How much tile to order

15 August 2026

Measure the area, add a wastage allowance, then round up to whole boxes — tile is sold by the box, not the piece.

The arithmetic

Measure each area separately — length × width, in feet or metres, one figure per room or wall. Add them together.
Add wastage. 10% for a plain straight lay; 15% if the tile runs diagonally, in a herringbone, or into a room with lots of corners and cut-outs.
Divide by the box coverage printed on every product page, then round up. Four and a bit boxes means five boxes.

A 12 ft × 10 ft bedroom is 120 sq ft. With 10% wastage that is 132 sq ft. At 15.5 sq ft a box, that is 8.5 boxes — so nine.

What the wastage is actually for

It is not padding. It covers four real things:

Cuts. Every tile that meets a wall, a door frame or a drain is cut, and the offcut is usually unusable.
Pattern setting-out. A layout centred on the room wastes more at the edges than one started from a corner — and it looks considerably better.
Transit breakage. Tile travels on pallets by road. A small amount arrives broken; that is why our returns policy treats up to 2% of an order, or one box, as normal.
The spare box. Keep it. A cracked tile two years from now is a ten-minute repair if you have a match and a re-floored room if you don't.

Why you cannot just order more later

Tile is made in batches, and batches differ. Two boxes of the same product from different production runs can vary slightly in shade and in size — enough to see once they are laid side by side under one light. The industry prints a batch or shade code on the box for exactly this reason.

Order the whole job in one go, and it comes from one batch. Order 90% now and the rest in three weeks, and the last row of your floor may not match the first.

Order a sample before you order the floor

A screen cannot tell you what a tile looks like under your own light, and no two rooms light the same. A sample settles it, and we refund the cost against your order when you buy the material.

If you would rather not do the sums

Send us the room dimensions on WhatsApp with the tile you are looking at, and we will come back with a box count and a price. It takes us a few minutes and it is the cheapest part of the job to get right.

The arithmetic

Measure each area separately — length × width, in feet or metres, one figure per room or wall. Add them together.

Add wastage. 10% for a plain straight lay; 15% if the tile runs diagonally, in a herringbone, or into a room with lots of corners and cut-outs.

Divide by the box coverage printed on every product page, then round up. Four and a bit boxes means five boxes.

A 12 ft × 10 ft bedroom is 120 sq ft. With 10% wastage that is 132 sq ft. At 15.5 sq ft a box, that is 8.5 boxes — so nine.

What the wastage is actually for

It is not padding. It covers four real things:

Cuts. Every tile that meets a wall, a door frame or a drain is cut, and the offcut is usually unusable.

Pattern setting-out. A layout centred on the room wastes more at the edges than one started from a corner — and it looks considerably better.

Transit breakage. Tile travels on pallets by road. A small amount arrives broken; that is why our returns policy treats up to 2% of an order, or one box, as normal.

The spare box. Keep it. A cracked tile two years from now is a ten-minute repair if you have a match and a re-floored room if you don't.

Why you cannot just order more later

Order the whole job in one go, and it comes from one batch. Order 90% now and the rest in three weeks, and the last row of your floor may not match the first.