Every tile calculator I looked at before building this one, including the ones the tile retailers themselves run, hands back a bare tile count from a flat waste percentage and stops there. This one adds up every room you’re tiling, subtracts anything you don’t tile under like a built-in bath or a kitchen island, and applies the right waste percentage for your actual layout, 10% for a straight grid, 15% for diagonal, 20% for herringbone, rather than one number for every job.
It then works out adhesive and grout the way a tiler actually buys them. Adhesive coverage comes from published South African technical data sheets for the trowel notch size your tile calls for, a lightweight wall tile, a standard floor tile and a large-format tile over 600mm need very different amounts, and the calculator picks the right one automatically. Grout uses the standard tile, joint and depth coverage formula and rounds up to South Africa’s real 20kg, 5kg and 2kg bag sizes, working out the cheapest combination for your exact total.
Alongside your own DIY materials total, it shows what a professional tiler would likely charge for the same job, both labour only and a full supply-and-fit quote, using 2026 South African market-rate ranges, so you can weigh up hiring a tiler against doing it yourself with real numbers rather than guesswork.
Prices default to a mid-range ceramic/porcelain tile and standard adhesive and grout, but every field is editable to your own quote. Let me know if the adhesive tier or the waste percentages look off for a job you’ve actually quoted.
Hey Nebula, thanks! Right now you just type your tile size in cm rather than picking from a list, so any size works fine, common ones included, but I get what you mean, a quick preset list would save a step. I will add that.
And diagonal is already built in as its own layout option, it bumps the waste to 15% automatically, so no more mapping it out by hand in Visio. Give it a go on a diagonal floor and let me know if the number feels right for what you actually used.
Quick update Nebula, the preset dropdown is live now. Pick from common sizes like 300x300, 600x600, 600x1200 and a couple of plank/subway sizes, or leave it on Custom and type your own. Have a look: Tiling Calculator South Africa: Cost, Adhesive & Grout
That preset dropdown is going to save people so much time, well done. I remember helping my mother price out tiling her kitchen last year and we had exactly this problem, the retailer’s site just gave a rough tile count and left us to guess at adhesive and grout ourselves, so we ended up over ordering on grout and under ordering on adhesive. Cost us an extra trip to the hardware store on a Saturday morning, which anyone in Joburg traffic knows is not how you want to spend your weekend.
What I’d be curious about is whether you’re planning to add a bulk buy or offcut warning, something that flags when you’re just over a box threshold so people know if adding one more square metre to a cut list actually pushes them into needing a whole extra box. That’s usually where the real cost surprises come in for renovations. Either way, this is the kind of practical tool that actually reflects how people plan real projects, not just theoretical square metres.
Thanks ThandiM, and that Saturday morning hardware run is exactly the story this tool is meant to save people from, the theoretical square metreage was never the hard part, the shopping list was.
A box threshold warning is a good idea. The tricky bit is that waste is already baked into the total, 10 to 20% depending on layout, so you are often already a bit over a box on purpose, the tool would need to tell “this extra bit is your waste buffer” apart from “this extra bit tips you into a whole new box you did not plan for.” That is the actual useful warning, not just a raw leftover percentage. I will have a proper look at building it in.