Choosing tiles comes down to five decisions: material, size, finish, slip rating, and how many to buy. Nail those and everything else is just taste. The showrooms are set up to sell you on looks first — which is fine, looks matter — but the tile that looks great and the tile that's right for the job aren't always the same thing. Here's how I'd work through it.
Key Takeaways
- Material: porcelain for floors and wet areas, ceramic is fine for walls.
- Size: big tiles suit big, flat rooms — and need a flatter substrate.
- Finish: matt for floors (grip, hides marks), gloss or matt for walls (taste).
- Slip rating: check it for any floor that gets wet. R9 (least grip) to R13 (most).
- Quantity: measure, add 10%, and buy a spare box you keep sealed.
Decision 1: Material
The big one. For most people it's porcelain or ceramic, and the right answer depends on where the tile's going.
- Porcelain is denser and barely absorbs water (0.5% or less, the technical line that defines it under EN 14411). That makes it the default for floors, wet rooms, and anywhere that takes a beating. The catch: it's harder to cut, which matters if you're fitting it yourself.
- Ceramic is softer, more porous, cheaper, and far easier to cut — genuinely fine for walls and splashbacks where there's no foot traffic.
There's also natural stone — marble, travertine, slate — which looks superb but needs sealing and more care. For the full porcelain-vs-ceramic breakdown, including which is the nightmare to cut, see porcelain vs ceramic tiles.
Decision 2: Size
Tile size changes the look and the difficulty of the job in equal measure.
Bigger tiles mean fewer grout lines, which reads as cleaner and can make a room feel larger — yes, even a small one. But big tiles are less forgiving:
- They need a flatter substrate. Any dip in the wall or floor shows as lippage (one tile edge sitting proud of the next).
- They're harder to handle and cut, and often need a bigger notched trowel and back-buttering.
- In a small, awkward room they can mean lots of cuts and waste.
If you're going large format (600mm and up), it's its own discipline — see the large format tile installation guide. For a busy, cut-heavy little bathroom, a medium tile is often the easier, tidier job.
Decision 3: Finish
Finish is partly taste, partly function.
- Matt hides water spots, fingerprints, and smears, and gives more grip underfoot. It's the sensible default for floors.
- Polished and gloss bounce light around a room — good in darker spaces — but on a floor they get slippery when wet and show every mark. Keep them to walls unless you've a specific reason.
- Textured / structured finishes add grip and are worth a look for wet-room floors.
A common, hard-to-fault combination: a matt floor for grip and a gloss or matt wall for the look you're after.
Decision 4: Slip rating
People skip this one and regret it. A floor tile that gets wet needs grip, and slip resistance is measured — commonly as an R-rating from R9 (least grip) to R13 (most).
- Bathroom floor: you want decent slip resistance, not a polished tile chosen purely on looks.
- Wet room or level-access shower floor: the floor's soaked regularly, so go higher up the scale.
- Kitchen floor: grip matters here too — wet, greasy floors are slippery.
It's the cheapest insurance in the room. A slip on a hard tile floor is a serious injury, and no amount of "but it looked lovely" makes up for it.
Decision 5: How many to buy
Once you've chosen, work out the quantity properly:
- Measure the area in square metres.
- Add 10% for cuts and breakages — more (15%) for herringbone or diagonal lays, which waste more.
- Divide by the area of one tile to get the number of tiles, then round up to whole boxes.
- Buy a spare box on top and keep it sealed. Tile is mixed in colour batches; a box bought a year later rarely matches.
The free tile calculator does all of that for you, and how many tiles do I need walks through the method if you want to understand it.
The showroom traps
A few things worth knowing before you hand over a card:
- Display lighting flatters. Showroom spotlights aren't your bathroom's lighting. Take a sample home and look at it in the actual room, in daylight and at night, before you commit.
- "Rectified" isn't a finish, it's an edge. Rectified tiles have precision-cut square edges that allow tight grout joints — great for a clean modern look, but they want a flatter substrate and a careful set-out. Know what you're buying.
- The tile is only part of the spend. Adhesive, grout, trims, tanking, and any tools you don't own all add up. Budget the whole job, not just the tiles. The honest numbers for a bathroom are in what it costs to tile a bathroom.
- Don't forget the grout. Grout colour changes the whole look, and the wrong type stains or cracks. How to choose tile grout covers it.
Putting it together
Choose the material for where it's going, the size for the room and your skill, a finish that gives grip where it needs it, a slip rating you've actually checked, and 10% more than you measured. Do that and you've made the decisions that matter — the colour and pattern are the fun bit on top.
When you've got your tiles, the fitting guides take over: the complete bathroom tiling guide walks the whole job in order.
Related guides
- Porcelain vs ceramic tiles — material choice in depth
- Large format tile installation — going big, done right
- How to choose tile grout — the finishing decision
- How many tiles do I need — quantity + the calculator
- The complete bathroom tiling guide — fitting it all