Greca, with her Greek heritage, brings some Mediterranean flair to our home flooring style pages. She has been obsessed with home design ever since she got her first Lego set and made a house instead of a spaceship. Having graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, with a BA in Technical Art, she worked in film and theatre set design before redirecting her career to interior design content writing as a working mom. She is now our go-to writer for flooring trends, flooring ideas, and flooring brand reports. When not working, Greca spends her time secretly planning new remodeling projects and singing in her local choir.
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The most popular flooring materials for a kitchen are ceramic/porcelain floor tiles, solid hardwood and vinyl, but that only tells half the story. There are several other top kitchen flooring options for you to consider, including engineered hardwood, laminate and natural stone.
In this report, you’ll learn which are the most popular kitchen flooring options in 2024 and how they stack up against the most important criteria that you look for when choosing a kitchen floor, including durability, ease of cleaning, great looks and value for money.
The average total cost ranges from $9 to $20 per square foot.
The average total cost for carpet ranges from $5.67 to over $21 per square foot, depending on the quality.
The average total cost for laminate flooring is between $3 to $13 per square foot.
The best flooring for kitchens is the flooring you install based on your consideration of the following.
Key Criteria for the Best Kitchen floor:
Once you’ve wrestled with these four key features you then have a subset of much more personal considerations that may affect your final choice.
Personal Criteria for a Kitchen Floor:
So in this article we are going to compare and contrast popular kitchen flooring options, looking at the pros and cons of each as they stack up against the criteria we’ve already discussed above.
Before we start let’s take a look at the best kitchen flooring options based on popularity.
According to a Houzz kitchen trend survey in 2021, tile retook the top spot as the most popular flooring for a kitchen, followed by hardwood in second place and vinyl in third. It goes without saying that we will take a much closer look at all three of these flooring materials below.
It certainly seems true that the majority of online discussion between homeowners, on the subject of their favorite kitchen flooring material, is between those in favor of tile vs those in favor of wood.
However, as we will see there are plenty of other great kitchen floor materials that might be perfect for you. In this kitchen flooring report we will start with the most popular kitchen flooring, tile and work our way down.
Why is tile flooring the most popular kitchen flooring option for homeowners? Let’s run through our key criteria:
Now let’s turn to some of our more personal kitchen flooring criteria, for brevity we’ll group some of these together:
Although floor tile edges out solid hardwood as the most popular kitchen floor option there’s barely anything in it. In fact if you combine solid hardwood with engineered hardwood then the desire for wood as a kitchen floor far outstrips tile…but why? Let’s work through the key criteria again:
And what about the more personal kitchen floor criteria? Lets’ take a look:
For many years the budget flooring market was dominated by laminate, but vinyl flooring is making all the headlines these days and modern vinyl kitchen flooring should be a serious consideration for your kitchen.
We’ve mentioned most of the lifestyle benefits above but we should also emphasize the comfort of vinyl. Vinyl falls under the umbrella of “resilient flooring” being both firm but also cushioned. Those of you who spend a lot of time in the kitchen will appreciate the softer cushioned quality of vinyl over other harder floors. And for those fast and furious chefs who seem to forever be dropping or knocking plates or glasses to the floor you will be grateful for a more forgiving surface with a bit more bounce.
As for style, although not as attractive as real tile or hardwood, vinyl does have the benefit of mimicking both so you actually have a greater range of kitchen style choices with vinyl. We think vinyl is best suited to contemporary, modern or urban kitchens.
You know solid hardwood is one of the best floors for a kitchen so why do we need a separate section for engineered hardwood? Don’t all the same pros and cons apply? While there are some similarities the differences are significant so let’s look again at our key criteria for premium kitchen flooring:
How does engineered wood kitchen flooring score when it comes to personal kitchen floor criteria? Lets’ take a look:
Laminate is a very popular kitchen flooring choice for those on a budget although opinion is sometimes split on its suitability for the high traffic and high humidity of a kitchen. Let’s try and get to the bottom of things by looking at the top kitchen floor criteria:
What about your personal kitchen floor criteria?
Let’s measure them up against our main kitchen floor considerations:
Natural stone scores high on more personal kitchen floor criteria, let’s see why:
Are you looking for a more niche kitchen flooring option? Something just a little different? Here are a few kitchen floor ideas that you might like.
Cork flooring will give your kitchen a unique aesthetic which is warm and personal. Like Vinyl it is a resilient flooring which is both firm but with some give. Let’s run through our criteria:
Kitchens with concrete floors, with or without epoxy, is a bold kitchen flooring choice.
Many homeowners confuse linoleum with vinyl when searching for a quality kitchen flooring solution. There’s not many residential linoleum flooring on the market these days, however there is one quality linoleum product that could be a good fit for your kitchen and that is Marmoleum, a product manufactured by Forbo and sold at independent flooring retailers.
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