A rental floor is judged on three things a homeowner never has to think about: how it survives a tenant who did not pay for it, what it costs to make good between tenants, and how long it lasts before the whole unit is redone. Those favor a narrow set of materials, and the order below reflects it.
Every rental floor gets damaged. The question is whether the damage is a plank, a tile or the whole room. Click vinyl plank and glue-down vinyl tile can be repaired one piece at a time from a box kept in the garage; broadloom carpet, sheet goods and laminate cannot, and a damaged spot means either living with it or replacing the room.
Cost is measured per year of service here, not per square foot on the box. A floor that costs twice as much and lasts three times as long is the cheaper floor, and that arithmetic is what moves rigid vinyl above the cheap carpet most units used to get.
Durability, water resistance and maintenance count in full, ease of repair counts half, and the installed price is subtracted so an expensive floor has to earn its place; cost per year in the table is the mid installed price divided by the mid expected life.
$4.00–$11.00 per sq ft installed
The rental floor of the last decade, and the ranking agrees. Waterproof core, so a tenant’s overflowed tub is a mop-up and not a claim; a 20 mil wear layer, so it survives furniture and dogs; a click joint, so one ruined plank is swapped from a spare box at turnover. Buy two extra cartons of the same dye lot and store them.
$5.00–$13.00 per sq ft installed
The same repairability and waterproofing as SPC in a warmer, quieter plank. It dents more easily under a heavy appliance or a dropped weight, which is the one reason it ranks below SPC for a unit whose furniture you do not choose. In an upstairs unit the quiet is worth a lot.
$5.50–$13.00 per sq ft installed
Glue-down vinyl tile is the apartment-building standard: cheap per square foot in volume, fully bonded so it cannot be lifted by a tenant, and a damaged tile is cut out and replaced with a heat gun and a spare. It takes a professional to install and a smooth subfloor to look right.
$3.50–$11.00 per sq ft installed
Cheap, scratch-resistant and quick to lay, and for a dry unit it is a reasonable rental floor. The bare-core tier swells at the first flood and cannot be repaired, so the sealed-core tier with a written waterproof warranty is the only version worth putting in a unit with a kitchen and a bathroom.
Same rule as the picks, run over everything that qualifies. Ties go to the cheaper material.
| Material | Durability | Water | Easy to keep | Cost per year | Installed / sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1Luxury Vinyl Plank — SPC (Rigid Core) | $0.38 | $4.00–$11.00 | |||
| 2Luxury Vinyl Plank — WPC (Wood-Plastic Core) | $0.45 | $5.00–$13.00 | |||
| 3Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT) | $0.46 | $5.50–$13.00 | |||
| 4Laminate | $0.36 | $3.50–$11.00 | |||
| 5Epoxy & Resinous Coatings | $0.61 | $3.50–$18.00 | |||
| 6Sheet Vinyl | $0.34 | $3.00–$9.00 | |||
| 7Luxury Vinyl Plank — Flexible (Glue-Down) | $0.42 | $3.50–$9.00 | |||
| 8Porcelain Tile | $0.25 | $8.00–$29.00 | |||
| 9Triexta (PTT) Carpet | $0.52 | $4.00–$9.50 | |||
| 10Polyester / PET Carpet | $0.62 | $3.00–$7.50 | |||
| 11Ceramic Tile | $0.32 | $6.00–$18.00 | |||
| 12Nylon Carpet | $0.47 | $4.00–$10.00 | |||
| 13Engineered Hardwood | $0.40 | $9.00–$19.00 | |||
| 14Olefin (Polypropylene) Carpet | $0.60 | $2.50–$6.50 | |||
| 15Solid Hardwood | $0.21 | $9.00–$22.00 | |||
| 16Wool Carpet | $0.50 | $8.00–$22.00 | |||
| 17Natural Stone | $0.41 | $11.00–$50.00 |
Polyester and olefin broadloom is the cheapest floor to install and the most expensive to own: it wears flat in the traffic lanes in three to five years, holds every odor a tenant leaves, and is replaced whole. The cost-per-year column is where it loses.
A 6 mil wear layer is a residential product for a house with one careful family. Under a tenant it scratches through in a couple of years, and the whole reputation LVP has in rentals was built on 20 mil commercial-grade plank. Ask for the mil rating in writing.
It can be refinished for a century, which is the point in a home and beside the point in a rental, where nobody refinishes between tenants. A tenant’s dog, one leak, or a dragged sofa turns a beautiful floor into a claim you will not fully recover.
Repair depends on having the same plank. A landlord with six units and six different floors can repair none of them; one with six units on the same SPC and a pallet of spares repairs all of them for years. Standardize.
Dye lots change. The plank you buy in three years will not match the one on the floor. The two cartons stored at install are the only reason the repair-by-plank promise holds.
Rigid-core vinyl plank, by a wide margin, in every room but sometimes the bedrooms. It is waterproof, tolerates abuse, repairs one plank at a time and looks like wood in the listing photos. Before it the answers were sheet vinyl in the wet rooms and cheap carpet everywhere else, and the units that still have that are the ones being turned over.
Vinyl plank. Laminate resists scratches better, but standard laminate swells at the first leak and cannot be repaired, and a rental will have a leak. Sealed-core laminate closes most of that gap and costs about the same as mid-range vinyl, so it comes down to whether the unit has a lot of dog traffic (laminate) or a lot of water (vinyl).
For damage beyond normal wear, yes, in most jurisdictions, but only for the depreciated value of the floor. A carpet with a seven-year life that is destroyed in year five has two years of value left, and that is the ceiling of the claim. A floor that lasts twenty years keeps more of its claimable value for longer, which is a quieter argument for durable materials.
Five to seven years for the polyester and olefin grades most rentals get, and many landlords replace it at every second turnover regardless. Nylon or triexta lasts ten or more, costs a little more per foot, and is the fiber to buy if the unit is going to have carpet at all.
The same SPC plank, at 20 mil, with the joints laid tight and a bead of sealant at the wet-room transitions. For carpeted bedrooms, a solution-dyed nylon over a moisture-barrier pad, and accept that an accident which reaches the pad is a replacement rather than a cleaning. The full ranking for animals is on the pet page.
Yes, unless a room has a real reason not to. One product means one box of spares, one cleaning instruction for the tenant, no transition strips to lift, and a unit that photographs larger. The bathroom is the usual exception, and a waterproof plank removes even that.
Each of these ranks every material against one problem, the same way this page does.
Also relevant: Luxury vinyl plank · Flooring costs