlay, and the damp-proof membrane under it
Laminate needs underlay: it evens out the subfloor, takes the click of footsteps out of the room and protects the joints. Rolls usually cover 15 m², so that same 22 m² order takes two. Over a concrete or screed floor you also need a damp-proof membrane, either a separate 500-gauge polythene sheet or a combined underlay with the membrane bonded on — moisture coming up through concrete will swell the board edges from underneath.
Choosing the laminate itself
AC rating, and why it matters more than thickness
The AC number grades the wear layer, not the board. AC3 is fine for a bedroom, AC4 is the sensible minimum for a hall, living room or anywhere with a dog, and AC5 is a commercial rating. Thickness — 7mm, 8mm, 12mm — changes how solid the floor feels and sounds underfoot rather than how long the surface lasts, so a thick AC3 board in a hallway will wear through before a thin AC4.
Water resistance
Standard laminate has a fibreboard core that swells permanently once water gets into a joint, which is why it fails first at the kitchen sink and the bathroom door. Water-resistant ranges seal the joints and the core and cost more per m². If the room is genuinely wet, LVT or sheet vinyl is the right material and the flooring calculator prices all six side by side.
Can it go over the existing floor?
Over floorboards or an old vinyl that is flat and well stuck down, yes — underlay goes straight over the top. Over carpet, never. Over tiles it depends on the grout lines: anything more than about 3mm deep telegraphs through, and the board edges work against the ridge until the joints fail. Lifting the old floor instead is an option in the calculator because it is a real cost, not a rounding error.
What it costs to fit
Why a small room costs nearly as much as a big one
A fitter charges by the day and lays roughly 20–25 m² of click laminate in one, so a 12 m² bedroom and a 22 m² living room are both a day’s work. Doors to trim, radiator pipes to cut round and an out-of-square room all eat into that. The per-m² figures behind this, and the comparison against LVT, carpet and real wood, are in our guide to UK flooring costs per m².
Next steps
Pricing a whole house rather than a room? Run each room through the flooring calculator and compare materials, or price the carpet half of the job with the carpet calculator, which works in running metres off a roll instead of packs. For the rest of the project, see budgeting a renovation.