Tile sizes, and what each one is for
Bigger tiles, fewer joints — a calmer floor and less grout to clean. Smaller tiles cut in better around drains, slopes and tight corners. Most homes want both, in different rooms.
The common sizes
- 300 × 300 mm — bathroom floors, utility areas, small balconies. Small enough to follow a slope to a drain without the tile rocking.
- 300 × 450 and 300 × 600 mm — the standard bathroom and kitchen wall sizes. Laid vertically they lift a low ceiling.
- 600 × 600 mm — the default living-room and bedroom floor in Indian homes. Widely stocked, easy for any fixer to lay, forgiving on a floor that is not perfectly flat.
- 600 × 1200 mm — the large format that has largely replaced 600 × 600 in new work. Roughly a third of the grout lines, and where convincing marble looks live.
- 800 × 1600 mm and larger slabs — feature walls, showrooms, and floors where you want the joints to nearly disappear. Needs a genuinely flat base and a fixer who has laid them before.
Matching size to room
A small room does not need a small tile. The opposite, usually: fewer lines across a floor makes a compact room read as one continuous surface rather than a grid. The limit is practical, not visual — a large tile in a small room means more cutting at the edges, so the wastage allowance goes up.
Wet floors are the exception. A bathroom floor has to fall towards a drain, and a rigid 600 × 1200 tile cannot follow two directions of slope at once. Smaller tiles, more joints, water that goes where it should.
What large format demands from the floor beneath
The larger the tile, the less it forgives. A high spot under a 600 × 600 tile is invisible; under a 600 × 1200 it becomes a lipped edge you catch with a foot. Large formats need a levelled base, the right adhesive rather than a thick sand-cement bed, and back-buttering. Ask your fixer what they have laid before you commit to slabs.
Nominal versus actual
Sizes are nominal. A "600 × 600" tile is typically a few millimetres under, which is why grout joints exist and why tiles from different batches should not be mixed in one room. Rectified tiles — cut square after firing — allow the narrowest joints, and are the reason a large-format floor can look nearly seamless.