Questions to ask a flooring fitter before you book

Booking a flooring fitter usually comes down to comparing a handful of quotes, but price alone doesn't tell you whether a fitter is genuinely experienced with your specific type of flooring, properly insured, or likely to finish the job to the standard and timescale you're expecting. A short list of practical questions covers most of what actually matters before committing to one.

Experience with the specific material and subfloor involved is worth asking about directly, rather than assuming general flooring experience covers everything equally. Fitting engineered wood over a concrete subfloor is a genuinely different job from fitting laminate over an existing timber floor, and a fitter who's mostly worked with one material or subfloor type may be less confident, and slower, with another. It's reasonable to ask how long a fitter has worked specifically with the material you're having installed, and to ask to see photos of recent, similar jobs — a fitter confident in their work should have no difficulty showing examples.

Insurance is worth confirming explicitly rather than assumed. Public liability insurance protects you if something is accidentally damaged during the job — a spilled adhesive on a carpet elsewhere in the house, a scratch to existing woodwork, or damage caused while moving furniture. Checkatrade, among other trade directories, requires all its members to hold public liability insurance as a baseline condition of membership, which gives a reasonable sense of what's considered standard practice in the trade; it's a fair question to ask any fitter directly, whether found through a directory or independently.

Getting the quote itself right matters as much as choosing the fitter. It's worth getting two or three like-for-like quotes rather than comparing headline prices in isolation, and confirming that labour, materials and VAT are all clearly included in each one, since not every fitter is VAT-registered and this can distort a straight price comparison. More specifically, it's worth checking whether the quote covers removal of the existing floor, any subfloor preparation that turns out to be needed, trims and door threshold adjustments, and disposal of waste materials — these are commonly quoted separately if not explicitly stated, and a quote that looks cheaper on paper sometimes turns out to exclude several of these and cost more once they're added back in.

It's also worth asking about the installation method and materials the fitter plans to use, and why. A good fitter should be able to explain which fitting method suits your specific flooring and subfloor, whether any additional materials — adhesive, underlay, a damp proof membrane — are likely to be needed, and whether those are included in the quoted price or would be extra if required. This is also a natural point to ask what happens if the subfloor turns out to need more preparation than expected once work starts, since this is one of the most common sources of a final bill coming in higher than the original quote.

Finally, it's worth pinning down the practical timeline before booking: how many days the job is expected to take, whether the fitter or crew will be on site continuously or working around other jobs, and how access to the rest of the property will be managed while flooring is being fitted, particularly if it affects a hallway, staircase or the only route to a bathroom or kitchen. None of these questions are unreasonable to ask, and an established, professional fitter should be able to answer all of them clearly and without hesitation — a fitter who's vague or evasive about insurance, what's included in a quote, or the expected timeline is worth treating with some caution before booking.

Frequently asked questions