What New Flooring Costs in St. Louis (2026 Price Guide)
Revised August 13, 2026
How much does it cost to floor 1000 sq ft fully installed?
Installed, St. Louis runs roughly $4.50 to $12 a square foot for luxury vinyl plank, $6.90 to $11.80 for laminate, $7 to $20 for engineered wood, $10 to $16 for solid hardwood and $10 to $31 for tile. Carpet with pad is $1.75 to $7.50. But the number that decides your bill is usually what is under the old floor: refinishing existing hardwood runs $3 to $8 a square foot and a typical local project lands around $2,055 — frequently cheaper than replacing, and in a century home there is often oak under the carpet already.
Keep reading ↓Picture three St. Louis households on the same Saturday morning, all of them staring at a floor. In a century brick two-family in south city, a homeowner peels back the corner of a bedroom carpet with a pair of pliers and finds narrow-strip oak underneath — gray at the edges, a little dinged near the doorway, but solid all the way across. The question in that room is not what new flooring costs. It’s whether the floor already there is worth saving.
A few miles west, in a 1958 Kirkwood ranch, a different family has decided the wall-to-wall carpet is done. They want luxury vinyl plank running through the living room, hall, and three bedrooms. Then somebody notices that the hallway dips slightly toward the center of the house, and the closet door has been sticking since the last dry summer. That dip is going to show up on the quote, and it has nothing to do with the flooring itself.
Out in St. Charles, a 2003 two-story has builder-grade carpet upstairs and a finished basement that took water one spring. The family wants something down there that can get wet again without becoming a disaster. Three houses, three completely different numbers — and that’s the honest answer to what flooring costs in this metro. What follows is the price range for each material, plus the St. Louis-specific line items that turn a tidy estimate into a real one.
The short version: installed cost per square foot
These are 2026 national installed ranges — material plus labor, before removal, subfloor work, or stairs. St. Louis labor tends to sit at or slightly below the national middle, which is good news, but our housing stock adds prep work that flatter markets don’t need.
- Carpet with pad: roughly $1.75 to $7.50 per square foot installed, with most homeowners landing between $3 and $6. Mid-grade nylon or triexta runs about $4 to $8.50 all in.
- Luxury vinyl plank (LVP): about $4.50 to $12 per square foot installed.
- Laminate: roughly $6.90 to $11.80 per square foot installed.
- Solid hardwood: $6 to $25 or more per square foot installed, with most jobs settling in the $10 to $16 range.
- Engineered wood: about $7 to $20 per square foot installed.
- Ceramic and porcelain tile: $10 to $31 per square foot installed, averaging around $18.
Blend all of that together and the broad national average for flooring installation is close to $12.50 per square foot, based on a 500-square-foot project running roughly $1,529 to $4,860. That average is nearly useless for budgeting a specific room, which is why the per-material ranges above matter more.
How much does it cost to floor 1000 sq ft fully installed?
A thousand square feet is roughly the main level of a small ranch or the first floor of a south city bungalow, so it’s a useful yardstick. Run the ranges out and here is what you get for material and labor only:
- Carpet and pad: about $3,000 to $6,000 for most mid-grade choices.
- LVP: about $4,500 to $12,000, with a lot of St. Louis jobs landing near $6,000 to $8,000.
- Laminate: about $6,900 to $11,800.
- Solid hardwood: about $10,000 to $16,000 for a typical grade and layout.
- Engineered wood: about $7,000 to $20,000 depending on veneer thickness and finish.
- Tile: about $10,000 to $31,000, which is why almost nobody tiles a whole main level.
Then add the prep. Old flooring removal, subfloor repair, and leveling can easily add $2 to $6 per square foot on an older home, which on a thousand square feet is another $2,000 to $6,000. In a century house that prep is not optional and it is not a small rounding error. Budget for it before you fall in love with a sample.
Solid hardwood, and the floor you may already own
Solid hardwood is the default in a huge share of St. Louis housing built before about 1950. Red oak strip flooring went into brick two-families, bungalows, and four-families across the city by the acre, and in a startling number of them it is still down there under carpet, under padding, sometimes under a layer of vinyl tile from the 1970s.
That changes the math completely. New solid hardwood installed runs $10 to $16 per square foot for most jobs. Refinishing what you already have runs $3 to $8 per square foot nationally, and in the St. Louis market whole-project refinishing commonly lands between about $1,153 and $3,051, with an average near $2,055. Dustless refinishing sits at the higher end, roughly $5 to $8 per square foot.
So the first thing to do in an older home is not to shop flooring. It is to pull a vent cover, lift a closet carpet corner, or check the edge of a heat register and see what is actually under there. If you want the full walkthrough on choosing between wood, laminate, and vinyl once you know what you have, our guide on hardwood, laminate, or vinyl in St. Louis homes starts exactly there.
Is it cheaper to refinish hardwood floors or replace them?
Almost always, yes. Is it cheaper to refinish hardwood floors or replace them? Refinishing typically costs a third to a half of what new solid hardwood costs on the same square footage, and it keeps the original material — which in a 1910 house means quartersawn or tight-grained old-growth oak that you simply cannot buy at that price today.
Refinishing stops making sense in a few specific situations:
- The boards have already been sanded down to the tongue. Old floors have a finite number of sandings in them, and a house that has changed hands six times may be out of them. A flooring pro can check this at a doorway or a floor register cut.
- There is water damage with cupping or crowning that did not flatten out after the source was fixed.
- Large sections are missing — a wall was moved, a chimney was pulled, a bathroom was added — and matching old strip width and species would cost more than starting over.
- Pet damage has soaked through the boards into the subfloor. Surface stains sand out. Saturation does not.
Partial replacement plus a full refinish is a real middle path and it is common here. A crew laces in new boards where the old ones are gone, then sands and finishes the whole room so it reads as one floor. It costs more than a straight refinish and far less than a full tear-out.
LVP and why it suits St. Louis basements
Luxury vinyl plank has taken over the lower-cost end of this market, and in St. Louis it earns the spot for a specific reason: quality LVP is genuinely waterproof, not merely water resistant. A plank can be submerged, dried, and still be fine. Laminate and engineered wood cannot make that claim — laminate’s fiberboard core swells and does not come back.
That matters in a metro where finished basements are standard and where a slab is always wicking moisture up from the ground even when it feels bone dry to the hand. If you are putting a floating floor over a basement slab, a vapor barrier is not an upgrade, it is a requirement. Skip it and you get trapped vapor under the underlayment, which is how mold starts in an otherwise dry-looking basement.
If your lower level has ever taken water, fix that before you spend a dollar on flooring. Our St. Louis basement waterproofing guide covers the drainage and grading side, and the order of operations is not negotiable: water first, then floor.
Expect $4.50 to $12 per square foot installed. The spread inside that range is mostly wear layer thickness and plank rigidity. Thin, floppy, cheap LVP telegraphs every imperfection in the slab underneath and its wear layer gives out in a hallway within a few years.
Laminate, tile, and carpet in short
Laminate installs for roughly $6.90 to $11.80 per square foot. It looks better than it used to and it handles foot traffic well, but it is the wrong call anywhere that floods, and that includes a lot of St. Louis lower levels.
Tile is the most expensive square foot in the house at $10 to $31 installed, averaging around $18. That price buys a floor that outlives everything else in the room, which is why it stays sensible in baths, entries, and mudrooms even when it is unaffordable everywhere else. Substrate prep drives a big share of tile cost in older homes; if you want the detail, see our guide to choosing a tile installer in St. Louis.
Carpet remains the cheapest way to cover a floor: about $1.75 to $7.50 per square foot with pad and labor, with most projects between $3 and $6. Carpet material alone runs $1 to $12 per square foot, pad with installation adds $0.75 to $3.75, and labor lands between about $0.50 and $3.00. Ask for those three numbers separately. Cheap pad under good carpet is a false economy that shows up in eighteen months.
The line items that blow up a flooring quote
Material price is the number people shop. Prep is the number that decides whether the project comes in on budget.
Removal and disposal of the old floor
General flooring removal runs about $2.42 to $4.47 per square foot. By material:
- Carpet: $1 to $5 per square foot. If you tear it out yourself, disposal alone is roughly $0.40 to $0.50 per square foot.
- Sheet vinyl: about $0.75 to $1.50 per square foot.
- Laminate: about $2 to $3 per square foot.
- Hardwood: about $2 to $4 per square foot.
- Ceramic tile: $2 to $7 per square foot, averaging around $3.50 — tile set in a mud bed is the worst of them.
Disposal is separate and real. A dumpster averages about $380 and ranges from roughly $200 to $800 per week, and hauling by a contractor typically runs $100 to $400. Ask whether the quote includes the dumpster or whether it appears later as a change order.
Subfloor repair
Replacing subfloor averages $2.20 to $4.75 per square foot, though jobs that need framing attention run $5 to $7 and can reach $10. This is the line item that catches St. Louis homeowners in pre-war houses, because the assembly under an old floor is not what is under a modern one. Many century homes have one-by planks laid diagonally over the joists rather than sheet goods, and after a hundred-plus years those planks have shrunk, cupped, and opened gaps. That surface is fine under a nailed hardwood floor. It is not flat enough for a floating LVP or laminate floor without an added underlayment layer.
Leveling for clay-soil movement
Missouri clay expands when wet and shrinks hard in a dry August, and it moves foundations with it. In practice that shows up indoors as a floor that dips toward the center beam, or a room that slopes a half inch across twelve feet. Floating floors are unforgiving about this — too much deflection and the locking joints separate and click underfoot.
Self-leveling compound runs about $1 to $5 per square foot for material, and $3 to $9 per square foot professionally installed on a slab. Over a wood subfloor it needs seam sealing and mesh, adding $1 to $5 per square foot. Whole-house leveling projects average around $2,800 and commonly range from $1,000 to $8,000.
One caution: leveling treats the symptom. If a floor has moved recently, or doors that used to close have stopped closing, get the foundation looked at before you cover the evidence with new flooring.
Radiator, register, and trim cuts
Old St. Louis houses fight back at the edges. Cast iron radiators either get drained and pulled or the new floor gets scribed around each foot. Floor registers in original hardwood are framed openings that a new floor has to be cut and trimmed to meet. Add pocket door tracks, curved bay window walls, and baseboard with a shoe mold that a previous owner caulked to the floor, and you have hours of finish carpentry that a 1990s subdivision simply does not generate. Expect an older-home labor premium, and expect the crew that quotes it lowest to be the one that has not looked closely.
Stairs are priced by the step, not the square foot
Every flooring quote that includes a staircase should break the stairs out separately, because stairs are labor, not square footage.
- Carpet on stairs: roughly $14 to $36 per step installed, with wider figures of $15 to $55 per step depending on carpet grade and whether the stairs are boxed or open on one side. A typical fourteen-step run comes in a few hundred dollars.
- Hardwood treads and risers: commonly $60 to $360 per step. A retro-fit overlay over existing stringers runs about $100 to $200 per step; a full replacement with demolition runs $150 to $300 per step. Treads themselves cost roughly $35 to $50 each, and can range from $20 to $160 for premium species.
- Refinishing existing stairs: a standard twelve to seventeen step staircase costs about $344 to $1,322, with a national average near $800 and a wide overall range of roughly $120 to $3,000.
In a south city two-family or a Central West End rowhouse, the staircase is often the single nicest piece of woodwork in the building. If the treads are original oak under carpet, refinishing them is almost always the better spend than covering them again.
How to read a flooring quote before you sign
A quote you can actually compare has these lines broken out. If they are bundled into one number, ask for them separately.
- Material cost per square foot, by product name and wear layer or thickness.
- Labor per square foot, stated separately from material.
- Old flooring removal and haul-away, including whether a dumpster is in the price.
- Subfloor inspection, repair allowance, and what happens if they open the floor and find more.
- Leveling or underlayment, with the compound and depth specified.
- Transitions, thresholds, quarter round, and shoe mold — and whether existing baseboard is being reused or replaced.
- Stairs, priced per step.
- Furniture moving and appliance disconnects.
- Acclimation time for wood products, which matters here because our humidity swings hard between a St. Louis July and a January with the furnace running.
Get three quotes on the same scope. If one is dramatically lower, look at what it left out rather than assuming you found a bargain — the low bid on an old house is usually the crew that skipped the subfloor conversation.
Ready to get real numbers on your floors?
Comparing quotes is how you find out what a St. Louis flooring project actually costs in your house — century subfloor, clay-soil dip, radiator cuts and all. Browse vetted local flooring contractors and hardwood refinishers in the St Louis Near Me Directory flooring category and line up three bids on the same scope.
Need somewhere to put the furniture while the floors go in? Our breakdown of what self storage costs in St. Louis covers sizes, fees and the rate increase nobody mentions.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to floor 1000 sq ft fully installed?
For material and labor, budget roughly $3,000 to $6,000 for carpet with pad, $4,500 to $12,000 for luxury vinyl plank, $6,900 to $11,800 for laminate, $10,000 to $16,000 for solid hardwood, and $10,000 to $31,000 for tile. On an older St. Louis home, add another $2 to $6 per square foot for removal, subfloor repair, and leveling, which is $2,000 to $6,000 more on that same thousand square feet.
Is it cheaper to refinish hardwood floors or replace them?
Refinishing is cheaper in nearly every case. Refinishing runs about $3 to $8 per square foot against $10 to $16 for new solid hardwood installed, and in the St. Louis market a typical refinishing project lands between roughly $1,153 and $3,051. Replacement only wins when the boards have been sanded down to the tongue, when water damage has permanently cupped them, or when large sections are missing and cannot be matched.
Can I stay in my house while floors are refinished?
You can, but most people are happier if they don’t. Sanding produces fine dust even with dust-containment equipment, and oil-based polyurethane fumes are strong for several days while the finish cures. Water-based finishes have less odor and dry faster. If you stay, plan to keep off the finished floors entirely for at least a day or two, longer before furniture goes back, and expect to live around a sealed-off work zone.
How much does a contractor charge to install LVP?
Installed luxury vinyl plank runs about $4.50 to $12 per square foot including material and labor, and many St. Louis jobs land near the $6 to $8 mark for a good mid-grade product. Labor alone is the smaller share; most of the spread comes from wear layer thickness and plank rigidity. Add a vapor barrier over any basement slab and add leveling if the subfloor is not flat, because a floating floor over a wavy surface will separate at the joints.
What are the downsides of luxury vinyl plank flooring?
It is a plastic product, so it can dent under heavy furniture, it can fade in a room with strong direct sun, and it will not add resale value the way real wood does. It also cannot be refinished — when the wear layer goes, the floor is replaced rather than restored. And it is unforgiving of a bad substrate: every hump and dip in an old St. Louis subfloor shows through a thin floating plank.
How do I find out if there is original hardwood under my carpet?
Pull up a floor register or a heat vent cover and look at the cut edge of the opening — you will usually see the whole floor assembly in cross section. Failing that, lift a corner of carpet in a closet where the tack strip is easy to pry and nothing shows afterward. In St. Louis homes built before about 1950, narrow-strip red oak is common, and finding it changes your project from a several-thousand-dollar replacement into a refinishing job at a fraction of the price.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.