Calculate the number of tiles and boxes needed to cover a floor or wall, including a wastage allowance for cuts.
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This tool calculates the number of ceramic or porcelain tiles needed to cover a room or wall area, based on the room's dimensions and the size of a single tile being used for the project. The total room area is divided by the area of one tile to get a base count, then a wastage allowance, 10% by default and adjustable, is added on top to cover cuts needed at edges and corners, tiles broken during handling or installation, and future replacement pieces kept aside for repairs — a standard percentage commonly used throughout professional tiling work rather than an arbitrary buffer. If you enter the number of tiles per box, which varies by tile size, thickness, and manufacturer packaging conventions, the tool also directly shows the number of boxes you need to buy, making it considerably easier to estimate purchase quantities and cost before actually visiting the store or placing an online order.
A first-time DIY tiler calculating exactly how many tiles a room needs, then ordering that precise number, almost always ends up short partway through the job — not because the math was wrong, but because the bare area-divided-by-tile-size calculation doesn't account for several real-world factors that professional tilers build into their orders as standard practice.
Cutting tiles to fit at room edges and around obstacles like pipes, outlets, or door thresholds is unavoidable in nearly every real installation, and cut pieces are frequently unusable elsewhere in the room — a tile cut to fit an odd corner typically can't be repurposed as a full tile somewhere else, meaning that material is effectively consumed without contributing its full area of coverage.
Tiles also break during handling, cutting, and installation more often than beginners expect — porcelain and ceramic are brittle materials, and even careful handling results in occasional breakage, particularly when cutting tiles to irregular shapes around fixtures or in corners where standard straight cuts aren't possible.
A less obvious but genuinely practical reason to order extra is future repair capacity: keeping a small number of matching tiles aside after a job is complete means that if a tile ever cracks or gets damaged years later, a matching replacement is available without needing to track down the exact same product, which manufacturers frequently discontinue or reformulate over time, making an exact dye-lot match increasingly difficult to find as years pass.
Tile pattern does add an additional consideration beyond the basic wastage allowance: straight-laid patterns generate the least waste, since cut pieces from one edge can often be reused at the opposite edge, while diagonal and herringbone patterns generate more cut waste because the tile orientation relative to the room's straight walls creates more irregular cut pieces that are harder to reuse elsewhere — which is why more elaborate patterns often warrant bumping the wastage allowance above the standard 10% baseline.
Cutting tiles to fit edges, corners, and around fixtures always produces some unusable offcuts, and a small percentage of tiles may break during handling or installation. 10% is a widely used industry standard, though intricate layouts may need more.
Yes, this calculator always rounds up (you can't buy a fraction of a box), so the box count already reflects the minimum full boxes you need to purchase.
Yes, diagonal or complex patterns typically waste more material than a simple grid layout — consider increasing the wastage percentage to 15-20% for such patterns.