How the two differ in kind
The two floors on this shortlist are built on opposite principles, and it is worth seeing how before weighing anything else. Carpet is a tensioned textile: a cushion rolled out loose, then broadloom stretched over it and hooked onto a strip of angled pins nailed around the perimeter. Nothing in the middle of the room is fixed to anything — the stretch is what holds it flat. Vinyl plank is a rigid floating sheet: planks clicked edge to edge into one continuous panel that rests on the subfloor under its own weight, with a gap left at every wall so the whole sheet can grow and shrink with the season. Neither is stuck to the subfloor, and in both cases it is the perimeter that makes the floor work — the pins that grip on one, the gap that must be left on the other. There the resemblance ends, because one is soft all the way down to the subfloor and the other is hard all the way down to it.
That single difference pays and charges in the same currency: what a floor absorbs is also what it keeps. Carpet's fibre and cushion take footfall out of the room below, take the echo out of a bare living room, and take the cold out of the first step of the morning — and they take the spilled glass of wine, the muddy paw and the accident down into a layer that no vacuum, no mop and no amount of cleaning ever reaches. Vinyl plank offers none of that softness and holds none of that history: the surface is impermeable, so what lands on it stays on it until it is wiped, and what is under it is dry.
Which is why the answer for a whole living area is usually not one floor. Map the house before choosing a material. Where do the drinks, the boots, the dog and the chair legs actually go, and where do bare feet, quiet and a room that is only used at night actually go? For most households those two maps barely overlap, and the honest recommendation is the split one: plank where the mess and the traffic are, carpet where the feet and the silence are. What can override that is what lies under the floor — a room above another dwelling may have the decision made for it by a lease — and what lies under the plank, because a subfloor that flexes or dips is a problem carpet hides and a floating floor reports.
The factors that actually differ
Show
| Broadloom carpet | Luxury vinyl plank | |
|---|---|---|
| Underfoot | Warm and yielding. Fibre trapping air is an insulator, so it sits at room temperature and gives back a little under every step. | Hard and cool. A dense plank in contact with the subfloor conducts heat away from a bare foot, so it reads as cold in a room that is not. |
| Sound, in two directions | The only one of the two that does both jobs: the pile absorbs speech and television in the room, the cushion damps footfall going down to the room below. | A hard sheet reflects sound back into the room and ticks under a heel. Every bit of impact performance it has comes from the underlay you specify, not from the plank. |
| Spills and pets | Liquid passes through the face into the backing and then into the cushion, and the cushion is the layer nothing reaches. Claws pull loops and hair works down into the pile. | Wipes; hair sweeps off a bare surface instead of being combed out of one. Claws and grit mark the wear layer, and a scratch through it cannot be sanded out. |
| The cleaning contract | Vacuuming is maintenance rather than cleaning — the soil that flattens a traffic lane needs periodic hot-water extraction, which is the part of the deal most owners quietly skip. | Vacuum then damp mop, and that genuinely is the whole routine. Nothing is stored between visits, so a skipped week costs appearance rather than condition. |
| Subfloor demands | The most forgiving floor there is. Cushion and stretch between them swallow dips, minor unevenness and the odd squeak without anyone knowing. | Floats over small imperfections but reports large ones: it bridges dips audibly, rocks over ridges, and flex in the deck works every clicked joint. Flatness is a stated tolerance. |
| How each is bought | By the metre, not the square metre. You hand over a roll width you did not choose and get back a length to order; the mismatch between that width and the room is what you pay on top of the floor. | By the pack. Area over pack coverage, rounded up to whole packs, with the waste band set by how many corners break the run — the offcut ending one row starts the next. |
| How each ages | Retires on looks. The traffic lane loses its recovery and its evenness of colour long before the fibre gives up, and appearance is what triggers the replacement. | Retires on thickness. A finite clear layer sits over a printed pattern, nothing can be sanded back once it is gone, and the surface stays presentable right up until it is not. |
| Repair and the spare | A patch cut from a kept offcut, matched for dye lot and set with the nap running the same way — and still findable under raking light from the window. | Unclick back to the damaged plank and reclick, which the room's furniture may or may not permit. A batch-matched spare pack is the only invisible repair. |
| Heat under it, sun on it | Over underfloor heating the carpet and its cushion are added together against a combined thermal-resistance limit — the pair has to clear it, not the carpet alone. | The underfloor-heating partner of the two, within the surface-temperature cap its maker sets. Strong direct sun through big glazing is its weak spot: dark planks warm and move. |
Which one, and when
Choose broadloom carpet when…
- Bedrooms, where the floor is met barefoot, traffic is light, and the worst spill risk is a bedside glass of water.
- A room sitting over another occupied room — carpet and cushion are the most effective impact-sound treatment any finished floor offers.
- The subfloor is uneven, springy or noisy and rebuilding it is not on this project's list.
- Toddlers still falling over, or anyone in the house for whom a hard landing is a real risk.
- A living room that is already hard and echoey, where the floor is simply the largest absorbent surface available to you.
Choose luxury vinyl plank when…
- Pets, and above all one with any history of accidents — under a carpet that becomes permanent in the layer you cannot clean.
- The living room's real traffic: the door line, the route to the sofa, the chair that scrapes back from the table.
- Someone in the house reacts to dust and you want a floor that can be cleaned completely rather than vacuumed repeatedly.
- Underfloor heating is in the plan — carpet and cushion resist it, planks pass it through.
- You want one damaged patch fixable without disturbing the rest of the room.
Now run your own numbers
This page holds no prices on purpose — a national average is wrong for almost every real project. Quantify both options with your dimensions and your local quotes.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is cheaper?
- They are different shapes of cost, which is why this site publishes no figure for either. Start with what the two waste allowances are actually paying for. A bedroom narrower than the roll leaves a fill strip that is either used elsewhere on the same job or paid for as nothing, and a living room wider than the roll buys a seam and everything the seam consumes — so the fit between one fixed dimension and your room drives carpet's extra, not the floor area. The plank's extra is bought back instead against every alcove, angle and doorway that stops a row from feeding the next one. Both then carry a second purchase charged against area (cushion, or underlay) and a third charged against the perimeter (gripper strip, or beading and expansion trim), plus a bar at every threshold. Labour splits cleanly: stretch-in carpet is a trade job because the stretch is the installation, while a click floor is the one an ordinary owner finishes over a weekend. And changing your mind costs differently in kind — a plank floor is repaired one plank at a time, whereas a tired carpet leaves as a single operation with its cushion, its gripper and its disposal. Run both calculators on your own rooms and read what each returns honestly: the plank one gives you packs to buy, while the carpet one gives a base length from area and roll width, and says itself that a room needing seams takes more than that base. Then put those quantities against local quotes.
- Can I put carpet in the bedrooms and plank in the living room?
- Yes, and for this reader it is usually the right answer rather than a compromise. Three practicalities decide whether it looks deliberate. The two systems build to different heights — carpet over its cushion and plank over its underlay rarely finish level — so the threshold bar has to bridge a small step, and the doors may need trimming by different amounts room to room. Buy the transition profiles at the same time as the floors, because a carpet-to-plank bar is a specific section and matching one to an installed floor later is the fiddly version of the job. Most important: the floating floor's expansion gap has to survive the doorway. The bar's track is fixed to the subfloor, never screwed through the planks, and the gap must run continuously under it — a floor pinned at a threshold peaks at the joints exactly like one pinned at a wall.
- Is vinyl plank actually waterproof?
- The plank is; the floor is not, and the gap between those two statements is where the marketing stops. A rigid-core plank shrugs off standing water on its face indefinitely, which is a genuine advantage over carpet and the honest reason to choose it in a room where things get knocked over. But what sits beneath a floating floor is a subfloor and an underlay with no drainage and no airflow. Liquid that finds a joint, or runs behind the beading into the perimeter gap, has nowhere to go and nothing to dry it — a radiator weep in a bedroom or a plant pot knocked over on a Friday can be doing quiet damage under a surface that still looks perfect. Read it as the wipeable floor rather than the waterproof one. Carpet is not even that: the same spill reaches its cushion within seconds.
- Is a hard floor better for allergies and asthma?
- Less settled than either side of the argument admits. Carpet traps particles out of the air, which some research treats as a benefit, and holds them until footfall or a vacuum lifts them again; it is also the layer capable of holding the moisture that dust mites need. A hard floor lets the same particles settle in the open, where they are easy to remove and easy to disturb. The uncontested part, and the only part worth deciding on, is that a hard floor can be cleaned completely and a carpet cannot — what goes into the cushion stays there. If someone in the house genuinely reacts, treat the floor as one variable alongside bedding, ventilation and humidity rather than as the treatment; and if the carpet stays, the extraction schedule matters more than the fibre you chose.
- We are above another flat — does that settle it?
- It comes close, and it may not be your decision to make. There are two separate noises: impact, meaning footsteps and dropped objects going down through the structure, and airborne, meaning speech and television. Carpet over a cushion is the most effective impact treatment a finished floor gives you and it needs no design work, which is exactly why so many leases and building rules require carpet in habitable rooms, or name a minimum acoustic rating for anything else. A floating plank floor can meet such a rating, but only with an acoustic underlay specified for it, and the rating belongs to the whole assembly tested together rather than to the underlay's own datasheet. Find out what governs your flat before you choose the material, because putting this right afterwards means lifting the floor you just laid.
- What actually wears each one out?
- Carpet usually does not wear out at all — it ugly-outs. The lane from the door to the sofa flattens, holds soil and stops recovering, and the room is re-carpeted while the fibre is still serviceable; skipped extraction is what brings that day forward, because grit is abrasive inside a carpet too. Vinyl plank runs a different clock: the wear layer over the printed film thins at the pivot points and under the chairs, and once it is through there is no refinishing, only replacement. Grit at the door is the abrasive on both, which makes a proper barrier mat the cheapest life extension either floor will ever get. Each also has one failure mode that has nothing to do with wear — carpet's is a cushion that has been soaked, and plank's is a floating floor pinned by something heavy enough to stop it moving, which peaks at the joints instead.