Tile calculator
This is a straight division of the area you type by the tile you pick, with a margin added for offcuts. It cannot see your layout, your pattern or the fiddly corners of the room, so treat the box count as a buying figure and lay a dry run before you commit the last box.
Enter the room size and the tile size, tell it how many tiles come in a box, and the tool totals the area, divides by one tile's face, adds waste and rounds up to whole boxes. That box figure is what you carry to the till.
Worked example
A 12 ft × 10 ft floor is 120 square feet. In 12 × 12 inch tiles each tile covers one square foot, so that is 120 tiles before waste. Add 10% and you need 132 tiles; at 10 tiles a box that rounds to 14 boxes. Move to 18-inch tiles and each covers 2.25 sq ft, dropping the count to about 59.
The formula
tiles = (area × (1 + waste)) ÷ (tile width × tile height)
Bring the tile size into the same unit as the area — inches become feet by dividing by twelve — so a 12-inch tile is a one-foot square. Divide the room area by that face area for the raw tile count, lift it by the waste margin, then round the boxes up because you cannot buy part of one.
Questions
- How many tiles do I need for a room?
- Work out the floor or wall area, divide by the face area of one tile, then round up and add a margin for cuts. A 120 sq ft floor tiled in 12×12 inch tiles is 120 ÷ 1 = 120 tiles before waste; with a 10% margin you are buying about 132. This tool does that division and rounds the boxes for you once you enter the room and the tile size.
- How much extra should I buy for waste and breakage?
- Ten percent is the usual starting point for a straight lay and it is the default here. A diagonal or herringbone layout wastes more off the cuts, so lift it to 15%. It is worth buying a spare box from the same batch anyway — dye lots shift, and matching a cracked tile two years later is close to impossible.
- Should I subtract cabinets, islands or fixtures?
- For a rough order you can leave the room whole and let the waste margin soak up the covered areas. If you are tiling an expensive stone and want a tight count, measure the true tiled area — floor minus the island footprint, wall minus the window — and enter that instead. This tool tiles exactly the area you give it.
- How do I count tiles for a wall instead of a floor?
- The same way — a wall is just a vertical area. Enter the wall length as one dimension and the height as the other, set the tile size, and read the count. For several walls, total their area first on the square footage calculator and bring that number back here.
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