Is hardwood flooring dying?

These are from Floor Covering News (FCNews), the industry trade paper, which counts every square foot of flooring sold in the U.S. Vinyl, which is mostly LVP (luxury vinyl plank), more than doubled its share. Most of it came from carpet. Hardwood sold 630 million square feet in 2025, the lowest since 2012.

So yes, LVP is winning new installs. Anyone who says otherwise is not looking at the numbers.

Hardwood was never big by the square foot. In FCNews's count it has been between 3.7% and 5.1% of square feet every year since 2009. It's the expensive floor, so its share of dollars is about double its share of square feet.

Another research firm, Catalina, counts it higher: 4.9% of square feet and 11.7% of dollars in 2025. The two even disagree on whether hardwood sales went up or down in 2024 and 2025. What they agree on: wood's share of square feet is below where it was in 2021, and LVP took the share.

A recoat business doesn't work on the floors sold this year. It works on the ones already in people's homes. One year of new hardwood sales is a sliver next to all the wood that is already down.

The wood floor count comes from a 2017 survey of 1,001 homeowners for the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA): 52% said they have wood floors. It is the only count there is, and people answered for themselves, so treat it as a ballpark. Nobody publishes how many wood floors are torn out each year, so we won't guess.

Most hardwood that is sold goes into homes people already live in, too. FCNews says new construction is typically about 30% of hardwood sales.

Wood lasts. The National Association of Home Builders' study of how long home parts last puts natural wood floors at 100 years or more, vinyl floors at up to 50 years, and carpet at 8 to 10 years (NAHB, 2007). A solid wood floor can be sanded six to eight times in its life (NWFA, 2025), and recoated many more times than that, since a recoat doesn't sand into the wood.

This isn't a knock on LVP. The big brands sell lifetime warranties. But you can't sand LVP down the way you sand wood. A damaged plank gets replaced. A wood floor gets renewed, and so can LVP whose factory wear layer is still there: a light scuff and one coat of finish.

In the NAHB's 2024 survey of more than 3,000 home buyers, 81% said hardwood on the main level is essential or desirable. It was 83% in 2019. That's flat, not falling.

Zillow looked at nearly four million home sales from 2016 and 2017 and found listings that mentioned hardwood floors sold for about 10% more than expected, while "new carpets" showed no boost (Zillow, 2018). That is a link in the listing text, not proof that the floor added 10%.

In new homes in 2024, engineered hardwood still led in living rooms, dining rooms, halls and family rooms, with LVP second (Home Innovation Research Labs).

If any floor is dying, it's carpet. If you clean carpets for a living, you already watch it get pulled up. Sometimes there is wood under it. Nobody has counted how often, so we won't give you a number.

No survey counts wood floors by region, so the age of the homes is the best guide there is. The table is from the Census American Community Survey (2024). Older homes are more likely to still have their original floors.

In new homes back in 2015, solid hardwood went into 52% of New England homes and 10% of Pacific homes, and it was about three times as likely in luxury homes as in starter homes (Home Innovation Research Labs). So look at older neighborhoods and nicer homes first. The demand pages by state and city show how many owner-occupied homes are near you.

Google Trends puts searches on one 0 to 100 scale. It shows each search's share, not a count. Searches for "lvp flooring" roughly doubled. But "hardwood flooring" is still searched more, every year. The gap closed from about 3.5 to 1 to about 1.4 to 1.

Searches for "hardwood floor refinishing" in the latest 52 weeks were 25% above the first 52 weeks of the five years to October 2026. That is LVP catching up, not wood dying.

The demand tool adds up the owner-occupied homes within 30 miles of any U.S. ZIP code, from Census counts, and works out how many wood floors come due each year with conservative math.