Click vs Tongue and Groove Flooring
Click floats and goes down in a day; tongue and groove is glued or fixed and stays put. Which floors use which, and what your room needs.
The edge of a board decides how the floor is fitted, and the range splits cleanly. Every laminate and every rigid vinyl floor clicks together; every solid oak, engineered oak and parquet board is tongue and groove. That is not an accident of the catalogue. It follows from what each material is.
Click
A click profile is a machined edge that locks into its neighbour when the board is angled in and pressed down. The floor is laid floating: it sits on an underlay over the subfloor, held together by its own joints and by nothing else, with an expansion gap around the edge so the whole floor can move as one. No adhesive, no nails, no curing time, and a room can be walked on the day it is laid.
It works because the boards it is used on are stable. A laminate core is dense fibreboard; a rigid vinyl core is a solid polymer. Neither moves much with humidity, so a floating floor of either stays flat. The standard for mechanically locked multilayer panels, quoted below, describes exactly this construction: modular panels with a wear-resistant surface, supplied for floating installation. The laminate range and the rigid vinyl range are both click.
Tongue and groove
A tongue and groove edge is older and simpler: a tongue along one edge slots into a groove along the next. It does not lock, so the floor has to be held down by something else, glued to the subfloor, secret-nailed to a timber base, or in some cases glued along the joints and floated. Every oak board and parquet block in the range is tongue and groove, micro-bevelled, and fitted one of those ways.
The reason is movement. Oak takes on and gives up moisture with the seasons, engineered oak less than solid but still more than a polymer core, and a wide floor of it needs to be fixed to the subfloor so that movement happens board by board rather than across the whole floor at once. Solid oak parquet blocks are glued without exception; engineered boards are glued or floated depending on the board and the subfloor; the UK code of practice for installing wood flooring, quoted below, is the document a fitter works to.
The rules for a floating floor
Whichever material clicks together, the floating floor it makes has two rules. It needs an expansion gap around every edge and at every doorway, covered by skirting or a threshold, so it can move; the industry figure for the gap is quoted below. And it needs an underlay, which does more than most people expect: it levels small imperfections, protects against residual moisture from below, and decides how the floor sounds. The industry statement of those three jobs is quoted as well, and the underlay guide goes into the choice. The laminate producers' position on floating against full-surface gluing is the last of the facts below, and it is clearer than many fitters assume.
Common questions
Can engineered oak be floated?
Some engineered boards can be floated with the tongue and groove glued along the joint, on a suitable underlay, and some are specified for gluing down; the product's own fitting instructions say which. Over underfloor heating, gluing down is the more common specification because it puts the board in contact with the heat.
Is click flooring less solid underfoot?
A floating floor has a slightly hollower sound than a glued one, and the underlay is what decides how much. A dense underlay under a click floor closes most of the gap; a thin foam one does not. The rigid vinyl floors, with the underlay attached, are specified as a system for that reason.
Can click floors go in a bathroom?
Rigid vinyl click floors can: the core takes on no water. Laminate click floors should not, whatever the edge profile: the core is wood fibre and the laminate standard excludes rooms that get wet regularly. The LVT or laminate guide covers it.
Do I need to glue the click joints?
No. The joint is the fixing. Gluing click joints defeats the design and stops the floor being taken up board by board. The exception is a manufacturer's own instruction to seal joints in a particular wet room, which the fitting guide for the product will say.
Which fitting a room needs follows from the material chosen for it, and the material follows from the room. LVT or laminate and solid or engineered oak are the two comparisons that come first. Subfloors vary as much as houses do. Browse by town and region.
