By the Home Savings Calculator team · 29 August 2026 · 7 min read
Roughly in order: sheet vinyl at the bottom, then laminate, then carpet, then LVT, then engineered wood, with solid wood several times the price of laminate at the top. Those bands overlap heavily — premium laminate can cost more than budget engineered board.
Material price alone rarely decides the project though, because the cheaper materials are also usually the fastest to lay, which compounds the gap in the finished cost.
Put your room area into the flooring calculator and switch between the six materials. It changes both the price per square metre and the fitting time, so you see the finished cost rather than the shelf price.
Fitters charge by the day, not the square metre. A fitter will lay perhaps 20–25 m² of click flooring in a day, less for glued LVT and far less for nailed solid wood. A 10 m² room and a 20 m² room can both be a one-day job.
The consequence is that per-square-metre cost falls sharply with room size. Quoting a single “cost per m² fitted” figure across all rooms is misleading, which is why the calculator works from your actual area.
Laminate is a printed photographic layer over fibreboard — cheapest, fastest to lay, and unforgiving of standing water. LVT is vinyl, so it genuinely handles wet rooms, costs noticeably more and is slower to fit because it is often glued.
Engineered wood is a real wood wear layer on plywood: it looks like solid, is far more stable over underfloor heating, and costs less. Solid wood is one piece of timber throughout — the most expensive material, the slowest to fit, and the only one you can sand back repeatedly.
Carpet sits in the middle on material and is quick to fit, but needs its own underlay and grippers. Sheet vinyl is the cheapest way to cover a floor and the fastest to lay, which makes it hard to beat on pure cost in a utility room or small bathroom.
Three items regularly land after the quote is accepted. Wastage — ten percent for a straight-laid room, fifteen for diagonal or herringbone. Underlay, needed for laminate, LVT, engineered board and carpet. And removing the old floor, including skipping it, plus levelling the subfloor if it is uneven.
All three are switchable line items in the flooring calculator rather than assumptions buried in a total. If the floor is part of a wider job, price the whole room in the room renovation cost calculator, and read budgeting a renovation for the contingency you should be holding.
Tiling a kitchen or bathroom floor instead? The trade-offs are different again — see the tile calculator.
