Questions to Ask a Flooring Contractor Before Hiring

Start with the paperwork, not the flooring

Everybody wants to talk about planks and colors. Do that last. Ten minutes of checking first rules out most of the people you don’t want in your house.

Licensing varies more than you’d think

There is no national flooring license, and this trips people up. Some states license flooring as its own specialty. California has a C-15 “Flooring and Floor Covering” classification, run by the Contractors State License Board, and their free Check a License tool confirms a contractor’s status in about a minute. Some states have no statewide flooring license whatsoever, leaving the matter to the city: New York City requires a Home Improvement Contractor license for residential work of $200 or more, and it forbids chopping a job into smaller contracts to duck under that.

There is a second lawful answer we skipped. A B General Building contractor may take on your flooring when it sits inside a job involving two or more unrelated trades, which is what a kitchen remodel or a room addition is. What a B may not do is take a standalone floor-only contract without either holding the C-15 or subcontracting it to someone who does. B-2 Residential Remodeling works much the same way.

So the sharp question is not whether they hold a license, and it is not whether they hold the one license you read about on a website. It is whether the credential they hold covers the work you are actually buying, and whether the paperwork names the exact company on your contract. Ask the board, not the business card. And if a contractor holds something other than what you expected, ask what its scope is before you assume the worst, because the state licenses more than one route to a floor.

Utah shows how strange this gets. It licenses flooring under a Carpentry and Flooring classification, and getting one means a 25 hour prelicensure course. But read the exemptions and Utah has decided that carpet, vinyl sheet, and vinyl plank installation do not require a contractor license at all. Those are three of the most commonly installed floors in the country. So in Utah, an LVP installer with no license may be entirely lawful, and treating that blank as proof of a cowboy would be a mistake we made ourselves until recently.

One more step people skip. Match the license to the exact legal name on your contract. Checking that “ABC Flooring” has a license does you no good if the contract you sign names a different LLC, or if the crew that shows up works for someone else entirely.

Insurance: get the certificate, then make the call

Two coverages matter here. General liability pays out when somebody puts a knee through your drywall or scars the stair rail hauling planks upstairs. Workers’ compensation settles who pays when a member of the crew gets hurt in your hallway.

On how much liability cover is enough, we used to tell you a million per occurrence and two million aggregate was the common setup. Nobody publishes what is common, and we should not have said it. What we can point at is what states demand: Vermont requires registered residential contractors to carry a million per occurrence and two million aggregate, while Ohio sets its floor at $250,000. So the million figure is real, it is just a statutory minimum somewhere rather than an industry norm everywhere. Ask what they carry and weigh it against what is in the room.

California hands you a sharp tool here. A licence there dies on its own the day a required workers’ comp policy lapses, suspended by operation of law. No hearing, no warning letter. So a Californian whose comp quietly expired is not just uninsured, they became unlicensed on that date, and everything they build for you counts as unlicensed work. Look it up on the board’s site rather than raising it in conversation.

Here’s the part almost nobody does. A certificate of insurance is a snapshot of one day, usually an ACORD 25 form, and it can be expired or straight up faked. The form itself says it confers no rights on you, that it is issued as a matter of information only, and, the line to notice, that the limits printed on it may already have been reduced by claims paid. Look up the insurer or broker yourself, call the number you found rather than the one on the certificate, and ask whether the policy is active right now. That one phone call is the whole verification.

What happens if an uninsured installer gets hurt on your floor depends a lot on your state and on your own homeowners policy. Don’t take a stranger’s word for it. Ask your insurance agent what you’re exposed to before you hire someone without coverage.

A certification is not a license

These two get blurred in sales conversations on purpose. A license is a legal requirement set by your state or city. A certification is voluntary, and the good ones are earned.

Three are worth knowing in flooring, and the differences between them matter more than the badges.

• The National Wood Flooring Association runs a genuinely tiered scheme with hands-on schools and practical testing, and it ladders upward, so a Certified Craftsman had to hold the rungs below it first. Ask which certification, not whether. Certified Installer and Certified Sand and Finisher are different credentials, and for a refinishing job the second one is the one that counts.
• Certified Flooring Installers has been going since 1993 and tests you orally, in writing, and on your knees with tools in your hands. Know who owns it though: CFI is now a division of the World Floor Covering Association, which is the industry’s own trade association. It is a real credential, earned. It is not an independent watchdog.
• INSTALL is the one nobody mentions and we left it out too. It is apprenticeship-backed, trains through a network of centres across North America, and it carries something neither of the others offers: a third party warranty on the labour. Not having it does not make an installer suspect. Having it is worth more than most homeowners realise.

FCICA is real as well, but it certifies installation managers on commercial jobs, so it tells you little about the person kneeling on your floor. And be careful with NALFA, which certifies laminate products rather than the people who lay them. A seal on the box is not a qualification on the fitter.

One more caution, on a claim we used to make ourselves. We told you the wood flooring association wants 24 continuing education credits a year. Its own pages give two different answers, and the requirements page says ten. So ask what a contractor holds and when they last renewed it, rather than quizzing them on a number that the association cannot state consistently.

A contractor with none of these can still be excellent, and plenty of the best learned on job sites. But someone who claims a certification should be able to name which one and show it.

The questions to ask a flooring contractor before you hire

Bring this to the walkthrough and set it on the kitchen counter, then read the room. A good installer loosens up when the questions get concrete, because that specificity is how they justify quoting above the lowest number you were handed.

1. 1What license does this work require here, and can I have your number to look up?
2. 2Who insures you, and are you carrying workers’ comp for the crew?
3. 3Are these your employees or a subbed crew, and who runs the job on site?
4. 4How will you check the subfloor is flat, and what’s your tolerance spec?
5. 5If this is on concrete, what moisture test will you run before install?
6. 6What happens, in writing, if the subfloor needs more work than you expected?
7. 7What’s the acclimation plan, and how many days will the material sit here first?
8. 8Who buys the material, and who eats it if the order runs short?
9. 9What’s your workmanship warranty, in years, and what does it actually cover?
10. 10What’s the deposit, and what does the payment schedule look like after that?
11. 11Who moves the furniture, pulls the appliances, and resets the toilet?
12. 12Can I have three local references from jobs you finished this past year?

Who buys the flooring material?

This one is genuinely contested, and anybody who tells you there’s one right answer is selling something. Installers usually buy at trade pricing and mark it up, and many say plainly that they’d rather supply it. Some won’t take a labor-only job at all.

The tradeoff is about who owns the problem. When the installer supplies the material, a short order or a bad batch is their headache and their supplier relationship. When you supply it, you might save the markup, but if the boxes run short mid-install or a plank line has a defect, that’s your phone call and your delay. Installers also point out that dye lots and product lines get discontinued, so buy extra and keep a few spare boxes either way.

What a flooring warranty actually covers

There are two warranties on your floor and they cover opposite things. People find this out at the worst possible moment.

Two separate promises

The manufacturer’s warranty covers the product: defects in the plank itself. The installer’s workmanship warranty covers the labor. You will hear that a year is the norm for workmanship, and a year is a real number, but understand what it usually is before you let it scare you.

A workmanship warranty is also only as good as the company still being around to honor it. That’s worth weighing against a rock-bottom price from someone who started the business last spring.

What quietly voids the manufacturer’s warranty

This is the part that should change how you read a bid. Manufacturers void the product warranty when the floor was installed outside their written spec, and that spec is mostly about the subfloor. Shaw’s engineered hardwood guideline is a fair example. It wants the subfloor flat to 3/16 inch over 10 feet or 1/8 inch over 6, wants a wood subfloor at or below 12% moisture and within 4% of the flooring itself, and wants both figures taken with a pin type meter rather than guessed at.

We had that spec wrong in a way worth admitting. We used to attribute it to Shaw’s solid hardwood warranty and to bolt a 48 hour acclimation requirement onto the end of it. Shaw does not publish a solid hardwood installation guideline, so we were quoting a document that does not exist, and the acclimation figure appears nowhere in what Shaw actually publishes. If a contractor cites a spec at you, ask which document it is in. We should have.

The National Wood Flooring Association publishes baseline guidelines too, generally 1/4 inch over 10 feet for nail-down and tighter for glued or floating floors. Here’s the catch: when the manufacturer’s spec is stricter than the association’s baseline, the manufacturer’s spec is the one that decides whether your claim gets paid. And every one of them excludes damage caused by installation errors, which is the whole point of this section.

While we are correcting ourselves, a word on the lifetime warranties. We used to say Mohawk’s laminate cover runs for as long as you own the home. It does not, and that sentence was actually Pergo’s, which we had quietly moved across. Mohawk’s cover belongs to the original buyer and does not follow the house to the next owner, and its value is prorated down over the years rather than staying whole. Read the word lifetime carefully. It rarely means what a homeowner assumes.

Read that again and the whole picture flips. A contractor who skips the moisture test isn’t just cutting a corner. He’s voiding the warranty on the floor you paid for, and neither he nor the manufacturer will be holding the bill.

Deposits: is it normal to pay 50% upfront?

No. And in some states, asking for it is against the law.

California draws a hard line on the up-front money on a home improvement job, in Business and Professions Code section 7159.5: no more than $1,000 or 10% of the contract price, whichever is less, and breaking that line is a misdemeanor carrying a fine and up to a year in county jail. It reaches an owner or a tenant. Nevada sets the same ceiling in NRS 624.970 but aims it more narrowly, protecting only an owner who actually occupies the single-family home. Landlords and second-home owners in Nevada have no cap to point at.

More states cap deposits than we used to admit, and telling you to go check your own was a dodge. Maryland holds it to a third of the contract price. So does Maine. Pennsylvania holds it to a third on any job over $5,000, plus the cost of special order materials. Massachusetts allows the greater of a third or the actual cost of anything special ordered or custom made, which for flooring is the clause that matters, since dye lots and custom orders are the whole trade. Ohio caps deposits at 10% but only on jobs above $25,000, so most flooring jobs there have no cap at all, and Ohio separately lets a supplier take up to 75% on a special order item that cannot be returned.

Which means a Massachusetts installer asking 60% down to cover a custom hardwood order may be following the statute to the letter. The lesson is not that a big deposit is fine. It is that a big deposit needs a reason you can name, a bond, or a special order, and a contractor who has one will tell you which. After that, peg each instalment to a milestone you can stand in front of: material delivered, demo and prep done, install finished, and the last cheque only once you have walked the floor yourself.

Red flags and the signs of a bad contractor

A few of these deserve a follow-up question. Some mean you’re done talking.

• The price drops dramatically if you sign tonight. A real bid doesn’t expire at bedtime.
• A big deposit with no bond and no explanation. The deposit itself is not the tell, since a bonded contractor or a custom order can justify one. The refusal to say which is.
• Any pressure to pay in cash, or to make the cheque out to someone other than the company on the contract.
• “Subfloor prep as needed” with no number and no plan.
• No moisture test mentioned, on a concrete slab.
• Won’t say whether the crew is in-house or subbed out. Warranty claims are where that vagueness costs you, when the seller and the installer point at each other.
• Can’t name the manufacturer’s flatness or moisture spec for the product they’re selling you.
• No written contract, or a scope with no dates and no line items.
• A workmanship warranty they’ll describe out loud but won’t put on paper.

Now the other half of the ledger, because we have manufactured a few false alarms in our time. An unfamiliar licence classification. A sole trader carrying no workers’ comp. An unlicensed carpet fitter in a state that never licensed carpet fitting. A bonded contractor wanting a third at the start. Each of those is frequently lawful, and treating any of them as proof of a crook costs somebody honest a job. Find out what the paperwork means before deciding it means something bad.

The three day right to cancel, and the trap in it for flooring buyers

In-home flooring pitches are a pressure cooker, and the sit-down-and-sign-tonight routine is a known pattern in this trade. Federal law does have a lever. The FTC’s Cooling-Off Rule gives you three business days to unwind a sale made at your home, if it is worth $25 or more. Sign at a hotel ballroom or a home show instead, anywhere that is not their regular storefront, and the threshold climbs to $130. At signing the seller has to tell you out loud that you can cancel, and hand you written notice plus two copies of the cancellation form. And business day here means everything except Sundays and federal holidays, so your Saturday counts.

Three more protections California grants that hardly anyone mentions, and one of them outlives the showroom problem entirely.

• Seniors get five days rather than three. Where the buyer is 65 or older, the notice itself must say five.
• Following a declared disaster the window stretches to seven business days, and this is the one that holds even where the deal was struck in a showroom. Floors are among the first things ripped out after a flood or a fire, so anyone repairing a home damaged in a declared emergency owns that clock.
• Your window opens on the day you are handed a signed, dated copy of the agreement carrying the cancellation notice, not the day you sign. Withhold that paperwork and the countdown never begins, which can leave an agreement cancellable long after everyone assumed the chance had gone.