Flooring
Hardwood flooring installation cost
A wood floor runs about $14.60 a square foot installed, of which roughly half is the wood. What moves the rest is not the species — it is what the boards are fixed to, because the subfloor decides whether they are nailed, stapled, glued or floated.
Written and edited by Pablo Ruiz Quintero
Last reviewed 2026-09-16 · Nothing you type leaves your browser
The floor and the room
What is underneath matters as much as what goes on top — it is what decides how the floor is fixed down, and that is most of the labour.
The floor being covered, all rooms together.
Measured the way the floor swells: across the planks, wall to wall, including any rooms that run through without a threshold.
What solid hardwood was designed for. A cleat goes through the board, through the plywood and bites the panel — nothing else is needed.
One piece of timber. It moves with the seasons across its whole width, it can only go over wood, and it outlives its owner because it can be sanded back four or five times.
What everyone wants now. Tighter grain than red oak, browner rather than pink, and it takes a grey or a natural finish without going orange.
Where plank starts. Gaps in a dry winter are five times wider than on a 2 1/4 in floor for the same moisture swing, because a gap is per board.
Wood takes on moisture from the air and gives it back. This floor sits between 5.9 % and 10.1 % moisture content, a swing of 4.2 points.
Removal is charged per square foot and it happens before anything else.
DIY drops the labour and the removal, not the materials.
Used only to pick a regional labour rate. It stays in your browser.
Installed, all in
$7,306
$14.61 per ft² · 550 ft² ordered for 500 ft² of floor
Fixed down by nail down, cleats
An L-shaped cleat driven through the tongue at an angle, every 8 in, with two more within 3 in of each board end. The barb holds in plywood and the floor stays tight to the subfloor.
The same boards, fitted four ways
Labour only, on 500 ft². The method is not a taste — it is what the subfloor allows.
| Method | Per ft² | Labour |
|---|---|---|
| Nail down, cleats · | $5.50 | $2,750 |
| Staple down | $5.00 | $2,500 |
| Glue down | $7.50 | $3,750 |
| Floating, click or glued edge | $4.00 | $2,000 |
Shopping list
- White oak, solid, 5 in boards
500 ft² of floor plus 10 % for cutting — the loss is at the end of each run, so wider boards and more doorways both cost more of it550 ft² - Flooring cleats
3.6 per ft² — one every 8 in along each board, plus the ends2 boxes - Underlayment paper
Goes down before the boards. It quiets the floor and slows moisture from below.1 roll
What the floor does after you leave
Across 16 ft of white oak, between a 28 % winter and a 55 % summer.
5/64 in
Winter gap, board to board
0.077 in
0.75"
Gap at every wall
behind the baseboard
4.2
Moisture points
5.9 % to 10.1 %
Wide enough to notice in midwinter and to catch a crumb. It closes again in summer. If that would bother you, the answer is a narrower board or a humidifier, not a different fitter.
What it costs
National average. Boards, fasteners, fitting, lifting the old floor and preparing the subfloor. Baseboard and thresholds are usually quoted separately.
$14.61 per ft² all in, of which $8.25 is the wood itself. Sanding the floor that is already there costs a fraction of this, and is the comparison worth making before pulling one up.
Worth knowing
- A swing from 28 % to 55 % indoor humidity is 4.2 moisture points, and on a 5 in white oak board that is 0.077 in of width — about 5/64 in of a gap between every two boards in midwinter, wide enough to catch a crumb and to be noticed in February. It closes again in summer. Nothing is wrong with the floor; that is what wood does.
- The perimeter gap is a different number and it does not come from that sum: it is the thickness of the board, about 0.75 in, left at every wall and every fixed obstacle and hidden behind the baseboard. Anyone quoting a gap of an inch and a half has multiplied the movement of the whole room together, which a nailed floor does not do — it is fastened every 8 in and relieves between the boards instead.
- 4.2 points of moisture swing is a lot for solid wood. It is what a house does with no humidifier in a cold winter, and it is the reason floors that were laid tight in August have hairline gaps in February. The gaps close again; the cupping caused by going the other way does not always.
- At 5 in the wood and the subfloor have to be within 2 moisture points of each other before a board goes down, not 4. That is a meter reading, not a number of days on site: wood delivered from a cold lorry into a heated house can take two weeks, and wood delivered into a house with the heating off never gets there at all.
- Lifting carpet and pad adds $325 before a single new board is laid, and on a nailed wood floor it is the slowest part of the job.
On this page — 9 sections
- 01The question nobody asks, and the one that sets the price
- 02What hardwood flooring installation costs per square foot, and where it goes
- 03What the floor does after the fitter leaves
- 04Choosing the wood, and what the choice actually buys
- 05The order things happen, and what each step costs
- 06Solid against engineered, honestly
- 07Six ways this goes wrong
- 08How the calculator works it out
- 09The words on a flooring quote
The question nobody asks, and the one that sets the price
The short version
- The subfloor picks the method. Wood takes cleats; concrete takes glue or a floating floor. It is not a preference.
- That decision is worth half again in labour. $5.50 nailed against $7.50 glued, for identical boards.
- Solid wood never goes over concrete. No price, no product and no installer makes that work.
- Board width is a humidity decision. A 7 in plank opens a winter gap three times wider than a 2 1/4 in strip.
Every quote for a wood floor starts with the same two questions: which wood, and how many square feet. Neither is the one that matters most. A floor fitter pricing the job is looking at the deck, because what the boards are fixed to decides how they are fixed, and how they are fixed is most of the labour.
The same white oak, the same room, the same fitter: nailed to a plywood deck it is one price, glued to a slab it is half again, floated over a basement it is less than either. The boards are identical. Nothing about the floor you walk on has changed.
| Under the floor | Method | Solid? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plywood, 3/4 in, over joists | Nail down, cleats | Yes | What solid hardwood was designed for. A cleat goes through the board, through the plywood and bites the panel — nothing else is needed. |
| OSB, 3/4 in, over joists | Staple down | Yes | Holds a staple better than a cleat, because OSB grips by friction along the whole leg rather than by a barb. Same floor, different fastener. |
| Plywood or OSB, 5/8 in | Staple down | Yes | Thin for a nail-down. It needs shorter fasteners so they do not come through, and most fitters add a layer of 3/8 in ply first — which is the cost here. |
| Concrete slab, on or above grade | Glue down | No | Solid wood does not go on concrete. There is nothing to nail into and the slab gives off moisture for the life of the building — this is engineered, glued or floated, over a moisture barrier. |
| Concrete slab, below grade (basement) | Floating, click or glued edge | No | Below grade the slab is surrounded by damp earth and the air above it is the wettest in the house. Engineered floated over a membrane, or a floor that is not wood at all. |
| An existing wood floor, staying down | Nail down, cleats | Yes | Going over the old floor saves the removal, costs height at every door and threshold, and the new boards have to run across the old ones, not along them. |
What hardwood flooring installation costs per square foot, and where it goes
About half of an installed wood floor is the wood. The rest is labour, and inside that labour the method is the biggest single lever — bigger than the fitter’s day rate, bigger than the region, and invisible in every published price range because the ranges average across all four methods at once.
| Method | Labour / ft² | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Nail down, cleats | $3.50–$9.00 | An L-shaped cleat driven through the tongue at an angle, every 8 in, with two more within 3 in of each board end. The barb holds in plywood and the floor stays tight to the subfloor. |
| Staple down | $3.20–$8.20 | Faster and cheaper than cleats, closer spacing, and it grips OSB better. The trade-off is rigidity: a stapled floor is less able to move, which shows up as squeaks if the wood was not at the right moisture. |
| Glue down | $5.00–$12.00 | The only way to fix wood to concrete. It is the most expensive to fit and the quietest underfoot, and the adhesive doubles as the moisture barrier if the right one is specified. |
| Floating, click or glued edge | $2.50–$6.50 | Fixed to nothing at all — the floor is one sheet that moves as a unit over a pad. Cheapest to fit, the only option in a basement, and it sounds hollow if the pad is thin. |
fasteners per ft² = 144 ÷ (board width × spacing)
- 144
- square inches in a square foot
- board width
- the face width of the board, in inches
- spacing
- how often a fastener goes in along each board — 8 in for cleats, 6 in for staples
Worked through — A 2 1/4 in strip floor at 8 in: 144 ÷ 18 = 8 cleats a square foot, so a box of 1,000 covers about 125 ft². A 5 in plank at the same spacing is 144 ÷ 40 = 3.6, and the same box reaches nearly 280 ft². Add about 8 % for the two fasteners at each board end and the face-nailed first and last rows.
MaterialsEstimator, Solid and engineered wood flooring installation price survey · checked 2026-09-16
What the floor does after the fitter leaves
Wood chases the humidity of the room it lives in, for as long as it exists. In a dry January it gives up moisture and narrows; in a humid July it takes it back and swells. This is not a defect and there is no wood that does not do it.
The number that matters is small and specific: how much one board changes. The movement of a nailed floor does not pile up at one end of the room — it is fixed down every eight inches — so it appears as a fine gap between each pair of boards, and the wider the board, the wider that gap.
winter gap = board width × coefficient × moisture points
- board width
- the face width, in inches
- coefficient
- how much the species moves per moisture point: white oak 0.00365, hickory 0.00411, cherry 0.00248
- moisture points
- the difference between where the wood sits in winter and in summer, from the indoor humidity
Worked through — A 5 in white oak board in a house that runs 28 % humidity in winter and 55 % in summer swings about 4.2 moisture points: 5 × 0.00365 × 4.2 = 0.077 in, a shade over a sixteenth. On a 2 1/4 in strip in the same house it is 0.035 in, about a thirty-second, which nobody notices.
USDA Forest Products Laboratory, Wood Handbook — Wood as an Engineering Material, FPL-GTR-190 · checked 2026-09-16
Choosing the wood, and what the choice actually buys
| Species | Janka | Movement | Board / ft² |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red oak | 1,290 | 0.00369 | $5.50 |
| White oak | 1,360 | 0.00365 | $7.50 |
| Hard maple | 1,450 | 0.00353 | $7.00 |
| Hickory | 1,820 | 0.00411 | $7.50 |
| White ash | 1,320 | 0.00338 | $6.00 |
| Black walnut | 1,010 | 0.00274 | $13.00 |
| American cherry | 950 | 0.00248 | $9.50 |
Hardness predicts denting, not scratching. Movement is inches of width change per inch of board per moisture point — lower is steadier.
The two columns pull against each other in a way nobody mentions on a showroom floor. Hickory is the hardest common floor and also the one that moves most, so a wide hickory plank in a house with no humidifier is the worst combination available. Cherry and walnut are the steadiest and the softest — beautiful, and a mistake in a hallway with dogs.
Red oak sits in the middle of everything, which is why it became the default American floor: hard enough, stable enough, cheap, and with a grain busy enough to hide a decade of living. White oak costs more for a tighter grain and a colour that does not go orange under a clear finish.
~50%
Of the total is the wood
the rest is fitting
+50%
Glue against nail
same boards, same room
0
Solid floors over concrete
at any price
⅓
Engineered's movement
against solid
The order things happen, and what each step costs
- 01Find out what is under the floorPlywood, OSB or concrete, and whether the room is above or below the ground outside. This decides everything that follows.
- 02Let the subfloor choose the methodWood takes cleats or staples; concrete takes glue or a floating floor. Solid wood over concrete is not an option at any price.
- 03Order boards with the waste the width demandsNarrow strip loses about 7 per cent to cutting, wide plank about 12 — the loss is at the ends of runs, so more rows means less waste.
- 04Count the fasteners from the board width144 divided by the board width times the spacing gives fasteners per square foot. Add about 8 per cent for board ends and the face-nailed first and last rows.
- 05Check the moisture before anything goes downWood and subfloor within 4 moisture points for strip, 2 for plank. It is a meter reading, not a number of days.
- 06Price the removal and the prep separatelyLifting the old floor and levelling the deck happen before a new board is laid and are charged per square foot.
Before the first board goes down
- The house at living conditions — heating or cooling running, not switched on the morning of.
- A moisture meter reading on the wood and on the subfloor: within 4 points for strip, 2 for plank.
- The subfloor flat to about 3/16 in over 10 ft, and screwed rather than nailed wherever it squeaks.
- Underlayment paper run across the joists, lapped, not taped into an airtight sheet.
- The first row snapped to a line, not to the wall — walls are not straight and the floor will telegraph it forever.
- Boards pulled from three or four bundles at once, so colour variation is distributed instead of striped.
- Expansion gap at every wall, every pipe and every door jamb, including the ones behind the trim.
Solid against engineered, honestly
| Solid | Engineered | |
|---|---|---|
| Price, same species | The baseline | About the same with a thick wear layer |
| Seasonal movement | Full | About a third |
| Over concrete | Never | Routine, glued or floated |
| In a basement | No | Floated, over a membrane |
| Sandings | Four to six | One to three, by wear layer |
| Wide plank | Needs humidity control | Handles it |
| Lifespan | Outlives the owner | Until the wear layer runs out |
The honest summary is that engineered buys stability and solid buys time. If the floor is going on a plywood deck in a house with a humidifier and the intention is to hand it on to somebody in fifty years, solid is the better object. If it is going over a slab, or in a basement, or it is a seven-inch plank, or the house swings from bone dry to humid, the engineered floor is not the compromise — it is the correct product.
Then price keeping it before pricing a new one. What matters is how much thickness it has left above the tongue, and that is a number you can work out before anyone quotes.
Is there already a wood floor under there?Six ways this goes wrong
01Pricing the floor before looking at the subfloor
The subfloor decides the method and the method is most of the labour. A quote built on the wrong assumption is out by thousands, not by a rounding error.
Instead — Find out what is under it and whether the room is below grade, then price. Two minutes with a screwdriver at a vent.
02Acclimating for three days and calling it done
Three days is a number, not a measurement. Wood delivered into a house that is not yet at living conditions does not acclimate at all — it just sits there waiting to move after it is nailed down.
Instead — Run the heating or cooling first, then meter the wood and the subfloor until they agree.
03Laying wide plank in a house with no humidity control
Every board shrinks by its own width. A 7 in board opens a gap three times wider than a 2.25 in strip in the same winter, and it is the fitter who gets the phone call.
Instead — Narrower boards, engineered, or a whole-house humidifier. Pick one before ordering, not afterwards.
04Filling winter gaps
The wood comes back in summer and the filler does not compress. What was a gap becomes crushed board edges, and that damage is permanent.
Instead — Leave them. If they are genuinely too wide, the answer is humidity, not filler.
05Caulking the floor to the baseboard
It glues the floor to the wall at exactly the point the expansion gap exists to keep free. The floor then has nowhere to go and lifts in the middle instead.
Instead — Shoe moulding nailed to the baseboard, never through the floor. It covers the gap and lets the floor slide under it.
06Ordering waste as a flat ten per cent
Waste comes from the ends of runs, so it scales with how many runs there are. Wide plank through five rooms and a hallway wastes far more than narrow strip in one open space.
Instead — Seven per cent for strip in an open room, twelve for wide plank through a house — and order the whole job in one batch.
How the calculator works it out
Board prices, installed labour by method, fasteners, adhesive and underlayment come from a price survey collected by method rather than by material, because the method is what a floor fitter actually prices. Expansion gap, acclimation, moisture tolerances and subfloor flatness follow the wood flooring association’s installation guidelines. The dimensional change coefficients and the equilibrium moisture content of wood at a given humidity come from the Forest Products Laboratory’s Wood Handbook. Everything is on the sources page, with the date it was checked.
Three things worth stating. The fastener count is the field schedule plus an allowance for board ends — a real floor also has a face-nailed first and last row, which is in that allowance rather than counted separately. The movement figure is per board and assumes the floor is fastened down; a floating floor moves as one sheet and behaves differently at the perimeter. And only labour is adjusted by region: the wood costs what it costs, with a freight factor for its weight.
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The words on a flooring quote
Two of these are worth knowing before anyone quotes: which method the subfloor forces, and what moisture content the wood is at when it goes down. Everything expensive that goes wrong with a wood floor comes back to one or the other.
- Cleat
- The L-shaped fastener a flooring nailer drives through the tongue at an angle. Its barb bites plywood and holds the board tight to the subfloor without any fixing showing on the surface.
- Blind nailing
- Fastening through the tongue so the next board hides the fixing. It is why a nailed wood floor has no visible nails except in the first and last rows, which have no room for the machine.
- Subfloor
- The structural deck the floor is fixed to: plywood or OSB over joists, or a concrete slab. It is the single input that decides the installation method, and therefore most of the labour.
- On grade, above grade, below grade
- Where the floor sits relative to the ground outside. Below grade — a basement — is the wettest air in the house and the one place solid wood must never go.
- Moisture content
- The weight of water in the wood as a percentage of the dry wood. A floor is laid at the moisture content it will live at, which in a normal heated house is between 6 and 9 per cent.
- Equilibrium moisture content
- Where wood settles for a given air humidity. At 30 per cent relative humidity it is about 6.2 per cent; at 60 per cent it is about 11. Wood chases that figure for as long as it exists.
- Dimensional change coefficient
- How much a board moves across its width for each one per cent change in moisture content. White oak is 0.00365, hickory 0.00411, cherry 0.00248 — which is why species matters for more than colour.
- Expansion gap
- The space left at every wall and fixed obstacle, about 0.75 in, hidden behind the baseboard. It is the thickness of the board, not a number derived from the room's width.
- Acclimation
- Letting the wood reach the moisture content of the house before it goes down. It is finished when a meter says so and not when a number of days has passed — in a house with the heating off it never finishes at all.
- Cupping
- Board edges rising above the centre, because the underside is wetter than the top. It is almost always a moisture problem below the floor, not a fitting problem.
- Glue assist
- Adhesive used as well as fasteners, on boards too wide for nails alone to hold flat. From about 5 in up it stops being optional, and it is a line most wide-plank quotes leave out.
- Janka
- The force needed to press a steel ball halfway into the wood — the standard hardness number. Hickory is 1,820, red oak 1,290, cherry 950. It predicts denting, not scratching.
Common questions
- How much does it cost to install hardwood floors?
- About $12 a square foot for red oak strip nailed to a plywood deck with nothing to lift, around $15 for white oak plank with carpet coming up, and past $25 for walnut wide plank glued to a slab with tile to break out first. Roughly half of any of those is the wood itself. The $6 to $12 figure everyone quotes is labour only, or labour plus a cheap board — and what moves the labour most is not the species, it is what the floor is fixed to.
- Can you install hardwood over concrete?
- Not solid hardwood — there is nothing to nail into and a slab gives off moisture for the life of the building. Engineered wood over concrete is routine, either glued down with a moisture-control adhesive or floated over a membrane and a pad. Below grade, in a basement, floating is the only sensible answer and some houses should not have wood there at all.
- Is it cheaper to nail or glue a wood floor?
- Nailing, by a clear margin: about $5.50 a square foot against $7.50 for glue-down, with floating cheapest at $4.00. But it is not a choice — the subfloor decides. Glue costs more because it is slower, messier and the adhesive itself is a real material cost on top of the labour.
- How many nails per square foot for hardwood flooring?
- It falls straight out of the board width and the spacing: 144 divided by their product. A 2 1/4 in floor at 8 in spacing is 8 cleats a square foot — a box of 1,000 covers about 125 ft². A 5 in plank at the same spacing is 3.6, so the same box goes nearly three times as far. Add about 8 per cent for the two fasteners at each board end.
- How long does hardwood flooring need to acclimate?
- Until a moisture meter says it matches the house, which is the answer nobody wants. Three days is the number everyone repeats and it is meaningless on its own: wood delivered from a cold lorry into a heated house can take two weeks, and wood delivered into a house with the heating not yet running never gets there at all. The house has to be at living conditions first.
- What is the best width for hardwood flooring?
- It is a trade between look and movement. Every board shrinks by its own width times the moisture swing, so a 7 in plank opens a gap three times wider in winter than a 2.25 in strip in the same house. Wide plank is not worse — it is a commitment to holding the indoor humidity, or to engineered, where the core restrains it.
- Why does my wood floor have gaps in winter?
- Because the air is dry and the wood gave up moisture. Every board narrows slightly, and the shortfall shows as a fine gap between each pair. It closes again in summer. It is the floor working as designed, and the only real fix is a humidifier — filling the gaps in February guarantees damage in August, when the wood comes back and has nowhere to go.
- Solid or engineered hardwood?
- Engineered is not a cheap imitation — in the same species with a thick wear layer it costs about the same. What you buy is stability: roughly a third of the seasonal movement, and permission to go over concrete and into basements. What you give up is sandings, because a wear layer is finite and a solid board has a quarter of an inch above the tongue.
- Which is harder, oak or maple or hickory?
- Hickory at 1,820 Janka, then hard maple at 1,450, white oak 1,360, red oak 1,290, and cherry and walnut around 1,000. But hardness predicts denting, not scratching, and a plain pale maple shows every mark that open-grained oak hides. The softest floor with a busy grain often looks better after ten years than the hardest one without.
- Do I need underlayment under hardwood?
- Under a nailed or stapled floor, asphalt-saturated paper or felt goes down first: it quiets the floor, slows moisture from the crawl space and lets the boards slide slightly instead of squeaking. Under a floating floor it is a foam pad, which is a different product doing a different job. Under a glued floor there is nothing — the adhesive is the layer.
- How much waste should I order for hardwood?
- Seven per cent for narrow strip in an open room, up to twelve for wide plank through several rooms. The loss is at the end of each run, so a floor with more rows wastes proportionally less, and a house full of doorways wastes more than one large room of the same area. Order it all at once: a second order is a different batch and may not match.
- Is refinishing cheaper than a new wood floor?
- By a long way — usually a third to a half, with no removal and no disposal. If there is a wood floor under the carpet, find out how much thickness it has left before pricing a new one; a floor with sandings left is worth far more kept than replaced.
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About the author
Pablo Ruiz Quintero — Editor
Editor of MaterialsEstimator. Decides which documents count as a source, what every default value is, and where the line sits between what the reader parses and what the engines compute.
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