Homeowners who remove 200 square feet of existing flooring and replace it with new hardwood flooring recover 78% of the investment, according to a 2023 report by Today's Homeowner, a home improvement media company.
The calculated cost of $1,802 for the new hardwood floors has a value of $1,405. New hardwood floors represented the 12th highest ROI for home renovation projects listed in the report, which analyzed 70,000 homes across nearly 1,300 U.S. cities.
New laminate flooring, comparatively, had only a 56% return on investment, with a $1,517 cost for 200 square feet returning $850 to the homeowner.
The report also found that homeowners do not recover their costs for 97% of home remodeling projects. The full report can be found here.
A 2022 Remodeling Impact Report by the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of the Remodeling Industry found homeowners who refinish their wood floors recover 147% of the cost—the highest recovery rate of all remodeling projects—and Installing new wood flooring was second at 118%.
