LVP vs Laminate vs Engineered Hardwood: Cost per Sq Ft

By the HandyFigures team · Updated 2026-06-11

The price on the box is the cost of the flooring, not the cost of your floor. Plank flooring is merchandised by the square foot of material, and that number leaves out everything else that rides along in the cart: the 10–20% you cut off as waste, the underlayment the planks float on, the transition strips at every doorway, and the box rounding that makes you buy 680 sq ft to cover 672. On the 600 sq ft project priced below, those extras added between 18% and 32% to the sticker price — and the cheapest material took the biggest percentage hit.

I learned this pricing our own 600 sq ft main floor last spring. The laminate I liked was $1.89 per square foot; the LVP one aisle over was $2.49. Sixty cents a foot looked decisive — $403.20 across the 672 sq ft I would actually have to buy once waste was figured in — so laminate seemed like the easy call. Then I built both carts for real. The LVP had an attached pad and needed nothing underneath it. The laminate needed underlayment — rolls are sized off the floor area itself, so 600 sq ft calls for six 100 sq ft rolls. Our chopped-up hallway and two closets left strips too narrow to reuse, though, so a seventh roll went in: $44.97 apiece, $314.79 total. (Most rooms genuinely need just the six; budget the seventh only if your layout is all corridors.) Final tally: $1,673.28 for the LVP, $1,584.87 for the laminate. A $403 advantage shrank to $88.41, about 15 cents per square foot of finished room. That afternoon changed how I price flooring, and it is the method this whole guide uses.

The four line items the shelf tag skips

Waste. Straight plank layouts run about 10% waste, diagonal 15%, herringbone 20%, and rooms with lots of doorways and jogs deserve the high end of whichever bracket applies. I used 12% on our main floor: straight layout, but with a hallway and two closets full of short cuts. The reasoning behind those brackets gets its own article — see why waste percentages work the way they do — but for this worksheet, 600 sq ft × 1.12 = 672 sq ft of material for every contender.

Box rounding. Boxes typically cover 18–24 sq ft, and you cannot buy 0.6 of one. At 20 sq ft per box, 672 sq ft means 34 boxes (33.6, rounded up), or 680 sq ft purchased. I built the worksheet below at the per-square-foot level to keep the three materials comparable, but expect each total to creep up a few dollars once your specific box size rounds it.

Underlayment. Rolls typically cover 100 sq ft. Basic foam runs around $20–25 a roll; versions with a vapor barrier or sound rating can cost double. Attached-pad LVP zeroes out this line entirely, which matters more than it looks.

Transitions. T-moldings, reducers, and thresholds run roughly $20–50 per strip depending on material. Our 600 sq ft floor needed four: a kitchen-tile transition, two bedroom doorways, and the front-door threshold.

Pricing the same 600 sq ft three ways

Typical retail ranges right now: LVP about $2–5 per square foot, laminate $1–4, engineered hardwood $4–9. For the worksheet I picked the middle of each range — $3.50, $2.50, and $6.50 — and applied identical assumptions: 12% waste (672 sq ft of material), four transitions, floating installation. If your room is a different size, the flooring calculator handles the waste and box math; the cost structure below stays the same.

Laminate at $2.50 per sq ft

Material: 672 × $2.50 = $1,680. Underlayment: seven basic rolls at $25 = $175 (choose a vapor-barrier roll like I did and that line jumps to $314.79). Transitions: four at $30 = $120. Project total: $1,975, which works out to $3.29 per square foot of actual room — 32% over the shelf tag.

LVP at $3.50 per sq ft

At this tier most LVP includes an attached pad, so the underlayment line reads $0; if yours lacks one, add the same $175. Material: 672 × $3.50 = $2,352. Transitions: four at $30 = $120. Project total: $2,472, or $4.12 per square foot of room — 18% over sticker, the smallest markup of the three because one whole line item disappears.

Engineered hardwood at $6.50 per sq ft

Wood costs wood prices: 672 × $6.50 = $4,368 in material. Underlayment: $175 for the floating click-lock version I priced. Transitions: four at $45 = $180, since real-wood moldings cost more than the plastic laminate-matched kind. Project total: $4,723, or $7.87 per square foot of room — 21% over sticker. Glue-down engineered swaps the underlayment line for adhesive, which generally costs more, not less.

The summary table

“True cost per square foot of room” is each project total divided by the 600 sq ft you actually walk on — the only per-foot number worth comparing across materials.

What the worksheet deliberately leaves out

Labor, first: these are material costs for a DIY install, and a pro’s quote varies too much by market for me to print a number with a straight face. Tearing out and hauling away the old floor is its own line, and so is patching the subfloor. Whether your slab needs a moisture barrier, or your subfloor is in good enough shape to float planks over, is a call for the product’s installation spec sheet. The spec sheet wins that argument every time; my math only tells you what the answer costs.

My three prices are also placeholders, pulled deliberately from the middle of each range. Swap in the tag price of the floor you actually want; the material line will move, but the underlayment, transition, and waste lines barely budge, which is exactly why the comparison keeps shifting.

Reading the results

Three things jump out of the table. The laminate-to-LVP gap is smaller installed than the shelf suggests — $0.83 per square foot here against a $1.00 sticker spread — and against attached-pad LVP, cheap laminate loses most of its edge, exactly as my $88.41 afternoon proved. Second, the markups run backward: the cheapest material carries the biggest percentage premium, because waste, underlayment, and transitions cost the same whether they sit on $1.89 planks or $6.50 ones. Third, engineered hardwood is a genuinely different budget tier; its $4,368 material line towers over every add-on, so no amount of cart math closes the roughly $2,250 gap to LVP.

Pick the floor you can see yourself living with at the installed number, not the sticker one, then run your real square footage and tag prices through the flooring calculator before you commit. The store will sell you the boxes either way — the worksheet just makes sure you know what the floor costs before the register does.