Commercial flooring cost guide
Key takeaways
- Most commercial floors in the UK land between about 25 and 80 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted, before VAT. Contract carpet tile and sheet vinyl sit at the lower end; LVT, rubber and resin screeds sit at the upper end.
- The finish is rarely what makes one quotation different to another. Subfloor preparation, uplift of the existing floor and access restrictions are where the money actually moves.
- Preparation can add anything from 8 to 40 pounds per square metre. A slab that needs grinding, a surface damp proof membrane and a smoothing compound costs more to get ready than the floor covering costs to buy.
- Rates fall sharply with area. A 200 square metre job and a 2,000 square metre job of the same specification are not the same rate, because mobilisation, setting out and welding time do not scale linearly.
- Working nights, in phases or around an occupied building typically adds 25 to 50 per cent to the labour element. It is the single most under-budgeted item on refurbishment projects.
- Compare quotations on scope, not on the headline rate. A low number usually means preparation has been excluded or assumed.
How much does commercial flooring cost per square metre?
As a working range for 2026, commercial flooring in the UK costs roughly 25 to 80 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted, excluding VAT and excluding subfloor preparation. Contract carpet tile and standard commercial sheet vinyl sit near the bottom of that band, commercial LVT and safety flooring sit in the middle and rubber, linoleum and resin screed systems sit at the top. Preparation, uplift and out-of-hours working are priced separately and frequently add 20 to 50 per cent to the total.
The table below gives indicative installed ranges by finish. Treat them as a budgeting starting point rather than a quotation. Every one of these numbers moves with area, access, programme, product grade and the condition of the slab underneath. Material prices also move with inflation and with raw material costs, so any range more than a year or two old should be read as indicative direction rather than as current pricing.
| Finish | Indicative installed cost per m2 | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Contract carpet tile | 18 – 45 pounds | Tufted loop pile at the bottom, designer and solution-dyed nylon ranges at the top |
| Commercial sheet vinyl (welded) | 25 – 45 pounds | Homogeneous vs heterogeneous, welding, coving, pattern matching |
| Safety flooring | 30 – 55 pounds | Slip rating, coving detail, wet room and drainage detailing |
| Commercial LVT (glue down) | 35 – 70 pounds | Wear layer thickness, setting out complexity, feature inlays |
| Linoleum sheet | 35 – 60 pounds | Acclimatisation time, welding, fitter skill premium |
| Rubber sheet or tile | 45 – 85 pounds | Thickness, acoustic build up, stud vs smooth |
| Entrance matting systems | 90 – 250 pounds | Recessed vs surface, aluminium carrier, insert type |
| Epoxy coating | 20 – 45 pounds | Number of coats, aggregate, colour, anti-slip additive |
| Resin screed (4 – 9 mm) | 45 – 100 pounds | Thickness, polyurethane vs epoxy, thermal shock duty, coving |
These are supply-and-fit rates for the covering only. The next few sections deal with what sits underneath them, which is where most cost surprises come from.
What is actually inside a square metre rate
A commercial flooring rate is usually four things bundled into one number: the material, the adhesive and ancillaries, the labour to fit it and the contractor’s overhead and margin. On a straightforward carpet tile job the material might be 45 per cent of the rate. On a welded safety floor with coving and capping the labour can exceed the material. On a resin screed the labour and the plant are almost always the larger half.
What is normally excluded, unless the quotation says otherwise: uplift and disposal of the existing floor, moisture testing, subfloor preparation of any kind, movement joints, thresholds and trims, skirting or capping, protection of the finished floor for following trades and any out-of-hours premium. A quotation that looks unusually cheap has almost always excluded two or three of those.
Area matters more than most budget holders expect. Mobilisation, setting out, delivery, welfare and the first day of a fitting team are fixed regardless of size, so a 150 square metre reception can carry a rate 30 to 40 per cent higher than the same product across a 3,000 square metre warehouse office. Small awkward rooms with lots of cuts are the most expensive floors per square metre in commercial work.
Contract carpet tile cost
Contract carpet tile is the cheapest way to cover a large commercial floor properly. Budget tufted loop pile ranges start around 18 to 25 pounds per square metre installed. Mid-range solution-dyed nylon in a class 33 general commercial heavy specification typically runs 28 to 40 pounds. Designer ranges, planks laid in a non-standard pattern or bespoke colourways push past 45 pounds and can go considerably higher.
Three things push the rate up. Laying pattern is the first: quarter turn is standard, but ashlar, brick bond and random plank laying all slow a fitting team down. The second is the backing, since a cushion or bitumen backing costs more than a standard felt or PVC one but changes acoustic performance. The third is tackifier versus full adhesive, which matters for lifetime cost because tackified tiles can be lifted and swapped individually.
The value case for carpet tile is not the installed rate, it is the replacement model. A single damaged tile is swapped in minutes without closing the floor, which no sheet material can match. Full specification detail sits on the carpet tiles page with broadloom and heavier contract options covered under commercial carpet.
Commercial vinyl flooring installation cost
Commercial sheet vinyl typically costs 25 to 45 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted. A homogeneous sheet in a plain colour across an open area sits near the bottom. A heterogeneous sheet with a design layer, hot-welded seams, coved skirting and welded capping in a clinical or catering environment sits at the top and can exceed it where the detailing is heavy.
The detailing is what people miss when they compare vinyl quotations. Hot welding a seam is skilled, slow work priced by the linear metre and a room broken into small areas has far more linear metres of weld than its floor area suggests. Coving the vinyl up the wall to form a hygienic junction, capping the top edge and forming neat internal and external corners can add 12 to 25 pounds per linear metre of perimeter. In a small clinical room, coving can cost more than the floor.
Safety flooring is the same family with a slip-resistant aggregate through the wear layer. Expect 30 to 55 pounds per square metre installed. Wet room specifications with drainage falls, tanking and welded upstands sit at the upper end because they are effectively a waterproofing package as much as a floor. The choice of slip rating is a compliance decision rather than a budget one, which is covered on the safety flooring page.
Two adjacent costs are worth budgeting from the start. Acoustic vinyl with a foam or cork backing adds roughly 8 to 18 pounds per square metre over the standard product, discussed in more detail under acoustic resilient flooring. Conductive and static-dissipative vinyl carries a similar premium plus the cost of copper earthing strips and testing. The full type breakdown lives on the commercial vinyl flooring page.
Commercial LVT cost per m2
Commercial LVT typically costs 35 to 70 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted. A 0.55 mm wear layer glue-down plank in a standard brick bond over a prepared floor sits around 40 to 50 pounds. A 0.70 mm wear layer product, a stone-format tile laid on the diagonal or a design with feature strips, borders or water-jet inlays moves quickly towards and past 70.
LVT is the finish where preparation cost and covering cost are most tightly linked. It is thin, it is glued directly to the substrate and it telegraphs everything underneath it, so the floor below has to be flatter and smoother than for any other resilient covering. It is common for the preparation package under LVT to cost 40 to 60 per cent of the covering itself and a quotation that prices LVT without stating a preparation specification is not comparable to one that does. That relationship is set out in full under subfloor preparation for LVT.
Wear layer is the specification decision with the biggest cost consequence over the life of the floor, because it is what separates a floor that survives fifteen years of trolley traffic from one that shows wear paths in three. The detail sits in the LVT wear layer guide and the product range itself on the LVT flooring page.
Linoleum, rubber and specialist resilient cost
Linoleum sheet runs roughly 35 to 60 pounds per square metre installed. Material cost is broadly comparable to good commercial vinyl, but the installed gap is wider because linoleum needs proper acclimatisation, more careful setting out and a fitter who works in it regularly. It is not a like-for-like substitution in a value engineering exercise, as covered under commercial vinyl vs linoleum.
Rubber sheet and tile sits at 45 to 85 pounds per square metre. It is the most expensive mainstream resilient covering, justified where impact absorption, acoustic performance or extreme durability matter. Thickness drives the number and acoustic build ups with a separate resilient layer underneath add more again.
Entrance matting is priced differently to everything else and is the most commonly under-budgeted item on a fit-out. A recessed aluminium carrier system with brush and fibre inserts runs 90 to 250 pounds per square metre, plus builders work to form the recess. It looks expensive per square metre and it is the highest-value flooring on the project, because it captures the grit that would otherwise abrade every other floor in the building.
Resin and industrial flooring cost
Resin is priced by system thickness rather than by product name. A thin-film epoxy coating at 0.3 to 1 mm runs 20 to 45 pounds per square metre. A self-smoothing epoxy at 2 to 3 mm sits around 40 to 65 pounds. A polyurethane screed at 6 to 9 mm for a food production or thermal shock environment runs 70 to 100 pounds and beyond once coving, drainage detailing and falls are included.
Two things separate resin from every other finish on cost. The first is that surface preparation is not optional. The slab has to be mechanically prepared by shot blasting or diamond grinding to create a profile the resin can key into, which is a plant-based cost, not a bag-of-compound cost. The second is downtime: resin cures in stages, the area has to be closed to other trades and the programme cost of that closure often exceeds the difference between two competing systems.
Full resin pricing sits in the dedicated guides rather than here. See the resin flooring cost guide for commercial and industrial systems, the resin driveway cost guide and the epoxy garage floor cost guide for residential work.
Subfloor preparation – the line that moves the number most
Preparation is the difference between two quotations more often than the floor covering is. Indicative rates: mechanical grinding or shot blasting 6 to 14 pounds per square metre; a two-coat surface damp proof membrane 10 to 20 pounds; a latex smoothing compound at 3 to 5 mm 8 to 16 pounds; a fibre-reinforced compound at 10 mm or more 18 to 35 pounds; a new sand-cement screed at 50 mm 25 to 45 pounds; a liquid anhydrite screed 22 to 38 pounds.
Add those together on a bad slab and the preparation package alone reaches 40 pounds per square metre before any covering is laid. That is why an existing floor that looks acceptable can still generate a quotation that seems high and why a survey that includes a moisture test and a flatness check produces a number that holds, while a quotation priced from a drawing does not.
Moisture is the single most common cause of a variation on a commercial flooring job. Testing relative humidity in the slab in line with BS 8203 is an investigation cost rather than a works cost and it is trivial against the price of the covering; discovering after installation that the slab was above 75 per cent relative humidity costs the entire floor. Screeding and levelling costs are covered separately in the floor screeding cost guide with the technical scope on the subfloor preparation page.
Uplift, disposal and working in an occupied building
Removing an existing floor typically costs 6 to 18 pounds per square metre including disposal. Loose-laid carpet tile is at the cheap end. Bitumen-bonded tiles, well-stuck sheet vinyl and old adhesive residue are at the expensive end because the adhesive has to come off mechanically before anything new goes down. The UK asbestos ban took full effect in 1999, so any floor in a building constructed or refurbished before 2000 should be assessed rather than assumed safe. Removal is not automatically licensed work, because vinyl floor tiles and bitumen adhesive frequently fall into the non-licensed or notifiable non-licensed categories depending on the material and the removal method, but it is a specialist cost that sits outside normal flooring rates either way.
Programme constraints are priced into labour, not materials. Night working, weekend working, phased handover room by room, restricted lift access, a live retail unit trading during the day or a hospital ward that cannot close all push the labour element up by 25 to 50 per cent. This is legitimate, not opportunism: a team that can only work six hours in a twelve-hour window is being paid for the window.
The related saving is real too. Zone-by-zone specification in phased buildings is covered under flooring for offices, airport flooring and stadium flooring. A floor laid in one uninterrupted phase in an empty building is the cheapest floor anyone will ever buy, so where the programme allows a shell to be floored before fit-out, that decision often saves more than the choice of covering does.
Why two quotations for the same job differ so much
In most cases the gap is scope, not margin. The usual culprits are preparation assumed rather than surveyed, uplift and disposal excluded, coving and capping omitted, a different product grade quoted under a similar-sounding name, out-of-hours working priced as normal hours and waste and cutting allowance calculated differently on a patterned or directional product.
The way to compare fairly is to fix the variables before the quotations go out. Specify the product by manufacturer, range and grade rather than by description. State the preparation specification, or state that it is to be confirmed after a moisture test so every price is built the same way. State the working hours and the phasing. State who is responsible for uplift, disposal and protection. Ask for the rate broken into covering, preparation, uplift and ancillaries rather than as one figure.
Once those are fixed, three quotations will often land within 10 to 15 per cent of each other and the one that is 30 per cent below the others is missing something that will reappear later as a variation.
Installed cost against whole-life cost
The cheapest floor to buy is rarely the cheapest floor to own. A contract carpet tile at 22 pounds per square metre that is replaced at year eight costs more over twenty years than a specification at 35 pounds that lasts the full period, once the second uplift, the second installation and the second period of disruption are counted. In an occupied building the disruption is usually the largest of those three costs and it never appears in the original comparison.
Three factors decide whole-life cost more than the purchase price. Cleaning regime comes first, because the wrong chemical on the wrong material shortens a floor’s life faster than traffic does. Repairability comes second, since a floor that can be patched or swapped tile by tile avoids whole-room replacement. Correct grading comes third: a class 33 product in a class 34 environment fails early and that failure is a specification error rather than a product fault.
The practical rule for a building intended to be held rather than flipped is to buy the preparation properly and the grade correctly, then economise on the design range if the budget needs it. Preparation and grade cannot be revisited later; a colourway can. The same logic drives environmental performance, covered under sustainable commercial flooring.
What a contractor needs in order to price accurately
Accurate pricing needs the area with a drawing where possible, the age and type of the existing floor, whether a moisture test has been carried out, the intended use of each area, the cleaning regime, the working hours available, the access route for deliveries and any programme constraints. A survey that captures those produces a number that holds through the job. A rate quoted from a floor area alone is an estimate dressed as a price.
Commercial flooring materials in these ranges are made by manufacturers such as Interface, Forbo, Tarkett, Polyflor, Altro, Gerflor, Amtico, Milliken, Sika and Flowcrete and a specialist contractor matches the product grade to the environment and prices the preparation the slab actually needs. Listing a manufacturer here does not imply a partnership, approval or accreditation.
Surface Specialists is a network of vetted specialist contractors covering commercial flooring, resin systems and subfloor preparation across the North West and nationally on larger projects. Tell us the building, the area and the programme and we match the project to a contractor who works in that environment. Get in touch to arrange a site survey.
Frequently asked questions
How much does commercial flooring cost per square metre in the UK?
Most commercial floors cost 25 to 80 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted, excluding VAT and excluding subfloor preparation. Contract carpet tile and standard sheet vinyl sit at the lower end, LVT and safety flooring in the middle, rubber and resin screeds at the top. Preparation, uplift and out-of-hours working are priced separately and often add 20 to 50 per cent.
How much does commercial vinyl flooring installation cost?
Commercial sheet vinyl typically costs 25 to 45 pounds per square metre supplied and fitted. Safety flooring runs 30 to 55 pounds. Hot-welded seams, coved skirting and capping are priced by the linear metre on top of the area rate, usually 12 to 25 pounds per linear metre of perimeter, which is why small heavily detailed rooms cost far more per square metre than open areas.
What does LVT cost per m2 for a commercial project?
Commercial LVT is generally 35 to 70 pounds per square metre installed. A 0.55 mm wear layer plank in a standard bond sits around 40 to 50 pounds, while a 0.70 mm wear layer, a diagonal or stone-format layout, or feature inlays push it higher. LVT also carries the heaviest preparation requirement of any resilient covering, which is priced separately.
How much should I budget for subfloor preparation?
Between 8 and 40 pounds per square metre depending on the state of the slab. Grinding is 6 to 14 pounds, a surface damp proof membrane 10 to 20, a latex smoothing compound 8 to 16 and a new screed 22 to 45. A slab that needs all of them costs more to prepare than most coverings cost to buy, so preparation should be surveyed rather than assumed.
Why is one flooring quotation much cheaper than another?
Almost always because the scope differs. The usual omissions are subfloor preparation, uplift and disposal of the existing floor, coving and capping, out-of-hours working and a lower product grade quoted under a similar name. Fix the product, the preparation specification, the working hours and responsibility for uplift before quotations go out and prices often converge within 10 to 15 per cent.
Does the size of the job change the rate per square metre?
Significantly. Mobilisation, setting out, delivery and the first day of a fitting team are fixed costs regardless of area, so a 150 square metre job can carry a rate 30 to 40 per cent higher than the same specification across 3,000 square metres. Small rooms with many cuts and short runs are the most expensive commercial floors per square metre.
How much extra does night or weekend working add?
Typically 25 to 50 per cent on the labour element, depending on the length of the working window and how much of each shift is lost to setting up and clearing away. Phased handover room by room in an occupied building has a similar effect, because the team never gets an uninterrupted run at the floor. It is the most commonly under-budgeted item on refurbishment work.