US floor covering market

While carpet and hardwood are suffering a decrease of their market share, the US floor covering market experiences the strong advance of LVT.

by Joseph Lundgren Consulting (Allen, Texas) - [email protected]

In recent years, competition between the various floor coverings to gain new market shares has intensified with the entry of new materials. Although carpet continues to have a dominant position with a 45% share of the market in value (albeit lower than the 55% of the year 2009), American consumers are increasingly aware of the advantages of hard surfaces. This benefits not only ceramic tiles, whose share grew in 2017 to 14.3% of the total market, but also other growing categories, most notably Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT).

Historically LVT has been grouped together with the vinyl category, but with sheet vinyl declining and LVT growing, Catalina Research has broken it out into a separate category in 2015: from 2015 to 2017 LVT’s share grew from 6.1 to 9.4% of the total US floor coverings market.

Most of LVT’s growth is impacting hardwood, whose market share decreased from 16.4% to 13.7% in just a couple of years. But it’s also impacting ceramic tile’s growth and capturing a percentage of the overall growth of the industry (unsurprisingly, new stone looks and designs are growing in the LVT new collections).