Carpet Installation Cost Calculator
Carpet installation cost runs about $1,113 for a 12 by 12 room in Atlanta and $5,817 for a thousand square feet. But the same thousand square feet in wider rooms comes to $7,216, because carpet is sold on a twelve-foot roll and a room wider than that buys a second strip it barely uses. This calculator works out what you buy, not just what you walk on.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost to carpet these rooms
$3,102
typical · range $2,274 to $3,929 · 504 sq ft of floor · $6.15 per sq ft
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 71% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from govinfo.gov Aug 2026bls.gov Aug 2026how every line is sourced
The one input that changes the answer for you.
Almost everything on a retail floor comes 12 feet wide. It is the default because it is what you will be offered unless you ask.
The bulk of what is sold: a solution-dyed nylon or a decent polyester at a pile weight that holds up in a bedroom or a lounge.
The usual rebond cushion. Adequate, and what a quoted price almost always assumes.
Stairs are priced per step, never by the square foot. A step is a fraction of the area and several times the work.
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The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
What you walk on, and what you pay for
- Floor area
- 504 sq ft
- Carpet you buy
- 504 sq ft
Nothing is wasted here: the short wall is 12 ft and the roll is 12 ft, so one strip covers the room with no seam. This is the lucky case, and it stops being lucky the moment the short wall passes 12 feet.
Asking for a 15-foot roll instead would cost $99 more. Wider is not automatically better.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carpet, mid rangesquare feet of roll purchased, from the roll geometry | 504sq ft of roll | $958–$1,814 | estimated±31% |
| Carpet cushion, 6 lb rebondfloor area + 5% trim, where standard cushion is used | 529sq ft | $185–$397 | estimated±36% |
| Tack strip and staplesroom perimeter, all rooms | 156linear ft | $39–$94 | estimated±41% |
| Door transitions and thresholds1.5 doorways per room, rounded up, where transitions are redone | 5each | $60–$190 | estimated±52% |
| Carpet installer: lay cushion, cut, seam and power stretch2 h + 1 h per 55 sq ft + 0.5 h per seam (modelled) | 12hour | $564–$606 | sourced |
| Labourer: move furniture out and back1 h per room where furniture is moved | 3hour | $132–$142 | sourced |
| Labourer: lift the old carpet, cushion and staples1 h per 250 sq ft + 0.5 h per room, where the old floor comes out | 4hour | $176–$189 | sourced |
| Haul away and tip the old carpet and cushionfloor area, where the old floor is taken away | 504sq ft | $91–$277 | estimated±51% |
| Delivery and site set-up1 per job | 1lot | $70–$220 | estimated±52% |
| Total | $2,274–$3,929 | ±27% |
Where these numbers come from
- Labour rates by area
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for carpet installers, carpenters and labourers. Retrieved 2026-08-20. One caveat we will not hide: BLS publishes a carpet installer wage for only 40 of the 530 areas in our index, so across most of the country that hour is priced from the broader construction group for your own area instead. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation.
- The federal floor every carpet has to clear
- All carpet and rugs sold as floor covering in the United States have to pass the flammability test in CPSC, 16 CFR Part 1630 — Standard for the Surface Flammability of Carpets and Rugs, which exposes eight specimens to a standard ignition source and fails the lot if the char reaches within an inch of the edge of the test frame. It applies whatever the fibre and whatever the construction. It is a floor, not a grade: passing it tells you nothing about how long a carpet will look new. Retrieved 2026-08-22.
- The smell of a new carpet
- New carpet, its cushion and its adhesive release volatile organic compounds for a while after fitting. EPA, Volatile Organic Compounds’ Impact on Indoor Air Quality covers what those are and what ventilation does about them. It is a real effect with a real answer — air the rooms out — and it is not a cost line, so it is named rather than priced. Retrieved 2026-08-22.
- Before you lift an old floor in an old house
- Nine-by-nine vinyl tile and the black mastic underneath it, both common before the eighties, can contain asbestos, and so can some old sheet flooring backings. Pulling it up is the one thing not to do until it has been tested — see EPA, Protect Your Family from Exposures to Asbestos. Nothing on this page prices that work, because a cheap number for it would be a dangerous one. Retrieved 2026-08-22.
- Material prices
- Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.
Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-22.
What this figure does not include
- What a big-box retailer charges to install
- Retail installation is arranged through local subcontractors and the price is set market by market and changes without notice. We do not publish a figure we cannot source. What is offered instead is the installer labour above at the wage published for your own area, which is the number any quote should be measured against.
- Asbestos in what is under the carpet
- Nine-by-nine vinyl tile and the black mastic under it, common in houses built before the eighties, can contain asbestos, and so can some old sheet flooring backings. That is not something to price cheaply or to guess at: it needs testing first and licensed work if positive. See the EPA on asbestos in the home. Nothing on this page covers it.
- The smell of a new carpet
- New carpet, its adhesive and its cushion give off volatile organic compounds for a while after fitting. The EPA covers what VOCs are and what ventilation does about them. It is a real thing and it is not a cost line, so it is named here rather than priced.
- Permits
- No jurisdiction we know of requires a permit to replace a floor covering.
- Stair rods, borders, bindings and inlays
- Decorative work on a stair or a bound rug from remnant is a different job, priced by the piece and by the yard of binding, and it is not what the per-step figure here covers.
- Repairing the floor structure
- The subfloor line refastens sheathing and fills dips. A bouncing floor, a cracked joist or rot from a leak is structural work and is not in these figures.
Questions people actually ask
What is the average cost to carpet a 12x12 room?
A 12 by 12 room in Atlanta comes to about $1,113 fitted, in a range of $811 to $1,415, with mid-range carpet, standard cushion, the old floor lifted and the furniture moved. It is also the luckiest room in the house, and that is worth knowing: carpet comes on a twelve-foot roll, so a twelve-foot room takes one strip with nothing left over and no seam. Ask the same question about a 13 by 13 room and the floor grows by seventeen per cent while the material you buy almost doubles, because the second strip has to be bought a full twelve feet wide however little of it you need.
How much does it cost to install 1000 sq feet of carpet?
There is no single answer, and the reason is the shape rather than the size. A thousand square feet laid out as six rooms of 14 by 12 comes to about $5,817 in Atlanta, because every one of those rooms fits the roll width exactly. The same thousand square feet as four rooms of 16 by 16 comes to about $7,216 — twenty-four per cent more for one and a half per cent more floor, because each of those rooms needs two strips and half the carpet you buy ends up as offcut. Any quote given as a flat price per square foot is hiding that difference, and it is hiding it in the direction that suits whoever wrote it.
How much is 2000 square feet of carpet?
About $11,303 fitted in Atlanta for a favourable layout of rooms that fit a twelve-foot roll, in a range of $8,267 to $14,338. Doubling the floor area does not quite double the price, because delivery and site set-up are paid once whatever the size of the job. Where a big job does go wrong is the same place a small one does: any room whose short wall is over twelve feet buys carpet it will never walk on. Work through your own rooms one at a time in the calculator rather than adding the square footage up, because the total tells you almost nothing.
How much does Home Depot charge to install a carpet?
Big-box installation is arranged through local subcontractors, so the price is set market by market and changes without notice. We do not publish a figure we cannot source. What this calculator gives you instead is the installer labour at the wage published for your own area: on the default job here, $869 of labour out of $3,067 total. Two things are worth asking whoever quotes: whether the carpet is being power stretched rather than kicked into place, because that is the difference between a floor that ripples in two years and one that does not, and how many seams your rooms will need, because that number comes from the roll width and not from the salesperson.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 22 August 2026, not invented.
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- How we calculate
The formula, the sources, and an honest account of which parts of the model are weak.