How long does flooring last?
It depends on what is underfoot, and the spread is enormous — a builder's carpet and a tile floor can be seventy years apart inside the same house. The warranty term beside each material tells a second story, sometimes decades longer than the floor really lasts and sometimes a single year under a material the industry says outlives the building. Every material below sits on the same axis, each number tied to the document it came from.
Updated
Every material on one 200-year axis
Soft band: typical service-life range. Solid bar: the published warranty term. The difference between their right-hand ends is the story.
The numbers, with their sources
| Material | Service life | Warranty term | Source tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solid hardwood | 100+ yrs | 50-year limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 2 · trade / standards literature |
| Engineered wood | 50+ yrs | 50-year limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
| Laminate | 15–25 yrs | “Lifetime” limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
| Luxury vinyl plank | ~25 yrs | “Lifetime” limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
| Carpet | 10+ yrs | 20-year limited, non-prorated, transferable, conditional | Tier 2 · trade / standards literature |
| Ceramic and porcelain tile | 75+ yrs | 1-year limited, conditional | Tier 2 · trade / standards literature |
| Sheet vinyl | ~25 yrs | 30-year limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
Two patterns run through the grid. The first is the carpet paradox: a 20-year warranty sits over a floor its own trade association puts at about ten years, and it holds because "wear" in that document means fibre lost by weight — matting, crushing and the flattened traffic lane, which are why carpet actually comes up, are written out of it. The second runs the opposite way. Tile and both kinds of wood floor outlast their paper, because the paper covers a finish or a defect rather than the floor staying a floor: Daltile warrants tile for one year against a 75-year service life, and Bruce's 50-year term is voided by the sanding that gives a solid floor its second century. The gap between the two bars is the part worth reading.