Every laminate/vinyl flooring calculator I looked at before building this one hands back a bare pack count from a flat waste percentage and stops there. This one adds up every room you’re flooring, applies the right waste percentage for your actual layout, 10% for a straight plank run, 15% for diagonal, 20% for herringbone, and rounds up to the whole packs you can actually buy at the till.
It also covers the parts a bare pack count leaves out. Underlay is matched to your subfloor, a moisture-barrier combination underlay for laminate over concrete, plain foam over timber, or none at all for SPC click vinyl, which usually ships with its own attached backing already, so paying for a separate underlay on top of that is just wasted money. Skirting is worked out from your rooms’ real perimeter, minus your doorways, rounded up to whole 2.4m, 2.7m or 3.0m lengths. Transition strips are counted for every doorway plus any internal expansion joint a long continuous run needs, following the same guidance manufacturers like SwissKrono publish for their own floating floors, most people forget these entirely until they’re standing in the shop a second time.
Alongside your own DIY materials total, it shows what a professional installer would likely charge for the same job, both labour only and a full supply-and-fit quote, using 2026 South African market-rate ranges, laminate and vinyl priced separately since vinyl installs run higher.
Prices default to mid-range 8mm AC4 laminate or SPC click vinyl, 90mm MDF skirting and an aluminium T-strip, but every field is editable to your own quote. Let me know if the underlay defaults or the transition-joint guidance look off for a job you’ve actually done.
This is genuinely useful, I only got round to laminate flooring in my place in Randburg last year and the underlay and skirting costs caught me off guard. I’d budgeted almost entirely for the planks themselves and then had to make another trip to the hardware store because nobody mentioned transition strips between rooms with different flooring types. Ended up losing a Saturday to it.
What I’d add, if you haven’t already, is some guidance on waste percentage for diagonal lay patterns versus straight lay. My installer told me diagonal eats up noticeably more material and I had no way of checking if that was fair or if he was just padding the quote. A lot of us don’t know enough to question these numbers, especially with contractors who know we’re pressed for time.
Also curious whether it factors in doorway transitions where the flooring continues through, that’s another spot where people underestimate the linear metres needed. Great initiative regardless, tools like this actually save people money instead of just information.
A couple of updates to the flooring calculator since I first posted it.
There is now an extra accessories section for the trims people almost always forget until they are standing in the shop a second time. If you are keeping your existing skirting boards and just want to cover the expansion gap, you can switch to scotia beading instead of pricing new skirting, it runs along the same wall length so you never pay for both. End profiles (also called reducers) are in there too, for edges that are not a doorway, say where the new floor meets tile or carpet at a different height, or ends at a sliding door track. And if you are flooring a staircase, stair nosing is now priced properly per tread rather than a vague per metre guess, since each step needs its own cut and you cannot stitch offcuts together across steps the way you can with skirting.
Also added a print or save as PDF button so you can take the actual shopping list to the shop or your installer, plus a WhatsApp share button if you want to send your numbers to someone else without retyping them.