Updated November 2026
Imagine launching a product that’s more scratch-resistant than the market leader. Water-resistant enough for kitchens and bathrooms. Better looking, if you ask us. And a lot cheaper.
You’d expect to clean up. Instead, last year the UK bought around three times as much vinyl as laminate, by floor area. In money, we imported £371m of vinyl against £89m of laminate.*
That’s the story of laminate flooring in the UK. Head across the Channel and it’s a different picture. Per head, the Dutch buy more than twice as much laminate as we do. The Poles buy nearly twice as much, and the Belgians and the French around half as much again.** Even in Ireland, where homes are a lot like ours, people buy more laminate than vinyl.*** So why are we still paying more for vinyl?
First, a confession: we’ve got nothing against vinyl
It’s a perfectly good floor. Our problem is the price. A good laminate now does everything vinyl does, for a lot less money. What vinyl gives you for the extra is a slightly softer feel underfoot. That’s about it.
Everything vinyl does, laminate now does too
Fifteen years ago, vinyl had a real case. Not any more.
- Water. Our best-selling laminate, made in Spain, is rated for 100 hours of water sitting on the joints (tested to ISO 4760, the standard for laminate joints). It’s approved for kitchens and bathrooms in homes, sealed with silicone around the edges, with a 10-year warranty in those rooms.
- Toughness. Ours are AC6, the top wear rating. Laminate’s melamine surface is harder than vinyl’s plastic wear layer, so it copes better with furniture legs, grit and dog claws.
- Looks. Matt, brushed finishes with texture that follows the grain. Most visitors to our showroom can’t tell our laminate from wood until they pick it up.
- Noise. On a dense rubber underlay, like our 26dB high-performance underlay, the hollow, biscuit-tin sound of old laminate has gone.
- Prep. Laminate floats on an underlay, so it forgives the small dips and bumps that would show straight through a thin glue-down vinyl.
And it costs a lot less
Our premium laminate is £36 per m². Karndean, the best-known vinyl brand in the UK, is £45 to £62 per m² at Tapi. And that’s before the subfloor work (LVT always needs levelling) and fitting. Which takes LVT to double the price.
Why the prep? Every bump in the subfloor shows straight through LVT. On concrete, a 5mm levelling skim costs around £30 per m² from our own jobs, including labour. On floorboards, you’ll usually need ply laid over the top, and then a levelling skim on the ply as well. Our laminate floats on an underlay, so most homes don’t need either.
On a typical 30m² living room (not including fitting, which will be more expensive for LVT than laminate), it’s around £1,080 for our laminate, against £2,250 to £2,775 for Karndean once the prep is done (£1,350 to £1,875 for the vinyl, plus around £900 for the prep). Laminate needs an underlay too, and you may need to fit plywood, but there’s unlikely to be £900 of subfloor costs. That’s more than double, for a floor that does the same job.
So why isn’t laminate winning?
Better and cheaper should win. With laminate, it hasn’t. And the biggest reason is simple.
Laminate sells features. Vinyl sells benefits.
Here’s the spec sheet for our best-selling laminate. This is genuinely how it’s sold to the trade:
Abrasion: AC6
Joint water resistance: 100h (ISO 4760:2022)
Board swelling: < 8%
Reaction to fire: Bfl-s1 (EN 13501)
Antistatic: < 2 kV (EN 1815)
Formaldehyde: CARB2 · EU Ecolabel · FSC
Max. installation without profiles: 12 m × 12 m
Every good salesperson knows you don’t sell features, you sell benefits. Nobody’s ever bought a floor because it says Bfl-s1. Meanwhile, vinyl has spent years positioning itself as the “worry-free” floor. So here’s that spec sheet in plain English:
| What the spec sheet says | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| AC6, class 33 | Kids, dogs and dining chairs won’t scratch it. It’s rated for busy shops and offices, so your hallway will be fine. |
| 100h joint water resistance | A spilt drink, a wet dog or a daily mop won’t get into the joints. It’s approved for kitchens and bathrooms. |
| Board swelling < 8% | No puffy, lifting edges after a few years. |
| Antistatic | No little electric shocks when you walk across it. |
| CARB2, EU Ecolabel, FSC | Low emissions for healthier air at home, and wood from responsibly managed forests. |
| 12 m × 12 m without profiles | One continuous floor through your ground floor, with no strips in the doorways. |
That’s a worry-free floor. It’s just never been sold as one.
And nobody’s telling the story
It doesn’t help that the odds are stacked against laminate in a few other ways.
A chequered history, and a bad reputation. Laminate floors 15 years ago weren’t pretty. They also used to swell the moment they got wet. But that was 15 years ago. Things have changed.
No marketing budget. The big vinyl brands are among the very few flooring companies anyone has heard of. They spend serious money on advertising, showroom displays and retailer networks. Laminate is mostly made by big panel factories that sell boards by the lorryload and don’t do glossy campaigns.
No influencers. Nobody’s posting a home tour captioned “obsessed with my new laminate”. Nobody takes nice photos of it. Vinyl gets styled, shot and sold. Laminate gets stacked in a warehouse.
No talent. Nobody wakes up one day and says, “I want to sell laminate for a living.” In general, the best people in flooring go into wood, or into the vinyl brands that pay them. There are a couple of gems out there selling laminate. But not many.
“I’ve been doing it this way for 20 years.” Plenty of fitters and shops built their businesses on vinyl, and they keep pushing what they know. Who can blame them? But it means the advice you get is often based on the laminate of 2006, not the laminate of today.
And are the vinyl brands going to stop marketing? After all the money they’ve invested, nobody’s going to wake up one day and say, “Guys, laminate is now better and cheaper than us. We should shut up shop.” Instead, they’ll bring out new colours (or “decors”, as the industry likes to call them), and new product categories that nobody ever needed. SPC, WPC, hybrid, rigid core… you’ll have seen a few. Add an extra millimetre of vinyl and call it “premium”? Why not. All of which just makes choosing a floor even more confusing.
And the result? You pay more for a floor you don’t need.
Laminate vs vinyl: the quick comparison
| Premium laminate | Vinyl (LVT / SPC) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A printed image of wood under a very hard melamine wear layer, on a wood-fibre (HDF) core | A printed image of wood under a clear plastic wear layer, on a PVC core |
| Price | Ours is £36 per m² | Karndean from £44.99 per m², plus subfloor levelling, which LVT always needs |
| Look | Matt, brushed and textured: reads as wood | Good ones are close, but most still have a slightly plastic sheen |
| Scratches and dents | Very hard-wearing. Ours are AC6, the top rating | Softer surface that marks more easily under furniture legs and grit |
| Water | Our best seller is rated for 100 hours of water on the joints, and approved for bathrooms and kitchens in homes | Waterproof, so it suits wet rooms |
| Subfloor prep | Floats on an underlay, so it forgives small dips and bumps | Always needs a levelled subfloor; every bump shows through |
| Sound | Harder sound underfoot; a dense acoustic underlay sorts most of it | Quieter and softer to walk on |
| Feel | Firm, like a wood floor; a touch cooler on bare feet | Softer and slightly warmer |
| Sun and heat | Stable | Can fade, or move in hot conservatories and south-facing rooms |
| End of life | Wood-based | Plastic, and rarely recycled in practice |
Where vinyl still wins
- Wet rooms. Where the floor itself gets soaked and drains away, you need something fully waterproof, glued down and sealed. A bathroom with a bath or shower is fine for laminate, as long as splashes get wiped up.
- Softness and warmth. It’s a little kinder on bare feet.
- Very tight build-ups. Where a few millimetres really matter, such as a door you can’t trim.
- Stone looks, borders and inlays. Vinyl can do them. Whether it should is another matter.
On that last one, we think a patterned vinyl floor is the definition of insanity. If you’ve got the money for a patterned vinyl floor, you’ve got the money for a good quality, well-finished oiled wood floor. A herringbone or chevron in real oak, looked after with a good oil, will outlast it by decades. (And no, you don’t need a thick top layer for that. Here’s the thick floor myth.) More in engineered oak vs LVT.
Laminate vs vinyl: FAQs
Is laminate better than vinyl?
For most rooms, yes. A premium laminate is more scratch and dent resistant, looks more like wood, floats over small subfloor imperfections and costs a lot less. Vinyl wins in wet rooms, and it’s slightly softer and warmer underfoot.
Is laminate cheaper than vinyl?
Yes, by a lot. Ours is £36 per m², against £44.99 to £62.49 per m² for Karndean. LVT also always needs a levelled subfloor, so once the prep is added, a typical room costs more than double in vinyl. And if budget’s tight, a premium laminate beats a cheap wood floor too.
Why is vinyl more popular than laminate in the UK?
Mostly marketing. Laminate is sold on its features, while vinyl is sold as the “worry-free” floor. The big vinyl brands also spend heavily on advertising and retailer networks, and many fitters and shops have sold vinyl for years. Laminate has improved a lot, but few people are telling that story. Across much of Europe, laminate is far more popular per head than it is here.
Can you put laminate in a bathroom?
Yes, a good one. Our best-selling laminate is approved by its manufacturer for bathrooms and kitchens in homes, sealed with silicone around the edges, with a 10-year warranty in those rooms. A bathroom with a shower is fine if splashes get wiped up. For wet rooms with a floor drain, choose vinyl or tile.
Is laminate noisier than vinyl?
A little, especially on a cheap underlay. A dense acoustic underlay removes most of the hollow sound and reduces noise travelling to the room below.
As ever, seeing is believing. Order a sample and put it next to a vinyl one.
Or for any technical advice, book a consultation with our team here…
* HMRC import figures for 2025, at the UK border, so floors made in the UK aren’t included. The vinyl figure (customs code 3918 10) covers all PVC floor coverings, from home LVT to commercial sheet vinyl, plus PVC wall and ceiling coverings, which customs groups in the same code; HMRC doesn’t split them out. The laminate figure (codes 4411 13 91 and 4411 14 91) is laminate flooring only.
** European Producers of Laminate Flooring (EPLF), 2025 sales per head.
*** Eurostat, Ireland’s 2025 imports of laminate and vinyl flooring, by weight and by estimated floor area.
Karndean prices from Tapi’s cost guide, November 2026, material only. Levelling costs are from our own jobs.
