Work out what to buy before you start tiling
Calculators for tile, flooring, pavers and decks that count the grout joint, the waste for your pattern and the rounding to whole boxes. Feet and inches or metric, with the working shown.
- Formulas and sources on every page
- Runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere
- No sign-up
New: the tile project planner
One job sheet for a whole bathroom, shower or backsplash. List each floor and wall, take off the tub, vanity, doors and windows, and get tiles in whole boxes plus thinset by trowel notch, grout, backer board, waterproofing for the wet walls, edge trim and spacers. Print it, copy it, or send the link.
The sample 5 × 8 ft bathroom with a tub surround needs: floor tile 2 boxes, wall tile 7 boxes, thinset 2 bags.
Open the tile project plannerAll calculators
- Floor tile calculator Tiles and boxes for a floor, counting the grout joint, with the waste allowance for straight, offset, diagonal and herringbone layouts side by side.
- Wall and backsplash tile calculator Net tiling area for up to four walls with windows, doors and other openings taken off, then tiles and boxes.
- Tile layout and centering calculator Where to put the first tile so neither wall ends up with a sliver: three starting points compared, with the edge cut each one leaves.
- Grout calculator Grout by weight and volume from tile size, joint width and joint depth, using the formula on manufacturers’ coverage charts.
- Laminate and hardwood flooring calculator Boxes of laminate, engineered or solid wood for a room, plus how the rows fall across it and whether the last row needs balancing.
- Square footage calculator for L-shaped and irregular rooms Build a room from rectangles, triangles and curves, subtract what is not floor, and get the area in square feet, square metres and square yards.
- Paver and patio calculator Pavers, compacted gravel base and bedding sand for a patio or path, in cubic yards, cubic metres and a tonnage range.
- Deck board and joist calculator Rows of decking, board counts for every stock length, joists at your spacing and the screws to fix it all down.
- Page and CSS grid column calculator Column width from page width, column count, gutter and margin, with every span width and ready-to-paste CSS. Works in px, mm or inches.
What is different here
Most material calculators multiply length by width and add ten percent. That is a reasonable start, but it misses the things that cause a second trip to the shop: the grout joint that changes the tile count, the rounding to whole boxes, the last row of flooring that turns out to be a finger-wide strip, the gravel that compacts, the sliver of tile at the far wall.
- The method is on the page. Every tool names its formula and walks through an example with real numbers, so you can check it by hand.
- Rules of thumb are labelled as such. Waste percentages, mortar coverage, base depths and densities vary; where they do, the tools show the range rather than one number.
- Both unit systems. Enter feet and inches (fractions like 3 1/2 work) or metric, and every result is shown in both.
- Nothing sent anywhere. Every calculation runs in your browser. See the privacy page.
Who it is for
Anyone about to buy materials for a floor, a wall, a patio or a deck: homeowners doing it themselves, people checking a contractor’s quote, and tradespeople who want a quick second opinion. The grid calculator is for designers laying out a page. The formulas, their sources and their limits are on the about and methods page.
Conversions at a glance
From the exact international definitions of the inch and the yard.
| 1 square foot | 0.0929 m² |
|---|---|
| 1 square metre | 10.76 sq ft |
| 1 square yard | 9 sq ft = 0.8361 m² |
| 1 cubic yard | 27 cu ft = 0.7646 m³ |
| 1 inch | 25.4 mm exactly |
| 1/8 inch | 3.175 mm |
| 1/16 inch | 1.5875 mm |