Guide
Resin flooring cost: what actually sets the rate per m2
Updated
Resin covers everything from a thin sealer that keeps the dust down to a heavy polyurethane screed that survives a bakery washdown. Same word, different product, different money.
Resin is a family, not a product
- Sealer or thin coating
- Applied by roller in a thin film. Controls dust, makes the floor cleanable, improves light levels. Little impact resistance and a short life under forklift traffic. The cheapest thing you can call a resin floor.
- Self-smoothing or self-levelling resin
- Poured and spread to a defined thickness, giving a seamless, flat, easily cleaned surface. The common specification for warehouses, workshops and light production.
- Heavy-duty screed
- A thick, trowel-applied resin screed, often polyurethane based, for heavy impact, thermal shock, chemicals and wet processes. Highest material and labour cost, longest life under abuse.
- Anti-slip systems
- Aggregate broadcast into the resin to give a defined slip profile. It changes cleaning as well as safety, so the profile is chosen against how the floor is actually cleaned.
Why quotes for the same floor differ so much
- Thickness: one quote at a thin film against another at several millimetres is not a like-for-like comparison. Ask for millimetres.
- Preparation: shot blasting a whole floor is a real cost, and a quote that assumes a quick sweep is a quote that assumes a different job. See preparation and moisture.
- Moisture testing: included in one price, omitted from another, and it is the omission that causes the failure.
- Area: the rate is not a constant. Confirm the rate at your actual measured area.
- Detailing: coving, joints, falls, thresholds and line marking are separate operations priced by length. See downtime and phasing for how programme affects them.
How to get comparable numbers
- Measure the floor and give every contractor the same area figure.
- Ask each to quote a named system at a named thickness from a named manufacturer, so you can compare data sheets rather than adjectives.
- Ask what preparation method is priced, and what happens if the substrate survey finds worse.
- Ask whether moisture testing is included, and what the price does if the slab tests high.
- Get line marking and coving priced separately, by metre, so they do not disguise a difference in the floor rate.
Floors in workplaces have to be suitable and kept free from anything that makes a person slip or fall: that duty sits in the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 (legislation.gov.uk), and the HSE publishes practical guidance on slip prevention (HSE slips and trips). Choose the slip profile against how the floor gets wet and how it gets cleaned.