Choose for Me: Laminate or Luxury Vinyl Flooring?

Laminate flooring and luxury vinyl plank flooring seem to exist on an equal playing field for many homeowners considering their next floor covering. Yet these two floors are vastly different. Which one should you choose?

Choose for Me

Choose luxury vinyl flooring. Luxury vinyl plank flooring is better than laminate flooring because it offers most (but not all) of the appearance attributes of laminate with none of the swelling or delamination problems.

Details

I have laminate flooring in my kitchen and if I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would put in luxury vinyl plank flooring (LVF). And though I cannot go back in time, I can go forward in time and choose LVF as my replacement floor covering for that laminate, because it is inevitable that the laminate will fail.

This isn’t just motivated by my personal experience with laminate and LVP, either. I’ve been immersed in both floor coverings for well over a decade as a home remodeling writer. Ten years ago, laminate was the clear choice; luxury vinyl flooring did not exist. If you wanted a floor covering that imitated real wood, laminate was the choice. The vinyl at the time was unattractive and thin.

Then the flooring industry ramped up its game and rolled out vinyl in long strips that mimicked wood flooring. Branding it with the swanky name luxury vinyl flooring helped immensely.

The reason I would choose luxury vinyl flooring over laminate is because laminate looks great on top but it’s a hot mess on the bottom. Essentially, the wood pulp conglomerate that forms laminate’s base (this is the part that you do not see, after the flooring has gone down) is touchy and finicky. As long as you keep every drop of water away from the base, you’re golden. But as soon as water starts finding its way to laminate’s base, it’s all downhill from there.

Qualifiers

Most blanket recommendations like this come with many variables. But this is a rare instance where I cannot produce many qualifiers. In order of importance, from most to least, I might purchase laminate flooring instead of luxury vinyl flooring if:

• Verisimilitude is highly important. Having a photographic layer, laminate flooring better mimics wood and stone than does luxury vinyl flooring.
• Flooring warmth is a primary concern. Laminate is warmer because you can place foam underlayment below it and because laminate boards are thicker than vinyl plank boards.
• Professionals are installing the laminate for me. I might consider laminate because tight, invisible seams on every single board is hard to achieve as a do-it-yourselfer.
• The room in question is purely moisture-free area. At least the swelling factor is greatly reduced.

Nor is any of this to say that luxury vinyl flooring is perfect. It can abrade easily, whereas laminate flooring’s topmost wear layer is amazingly protective against scratches. Also, this is not to suggest that luxury vinyl floor is a homogeneous product free from delamination. Luxury vinyl can have four or more layers. The difference is that luxury vinyl’s layers are thermally fused together and none of the layers, most importantly, contain any organic materials.

Trusted Sources

Because flooring is a highly competitive industry, it can be difficult to trust much of the web content because everyone is trying to advance their own cause. Skimming the top ten Google results for the search term “laminate or luxury vinyl,” we find:

• Supporting luxury vinyl: Parterre Flooring, Go Haus (both luxury vinyl vendors)
• Supporting laminate flooring: Swiss Krono (a laminate vendor)
• Neutral advice: HomeAdvisor, Fixr (both contractor-matching sites with no vested interest in either choice)

My advice, too, can be considered biased, since I have installed and lived with both laminate and luxury vinyl flooring for years and have seen the consequences.