Calculator
Floor footprint and walkway calculator
Add your room size and up to six furniture items. The result shows what share of the floor your furniture covers and how wide the clear path is across the room. It updates as you type, and nothing leaves your device.
55 percent of the floor is covered
Worked example (shown when scripts are off): a 12 ft by 10 ft room is 120 sq ft. A sofa 84 by 36 in is 21 sq ft, a bed 60 by 80 in is 33.3 sq ft, a 48 by 16 in cabinet is 5.3 sq ft and a 30 by 30 in table is 6.3 sq ft. Together that is 65.9 sq ft, or 55 percent of the floor, which falls in the tight band.
Check before you buy
This is a planning aid, not a design standard. Measure your own room, remember that doors, drawers and fold-out beds need extra space when open, and check your lease before moving or fixing anything to a wall.
How the calculator works
For each item it multiplies width by depth by the quantity, adds them up, and divides by the room's length times its width. That gives the share of the floor that furniture sits on. It then reports a band: 30 percent or less is roomy, up to 45 percent is balanced, up to 60 percent is tight, and above that is crowded. Those bands are our own planning rules of thumb for comparing options, not a published standard, so use them to compare two layouts of the same room, not to judge a room on its own.
The walking path is simpler. It takes the shorter side of the room and subtracts the depth of the deepest piece on each of the two long walls. What remains is the clear width between them. A clear width of 36 inches or more is labelled good, 30 to 36 inches is workable but tight, and below 30 inches is narrow.
Worked example
In the default room, the shorter side is 10 ft, or 120 inches. The sofa is 36 inches deep on one wall and the cabinet is 16 inches deep on the other. That leaves 120 minus 36 minus 16, or 68 inches of clear path. The footprint of the four default items is 65.9 square feet of 120, or 55 percent.
What it does not measure
It treats every item as a plain rectangle on the floor. It ignores doors that swing into the room, drawers that pull out, fold-out beds, chairs pulled back from a table, and furniture placed across the middle of the room. A bed shoved into a corner can leave two narrow strips of floor that the percentage hides, so also look at the path. It also does not know about radiators, windows or outlets.
When a bigger change helps
If the result is tight or crowded, you can usually fix it by removing one piece, swapping a deep piece for a shallow one, or choosing furniture with visible legs. The small-space furniture buying guide compares options by type, and the guide to making a small apartment feel bigger covers layout choices.
Where this comes from
We checked published summaries of the International Residential Code, which sets 36 inches as the minimum width for a hallway inside a home, and of the ADA Standards, which set 36 inches as the clear width of an accessible route with brief narrowing to 32 inches at a doorway. Those rules cover buildings, so applying them to furniture is our own practical use. The 30 inch lower limit and the percentage bands are our own planning rules, not published standards.