Laminate Flooring Cost per Sq Ft

AC rating and thickness decide the price

• AC3, 7–8mm — residential bedrooms and low-traffic rooms, bottom of the band.
• AC4, 8–10mm — living rooms and light commercial, the usual recommendation.
• AC5, 12mm — heavy traffic, top of the band, noticeably more solid underfoot.

Where laminate is the wrong call

Laminate has an HDF core. Standing water at a bathroom door, a leaking washing machine or repeated mopping with a wet cloth will swell the joints, and swollen planks cannot be sanded back. In wet-prone rooms price SPC or tile instead — the installed difference is usually smaller than one replacement.

Do not skip the underlay

Underlay is a small per sq ft cost that controls the hollow drum sound and cushions minor subfloor variation. It is included in the consumables line of the calculator.

How this estimate is calculated

Every figure on this page comes from the same formula. Rates are stored as configurable low–high bands per flooring type, overridden by city-level bands where we have them, then scaled by the quality level you pick.

effective_area = floor_area x (1 + wastage% / 100)
material_cost  = effective_area x material_rate
labour_cost    = floor_area x labour_rate
adhesive_cost  = floor_area x adhesive_rate
grout_cost     = floor_area x grout_rate
other_cost     = floor_area x other_rate
total_cost     = material + labour + adhesive + grout + other

Areas entered in square metres are converted using 1 sq m = 10.7639 sq ft. The low total uses every low rate and the high total uses every high rate, so the displayed range is deliberately wide — real quotations usually land somewhere in the middle.

Rates are configurable estimates maintained in our own database, not scraped live market prices, and we do not publish supplier names, reviews or ratings we cannot verify. Rate configuration last reviewed: September 2026.