Data checked August 13, 2026 · source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

How much does it cost to install tile?

100 square feet of floor tile, priced from the actual tile, the actual thinset and the actual membrane — plus the subfloor requirement that decides whether your natural stone quote is honest.

Where the money actually goes

The low column takes the cheapest verified material at every line and the fastest labour figure our sources support. The high column takes the most expensive material and the slowest labour. Nobody's real quote is all-low or all-high, so treat the two columns as the edges of the plausible range rather than as quotes.

How we got the labour hours

Two parts, and here is the sum. Setting: working setters describe 100 to 200 sq ft in an eight-hour day, which is 12.5 to 25 sq ft an hour, so 100 sq ft takes 4 to 8 hours. Layout, dry-fitting, cutting, grouting and clean-up add another 4 to 12. That is 8 low, 20 high, 12 in the middle, for one setter. This is the weakest-sourced number on the page and we say so below.

Sources: Working tile setters on daily output (100-400 sq ft a day, one setter) · Footprints Floors - how long flooring installation takes · Holtzman Remodeling - how long it takes to tile a bathroom. Where a source gives a crew size and a duration but not man-hours, we multiply the two ourselves and say so.

What the permit costs

None for a like-for-like replacement. The model code exempts finish work, and one county writes it out plainly: if it was there before, you may repair or replace paint, wallpaper, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, countertops, panelling and similar finish work. Moving plumbing, altering the structure or reframing a floor is a different question.

Source: Sedgwick County KS - what can I do without a permit.

The subfloor requirement that decides whether a stone quote is honest

This is the item most tile cost pages leave out entirely, and it is the one that can double a job.

So a marble floor quote on a second storey that has no line for structural work is either including it silently, or has not looked. Ask which.

CTaSC and the Ceramic Tile Education Foundation, the latter tying L/720 to TCNA Handbook method F250 STONE.

Pattern, and what it does to the hours

The herringbone figure is stated two ways by two sources: Holtzman says complex patterns often double the standard timeframe, and Burrini & Sons gives a backsplash going from one day straight-set to two or three in herringbone. Artistic Stone prices the same effect in dollars: $10–$20 a sq ft of labour for standard ceramic against $35–$50 for herringbone or mosaic. Large format from Apollo Tile, which cites back-buttering, levelling and sheer weight. We deliberately do not publish a diagonal-lay multiplier. The commonly quoted 1.3–1.4× is real trade convention and we could not source it to anything citable, so it is not on this page.

One thing to check on a waterproofing line

RedGard is priced per gallon, and how far a gallon goes changes by 2.5× between its two normal uses — and by more than ten times across the manufacturer's full published chart, which runs from 12.8 to 200 sq ft a gallon. The manufacturer's own technical bulletin puts full ANSI A118.10 waterproofing at 40 sq ft a gallon (40 mil wet) and crack isolation at 100 sq ft a gallon (16 mil wet).

At $77.53 a gallon that is $1.94 a sq ft as waterproofing and $0.78 as crack isolation — the same product, the same bucket, two and a half times the cost. A shower that was quoted at the crack-isolation rate and applied at that thickness is not waterproofed, whatever the invoice says it is.

Custom Building Products technical bulletin TB94.

What the tile costs, per square foot

A 27× spread, and the material choice also changes the labour — stone needs a stiffer floor, mosaic needs more grouting, large-format needs back-buttering and levelling.

Source: Home Depot tile category listings, checked 2026-08-13.

Specific products, with the price we saw

Not a recommendation and not an affiliate link. These are the listings we checked on 2026-08-13, so you can see whether the equipment line on your quote is close to retail.

Retail prices move. If one of these is wrong now, tell us and we will fix it with the date.

Parts list

What this job costs in 41 US metro areas

Materials cost roughly the same everywhere. Labour does not. The wage column is US government data; the labour column is that wage run through our published multiplier; the total applies it to the job above. On the same work Boston-Cambridge-Newton comes out 32% higher than New Orleans-Metairie at the top of the range and 54% higher at the bottom — the two differ because materials, permits and disposal do not move with the wage.

Wages: BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 47-2044 — public domain. Metros where BLS suppressed the figure are left out rather than estimated. Totals are FieldPricing calculations from the parts and hours on this page — they are not quotes and no contractor has agreed to them.

What did you actually pay?

Everything above this line is arithmetic on public data. It is honest, and it is not the same thing as a real invoice. If you have had this work done, the number on your invoice is worth more to the next reader than anything we can calculate.

What did you pay in total? Just the number is fine. $1,850, or "about 2 grand". Where? City and state. We publish this; it is the whole point.

When? Month and year is enough. What did it cover? Materials included? Permit? Removal of the old work? Anything unusual? This is the part that makes your number useful to somebody else. Email — optional Only used if we need to ask you one question before publishing. Never shown, never sold, never mailed to.

Website

Send it in

No account, no login, no newsletter. A person reads every submission before it appears, so it will not show up instantly. If we cannot make sense of one, we leave it out rather than guess — and if you would rather just email it, that works too.

What actually moves the price

The tile itself, which spans 27x

$0.97 a square foot for entry ceramic against $25.91 for a mosaic sheet. On the 110 sq ft this job needs that is $107 against $2,850. The materials table above tops out at $1,313 because it prices porcelain; stone and mosaic go well past it, and if that is what you want, add the difference to every total on this page.

Whether there is an old floor to take out

Zero to $700 on 100 sq ft. Ceramic removal is $2-$5 a sq ft plus $0.50-$2 to scrape the old thinset off, and genuinely dust-free removal with HEPA containment is $3.00-$6.50. The dust matters more than people expect in an occupied house.

Pattern and format

Herringbone and chevron roughly double the setting hours. Large format 24 x 48 adds 30-50 percent because every tile has to be back-buttered and levelled. Mosaic sheets go up fast but need far more grouting.

Floor or wall

A shower wall runs about twice the man-hours per square foot of a floor. Working vertically, cutting around a niche and valve, and keeping the waterproofing intact are all slower than laying flat.

What is under the tile

$0.83 a sq ft for cement backer board against $2.01 for an uncoupling membrane. They are not the same product: backer board gives you a stable substrate, an uncoupling membrane lets the tile move independently of a substrate that is going to move. Over a slab with cracks, or over radiant heat, the membrane is the answer.

Deflection, if you are buying stone

L/720 over wood framing against L/360 for ceramic. If the floor does not meet it, the joists get sistered or a layer of subfloor gets added before any tile is set, and that is a framing line item on a tile quote.

Code requirements that cost money

These are the things an inspector will look for, and each one is a line on the invoice that a homeowner often reads as padding. Mostly it is not.

• Subfloor deflection — L/360 and L/720 — Ceramic and porcelain need a floor no more flexible than L/360. Natural stone over wood framing needs L/720; over a concrete slab the question does not arise. This is an industry standard tied to the TCNA Handbook rather than a building-code requirement, and it is the reason a stone floor can require structural work. Source.
• Waterproofing coverage rate — ANSI A118.10 — A liquid membrane only performs as a waterproofing membrane at the thickness the manufacturer specifies for that use. RedGard is 40 sq ft a gallon at 40 mil wet for waterproofing and 100 sq ft a gallon at 16 mil for crack isolation. Source.
• No permit for like-for-like finish work — If it was there before, tiling may be repaired or replaced without a permit, the same exemption that covers paint, carpet, cabinets and countertops. Source.

Deflection and waterproofing standards here are industry standards from the TCNA Handbook and ANSI, not building code, though many jurisdictions reference them. Your jurisdiction adopts its own version of the model code — check locally before relying on any of this.

What we could not verify

We publish this list because a cost page that never admits a gap is not telling you the truth.

• Square feet per day from NTCA, TCNA, CTEF or any tile trade publication. None publishes it. The 100 to 200 sq ft per eight-hour day behind our figure comes from working setters describing their own output, which is real evidence but is self-reported and unedited. This is the weakest number on the page.
• A diagonal-lay labour multiplier. The 1.3-1.4x commonly quoted is trade convention we could not source, so we left it off rather than dress it up.
• Zone multipliers for shower walls and backsplashes as specific percentages. We give a 2x wall-to-floor ratio derived from setters' own job descriptions instead.
• Shower niche, bench and curb pricing. Widely quoted at $250-$500, $300-$600 and $150-$350 per linear foot; we could not source any of the three, and the per-linear-foot unit for a curb looks wrong in the first place.
• Grout, spacers, sealer, trowels and blades. Real costs, not priced here, and therefore missing from the materials total.
• The top of the setters' own range. One of them reported up to 400 sq ft in a day on a wide-open floor. We left it out and capped our fast case at 200, because a page that quotes the best day anyone ever had is not describing your job.
• Two of the tile prices above were read off Home Depot category pages rather than individual product pages, and are labelled as such. $1.69 a sq ft for polished 24x48 porcelain is low enough that it is worth re-checking before you rely on it.
• A .gov source for the tile permit exemption. Sedgwick County's site is the official county government site but sits on a .org domain.

How we got these numbers

• Wages — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 47-2044 (Tile and Stone Setters), pulled through the BLS public API. US federal data, public domain.
• Billed rate — wage × 1.3 labour burden × 1.70–2.454 overhead and profit, so 2.21×–3.19× the wage. Our assumption, published in full on the methodology page so you can disagree with it.
• Equipment and parts — retailer and supply-house listings, each linked above, checked 2026-08-13.
• Labour hours — Working tile setters on daily output (100-400 sq ft a day, one setter) · Footprints Floors - how long flooring installation takes · Holtzman Remodeling - how long it takes to tile a bathroom.
• Permit fees — Sedgwick County KS - what can I do without a permit.
• Disposal — CountBricks tile removal cost breakdown.

We do not use RSMeans or Craftsman cost data. Their licences forbid building a database from them, so every number here traces to a public source or a public listing you can open yourself.

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