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How much tile do I need?
Measure the room, pick your pattern, and this works out the square footage, the waste allowance you actually need, and how many boxes to order. No email, no sign-up.
How to measure
Measure in feet and don't subtract anything. Not the vanity footprint, not the toilet, not the door swing. The vanity may move one day, cuts around a toilet flange waste tile anyway, and every square foot you deduct is a square foot you'll be short at the worst possible moment.
The floor
Width times length. If the room isn't a clean rectangle — an L around a closet, a bump-out for the tub — break it into rectangles, work out each one, and add them.
The shower
Three surfaces: the back wall and the two returns. Measure each width, then decide how high the tile goes. Tiling to the ceiling costs a few extra square feet and is the single cheapest thing you can do to make a shower look expensive — a band of painted drywall above the tile line is the detail that dates a bathroom fastest.
The shower floor
Almost always a different tile: a mosaic, usually 2×2 or smaller, because the grout lines are what stop you slipping and the small sheets follow the slope to the drain. Work it out separately — it's a small number, typically 9 to 15 square feet, and it's the piece people forget until the setter asks for it.
Why the waste allowance isn't optional
Nobody orders exactly the measured area, because tile gets cut, tile arrives chipped, and tile gets broken on site. The allowance covers all three. It is not padding and it is not a sales tactic — running out mid-job is the expensive outcome.
| Situation | Add | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Straight set, ordinary room | 10% | The baseline. Perimeter cuts and a few breakages. |
| Large format (12×24 and up) | 15% | Every cut wastes a bigger piece, and big tiles crack more in handling. |
| Small or awkward room | 15% | A powder room is almost all perimeter. Cuts dominate. |
| Herringbone, chevron, diagonal | 20% | Every edge of the room is an angled cut, and the offcuts rarely reuse. |
| Natural stone | 20% | You will reject pieces for veining or color that don't work. That's normal and you should plan for it. |
Order it all in one go
Tile is made in batches, and batches vary — the industry calls it dye lot or shade variation. Two orders of the same product placed a fortnight apart can arrive visibly different, and once it's on the wall there is no fixing it.
Order the full amount at once, and keep the leftovers. In five years, when something cracks, the box in your garage is the only tile on earth that matches.
The pieces people forget
- Trim. Bullnose, pencil liner or a metal edge profile wherever the tile stops and there's no wall to turn into. Sold by the piece or the linear foot, not the square foot, and frequently forgotten until the day it's needed.
- The niche. A recessed shelf needs its back, its sides and usually a different tile from the wall around it. Small area, separate order.
- The curb. Three faces — top, outside, inside — and often the same mosaic as the shower floor.
- Thinset, grout and sealer. Not tile, but part of what your contractor is buying. Worth asking who's supplying them.
What else you're buying
Tile is the line people plan for. The setting materials are the ones that hold up a Saturday, and they're bought by the bag against a coverage figure that changes with the notch on the trowel.
| Trowel notch | Used for | 50 lb bag of thinset covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1/4” × 1/4” square | Mosaic, small format up to 8” | ~95 – 100 sq ft |
| 1/4” × 3/8” square | Subway and mid-size wall tile | ~70 – 75 sq ft |
| 1/2” × 1/2” square | 12”×24” and large format | ~40 – 45 sq ft |
Grout moves with tile size, joint width and tile thickness all at once, so treat any number as a starting point: a 25 lb bag goes a long way under large format with 1/8” joints and disappears fast under mosaic, where you're filling ten times the linear footage of joint. Every bag prints its own coverage — that figure beats any table, including this one.
If you set tile for a living
You already know all of this. What you might want is the other end of it: we run a free design tool that gets the homeowner to actually choose their floor, shower tile and vanity, and sends them a selection sheet naming every product at real sizes. You order from it.
No cost, no account, nothing to sign, and we don't install or bid — the deliverable is the selection sheet. If you've ever lost a week to “we still haven't picked the tile,” send them to oridesignlab.com and get them off the fence.
Now pick the tile itself
Our design tool lets you put real floor and shower tile into a bathroom, see how they read together, and send it back to us for a free materials list your contractor can order from.
Build your bathroom — freeThree mistakes worth avoiding
- Ordering to the square foot without asking about the box. Tile is sold by the box. If a box covers 15.5 sq ft and you need 62, you're buying 5 boxes and 77.5 sq ft, not 62.
- Assuming the shower floor tile is included. It is a separate product in a separate box, and it is the one that holds up a job.
- Returning the extras. The refund is small; the matching tile is irreplaceable. Keep at least a box.