Our top pick, Pergo Timber Graft + Wet Protect is waterproof, budget-friendly, and looks like real wood. Here are the best laminate flooring options for your home. Today’s Pergo products have crisp, deep embossing and images and colors with close fidelity to the original material. This is manifested in products like wide laminate planks that look similar to real hardwood planks or tiles that look like travertine, marble, or slate. Pergo’s TimberCraft and TimberCraft Elite are the standout Pergo laminates due to their verisimilitude to real wood in combination with reasonable pricing. Though the TimberCraft core is compressed fiberboard, the flooring is rated as being waterproof and acceptable for steam mopping. With high-definition imaging and deep embossing, TimberCraft not only looks like real wood but also has twice the number of uniquely imaged boards. This means less of a chance of repetitive patterning. TimberCraft offers 18 styles of wood-look laminate flooring, so you can find the right one to fit your style. Note that Pergo TimberCraft does not have an attached underlayment. You’ll need to roll out your own separate foam or acoustical fiber underlayment. One hundred square feet of foam underlayment costs about $50. Lifeproof aims to live up to its name as a tough, scuff-resistant AC-5 laminate that will maintain its structural integrity and will not degrade upon contact with water. This is the laminate flooring to buy for homes with pets and children. Plus, Lifeproof laminate flooring is priced at the lower end of the self-install laminate price range, making this an affordable DIY product. Advertised as a 14mm-thick floor, Lifeproof’s core and top layer equals 12mm thick. The attached underlayment contributes to the additional 2mm. One of the key advantages of Dream Home laminate flooring is its cost. The thick 12 mm laminate house-brand Dream Home laminate is less expensive than even thinner name-brand products. Another advantage: Since LL Flooring has over 400 brick-and-mortar locations across 47 states, buyers are able to touch and see Dream Home flooring in person. If you live in an LL Flooring market area, you might often see ads for laminate flooring priced under $1.00 per square foot, even down to $0.79 per square foot. These ultra-cheap laminates tend have a durability rating of AC3 for high-traffic residential use and have no attached underlayment. LL Flooring will deliver inside the home, too. Its reasonably priced white glove flat rate brings up to 10,000 pounds of laminate flooring stacked in a climate-controlled room for less than $300. That’s over 240 boxes of 12 mm laminate flooring. In 2021, Bruce introduced the TimberTru line of laminate plank flooring. With a pedigree that instills confidence, Bruce is just one brand owned by AHF Products, a holding company that also owns well-respected flooring names like Hartco, LM Flooring, Homerwood, Hearthwood, and Raintree. Competitively priced, from $2.70 to $3.70 per square foot, Bruce TimberTru uses a simple fold-and-lock method of joinery that’s very DIY-friendly. The high-definition laminate planks look realistically like wood. TimberTru’s lineup is succinct and easy to understand. Basic Wonders is the lower-cost 8 mm line; Landscape Traditions and Natural World are the 12mm laminates. If you’re looking for a specific species of wood—oak, maple, mahogany, walnut—you won’t find it with Bruce TimberTru. Bruce’s style of naming laminates—shared by Shaw Repel—is to eschew wood species and instead identify by moods or colors, like dark browns, taupes, or whites. Repel is Shaw’s waterproof laminate technology that uses the stable, moisture-resistant OptiCore material as its base platform. Shaw warrants OptiCore against all topical spills. Repel’s warranty is an insurance policy assuring buyers that Shaw will not only replace the materials but will pay the labor costs within the first two years of original installation, as long as the flooring was professionally installed. Several lines of Shaw laminates offer Repel, including the Gold Coast series. Available in five styles and colors, Shaw Gold Coast is 12mm thick with an underlayment, and the planks are 7-1/2 inches wide by 50-1/2 inches long. This flooring choice is on the pricey side—Anthem Plus’ prices, starting at around $6.60 per square foot, reflect its premium status.
AC-1: Light home traffic, for rooms that are rarely used like guest bedroomsAC-2: Moderate home traffic, for rooms like bedroomsAC-3: Heavy home use, like hallways or kitchensAC-4: Extremely heavy residential traffic or light commercial trafficAC-5: Heavy commercial trafficAC-6: Intense commercial traffic
Thickness
Look at the thickness of the laminate flooring. Thinner floors under 10mm help you save money, though often at the expense of appearance. Boards 10mm or thicker cost more but tend to look more realistic.
Underlayments
Attached underlayments, increasingly common, help you save some time but the underlayment is relatively thin. Laminate flooring without pre-attached underlayment lets you choose the underlayment—an advantage if you want a thick, sound-dampening cork or felt underlayment.
Available Accessories
For whole-house installation, make sure that the laminate flooring has a full range of available matching accessories like quarter-round, stair noses, and floor transitions.
Why Trust the Spruce?
Lee Wallender has over 13 years of experience in researching, reviewing, and writing about home remodeling, improvement, and design. He has over 20 years of hands-on experience in improving homes. Lee has written for or been cited in People, Forbes Advisor, Huffington Post, Toolmonger, BuzzFeed, ABC News, Chicago Tribune, and Cleveland Plain Dealer.
