Do I need to buy an iPhone Pro to make floor plans?
Rarely. LiDAR saves you the measuring, not the floor plan itself — and a laser distance meter does the same job for a fraction of what a new Pro phone costs.
Short answer: No, unless you need to measure up a lot of homes. LiDAR only sits in the iPhone Pro (from the iPhone 12 Pro onwards) and the iPad Pro (from 2020 onwards), and it saves you the measuring — not the floor plan itself. If you just need your own home drawn, a tape measure or a laser distance meter and an app that can draw will get you there. If you need to measure up new homes every week — as an estate agent, a tradesperson, an interior designer or a keen house hunter — a Pro model starts to pay for itself in time saved.
What you're actually buying with LiDAR
LiDAR is a distance sensor sitting next to the camera lenses. It sends out pulses of light and measures how long they take to come back. That means it measures instead of guessing from the picture — even on a plain white wall and in a dim room, exactly where a camera on its own has nothing to grab onto.
The big win isn't precision. It's that the scan doesn't forget anything: alcoves, bay windows, chimney breasts, crooked corners and a kink in the hallway all come along without you having to spot them first. When you measure by hand, you only get what you noticed yourself.
What LiDAR doesn't do is draw the plan for you in the end, and it doesn't make the numbers any truer than a tape measure's either. A tape measure laid correctly from corner to corner is just as accurate as any sensor.
The sum: what does the time saved actually cost?
A careful tape-measure survey of an ordinary home takes around an hour per floor, plus 20-40 minutes to type the numbers in. A scan of the same floor takes a few minutes, plus time to tidy it up afterwards.
Say you save an hour and a half per home. Use that once on your own home, and you've saved an hour and a half — for the price of a new Pro phone. Use it on three homes a week for six months, and you've saved around 120 hours, and the sum looks completely different.
Compare that with the alternative: a laser distance meter costs a fraction of a new phone and removes the half of the time that's spent crawling around with a tape measure on your own. It's the cheapest time saving there is on this job.
Who actually benefits from a Pro model?
- The house hunter in a busy stretch. Five minutes in a stranger's house, and the house needs to be remembered correctly afterwards. Here the scanner wins hands down.
- The tradesperson and the interior designer who measure up new customers' homes every week.
- Anyone who needs to document a home as it stands — before a renovation, say, or when moving out.
Who doesn't?
- You, if you just need to draw your own home once. You already know the rooms; you only need the numbers.
- You, if you have an old building drawing. You don't need to measure everything again — you need to take a few spot checks and see whether the drawing still holds up.
- You, if you're going to use the plan to furnish a room or order materials. For that, a drawn plan is just as useful as a scanned one, as long as the measurements are right.
What you can do without buying anything
In HouseSense, the home can be drawn instead of scanned, and that works on any iPhone and iPad — including the ones without LiDAR. You drag the rooms out with your finger on digital graph paper and type your measurements in as whole centimetres; the drawing follows the numbers, not your finger. Every measurement is worked out internally, wall to wall — exactly the way you'd measure it yourself — and shared walls between two rooms snap together into one common wall, so the same centimetres are never counted twice.
The result is treated exactly like a scanned home: a scaled floor plan, areas per room and per floor, a 3D model, a takeoff for contractor quotes, and reports you can pass on.
And there's a third route people forget: borrow a Pro. The scan takes a few minutes, and the home sits in your own iCloud afterwards. If you have a friend or a colleague with an iPhone Pro, that scan costs you a cup of coffee.
First, check what you already have
LiDAR has been in every iPhone Pro and Pro Max model since the iPhone 12 Pro, and in every iPad Pro since 2020. The other iPhones don't have it — not even the Plus models — and neither the iPad Air, the iPad mini nor the regular iPad has it either. If you're unsure about your particular model, the sensor is listed in Apple's specifications for the phone.
If there's an old iPhone 12 Pro sitting in a drawer, it can scan just as well for this purpose as the newest model. The sensor's job hasn't changed: it measures distances.
The one thing no phone can buy you out of
Neither a scan nor a drawing can determine whether a wall is load-bearing. A sensor can measure where the wall stands, not what it's holding up. If a wall needs to come down, it takes an engineer or another building surveyor to assess it on site — and that's true no matter how expensive the phone is.