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What does it cost to lay a new floor in a 20 m² room?

An ordinary click floor fitted by a flooring contractor is one of the cheaper jobs in a home — but it is not the floor itself that decides the bill. It is what lies underneath it.

The price is five line items

A flooring quote for a 20 m² room is never one number. It is five line items, and they can vary independently of each other. Know the five, and you can read a quote instead of just trusting it.

1. The flooring itself — including waste, bought in full packs.
2. Accessories — underlay, moisture barrier, skirting, transition strips, adhesive.
3. Labour for fitting — depends on the pattern and the method.
4. Preparing the subfloor — tearing up the old floor, levelling compound, flattening.
5. Disposal — a skip, or a run to the recycling site.

Always ask for the quote broken down into these five lines. One lump sum cannot be compared with another lump sum, and it is almost always line 4 that accounts for the difference.

Line 1: the flooring — you need to buy more than 20 m²

You cannot just order 20 m². For a straightforward straight lay, reckon on 5-10% waste; for a diagonal lay, 10-15%; and for herringbone, 15-20% — and flooring is also sold in full packs, typically 1.5-3.5 m² each.

The sum: 20 m² × 1.08 (8% waste) = 21.6 m². If a pack covers 2.22 m², that is 21.6 ÷ 2.22 = 9.73 → 10 packs = 22.2 m². You end up buying 22.2 m² to cover 20.

The price difference between flooring types is the single biggest variable on this line: laminate is cheapest, then click vinyl, engineered wood, and solid wood, and the same solid wood laid in herringbone typically costs 30-60% more per square metre than an ordinary plank lay — partly because the boards cost more, partly because the waste is higher. Those ratios hold regardless of what any given supplier is charging when you read this.

Line 2: the accessories that get forgotten in the estimate

Accessories are rarely more than 10-15% of the total price, but they are almost always missing from a quick back-of-envelope figure. For a 20 m² room, budget for:

• Underlay for the whole area — meaning the 22.2 m² you bought, not the 20 you set out to cover.
• A moisture barrier on a concrete slab. Often built into the underlay, but not always — check it.
• Skirting around the room's perimeter. A 4 × 5 m room has a perimeter of 2 × (4 + 5) = 18 m, minus the width of any doorways.
• Transition strips — one per doorway.
• Adhesive, if the floor is glued down rather than floated.

Notice that three of these five items are priced by the running metre, not by square metre. That is why a narrow room costs more than a square one of the same area: it has a longer perimeter, and therefore more metres of skirting.

Line 3: labour — small rooms cost more per square metre

Labour follows the pattern. A floated click floor laid straight is the cheapest job; a diagonal lay costs more, because every board is cut at an angle at both ends; and a glued herringbone floor is the most expensive, often several times the straight lay, because each board is set individually against a chalk line.

The other half of the sum surprises most people: small rooms cost more per square metre than large ones. A 5 m² bathroom has just as many setup hours, cuts and metres of skirting per square metre as a 40 m² living room. That is why many flooring contractors have a minimum call-out charge — and why it is usually cheaper to have three rooms fitted at once than the same room fitted three separate times.

Line 4: the subfloor — the line that blows the budget

The price of the fitting itself is predictable. The price of what lies underneath is not. This is where quotes and final bills most often part ways, and it is why two quotes for the same room can land far apart:

• Tearing up the old floor. A floated floor comes up in an hour. Glued-down floors and tiles have to be chipped off, and that is an entirely different job.
• Levelling or screeding a concrete slab. The price follows how many millimetres need building up — and nobody knows that until the old floor is gone.
• New battens or a new subfloor, if there is rot, damp or too much deflection.
• Moisture testing on a concrete slab, which can delay the whole job by weeks if the slab is too wet for a sealed floor.

So always ask for the quote to state explicitly what it assumes about the subfloor — for example "assumes a flat concrete slab, max. 2 mm deviation over a 2 m straightedge". If the assumption is not on paper, this line is an open-ended bill, and the quote is really just a rough estimate.

Line 5: disposal

The old floor has to go, and it takes up more space than people expect: 20 m² of old boards or tiles with a levelling layer is a trailer load or two. Some contractors include haulage in the price, some list the skip as its own line, and some assume you will drive it away yourself. It is a small item, but an easy one to overlook — and an easy one to ask about.

What splits two quotes for the same floor

When two contractors look at the same 20 m² room and come back with wildly different numbers, the explanation is almost always one of four — and none of them is dishonesty:

1. They assumed different things about the subfloor. One priced in screeding, the other priced a direct lay. This is the single biggest cause.
2. They worked from different square metres. One from your room's internal dimensions, the other from a floor-area figure on file that is measured externally and therefore larger.
3. They allowed for different amounts of waste, because nobody told them which pattern the floor should be laid in.
4. One included skirting and transition strips, the other did not. This is the classic reason the cheapest quote ends up the most expensive.

All four disappear if all three contractors are given the same numbers and the same assumptions.

How to get quotes that can be compared

The only way to compare three flooring quotes is to give all three contractors exactly the same numbers and assumptions. That means providing:

• The floor area per room in m², measured internally — not a registered dwelling area, which is usually measured externally.
• The room's perimeter in running metres, so skirting can be priced.
• The number of doorways needing a transition strip.
• Which flooring and which laying pattern you want.
• What is on the floor today, and whether it needs removing.

That list is exactly what a contractor takeoff consists of. HouseSense produces it from the scanned or drawn floor plan — floor area and wall lengths per room, gathered into a report you can send to several contractors at once. But the list is just as useful written out by hand: the point is that all three quotes are priced against the same square metres.

And remember that a ratio like the ones above only tells you whether a quote is in the right ballpark. It is no substitute for a written quote on your own home, and the manufacturer's own instructions for the flooring you choose always take precedence.