Free floor plan maker

This is a free floor plan maker that draws to real measurements. You type or drag the sizes of your walls and rooms, and it works out the dimensions and areas for you as you go. It opens right here with nothing to install, and it works just as well on your phone while you’re standing in the room with a tape measure.

Use it as a floor planner for one room or a whole house. When you’re done, this free floor plan creator gives you a PDF that prints to scale, or a PNG or SVG to share.

How to use this floor plan maker

1. Measure your rooms. Write down the inside width and length of each room, then where each door and window sits. There’s more on doing this well below.
2. Add your first room. Type the width and length into the box on the plan and choose Add room. It’s drawn at exactly that inside size, with walls around it.
3. Add the rooms next to it. Pick the Room tool, enter a size, and drag the outline against a room you’ve already drawn. It snaps to the wall so the two rooms share it, and both keep the inside size you typed.
4. Draw anything that isn’t a rectangle. Under Room, Wall by wall lets you enter each wall as you walk around the room. The Walls tool lets you drag walls out, or type a length and tap an arrow for the direction. Rooms get measured on their own as soon as the walls close.
5. Put in doors and windows. Pick the tool and tap a wall. Then you can slide it along, or type the distance from the corner, and swap the hinge or swing with a button.
6. Try your furniture. Everything in the Furniture list is drawn at its real size, and you can change the width and depth to match what you own. Drag a bed or sofa up to a wall and it turns to put its back against the wall. While a piece is selected, dotted lines show the clear space on each side, so you can see straight away whether you can walk past it.
7. Check and export. If something overlaps, runs into a wall or blocks a door, it turns red and shows up in the fit check. When you’re happy, Export gives you a PDF that prints to scale, or a PNG or SVG to share.

Measuring a room so the plan comes out right

Measure from wall face to wall face, just above the baseboard, since that’s what you’ll actually have to fit things into. A laser measure is quicker, but a tape is fine. Have someone hold the other end if you can, because a tape that sags over a 14 foot wall will read long.

Measure every wall, even the ones that should match. Houses are rarely perfectly square. If you measure 12 feet on one side and 12 feet 1 inch on the other, that’s normal. Use Wall by wall in the Room tool and enter what you actually got. If your numbers miss by less than a foot, the difference is shared across the walls so the room still closes and stays square, and it tells you how far off you were. If they miss by more than that, you probably wrote one down wrong, and it will tell you that too.

To check a room is square, measure both diagonals. In a true rectangle they match. A 12 by 10 foot room should be about 15 feet 7 1/2 inches corner to corner. If the two are more than an inch or so apart, the room is out of square, and a long straight run of cabinets is going to show it.

For wall thickness, look at an open door. The width of the door frame is about the thickness of the wall. Most interior walls are around 4 1/2 inches. Outside walls are usually thicker, often 6 1/2 inches or more. New walls start at 4 1/2 inches. To change them all at once, use Set all outside walls in the summary panel, which pushes the walls outward so your rooms keep the inside sizes you measured.

For doors and windows, measure from the nearest corner to the edge of the opening, then the width of the opening itself. When you select a door in the plan you can type both.

Using it as a room planner

Sometimes you don’t need the whole house. You just want to know what fits in one room and whether you can still walk around it. For that, enter the room’s inside size, skip everything else and go straight to the furniture. A good room design layout usually comes together in this order:

1. Start with what you can’t move. Put in the doors, windows and closets first. A door swing takes up floor, and the fit check flags any piece that gets in its way.
2. Place the biggest piece next. The bed, sofa or dining table usually has only one or two walls that work, and it decides where everything else goes. Drag a bed or sofa up to a wall and it turns to put its back against it.
3. Keep the way through clear. Follow the path from the door to wherever people are headed, then select the pieces along it. The dotted lines show how much space you’ve left, and you can compare that to the table below.
4. Try the layout you don’t think will work. Moving things costs nothing and undo brings them back. If something you own isn’t in the furniture list, add Your own piece, type its size and label it.

Sizes to plan around

These are the sizes the furniture list starts with. They’re typical, so if you already own the piece, measure it and type the real size in.

Furniture fits in a room long before you can comfortably use it, so the space around it matters as much as the piece itself. These are the numbers I’d compare the dotted clearance lines against. If you’re building or changing walls, your local building department has the final say on the code ones.

Planning a house layout

A house layout is mostly about how the rooms connect, so build it one room at a time. Add the room you’re most sure of, then drag each new room against one that’s already on the plan. The two share a wall and both keep the inside size you typed.

Once the rooms are in, walk through your home layout on the screen. Go from the front door to the kitchen with the groceries, from the bedroom to the bathroom at night, and from wherever the laundry piles up to the washer. Long hallways, and rooms you can only reach by going through another room, are easy to spot at this stage and expensive to change later. If you’re planning new walls, also look at where the kitchen, bathrooms and laundry end up, because plumbing usually costs less when they’re close together.

For a second story, choose Add another floor in the summary panel. The floor below shows up as a light outline so you can line up the outside walls, and straight stairs are in the furniture list under Other. The summary panel adds up each room’s area, the total inside and the footprint with walls. To see how the rooms sit together, open the 3D view.

How to read a floor plan

A floor plan is a view straight down from above, as if someone had sliced the house about four feet off the floor and lifted the top away. That’s why you see walls, door openings and windows, along with everything sitting on the floor. Once you know what a few marks mean, any plan gets a lot easier to follow.

Walls

Walls are the thick lines. Outside walls are usually drawn thicker than inside ones, because they are. This tool draws them solid, while other plans may use two parallel lines or a hatched pattern. A break in a wall means there’s a door or an opening there.

Doors

A swing door is a gap in the wall with a thin line for the door itself and a quarter circle for its path. The line starts at the hinge, and the curve shows which way it opens and how much floor it sweeps through. Double doors show two of these. Sliding, pocket and bifold doors don’t swing, so they get different marks, shown below.

Windows

A window sits in the wall as a set of thin lines running along it, with no gap, since there’s still wall under the sill. Plans don’t usually show how high a window sits or how tall it is. Those details go on a separate schedule or on an elevation drawing.

Symbols

Fixtures and appliances are simple outlines, drawn to size. You’ll also see short labels: W and D for the washer and dryer, DW for the dishwasher, WH for the water heater, and on many plans REF for the refrigerator and CL for a closet. Stairs show a line for each step, with an arrow marked UP pointing the way you climb.

These are drawn by this tool, all at the same scale. Plans from an architect can also carry electrical and plumbing symbols, and they normally come with their own legend. This tool doesn’t draw those.

Dimensions

A dimension line has a small tick at each end and a number in the middle, and the number is the distance between the ticks. 12' 6" means 12 feet 6 inches. It’s worth checking what the numbers measure. Here, the lines around the building measure the outside of the walls and the numbers inside a room measure from wall face to wall face. Some plans measure to the middle of a wall instead, which is why a room can come out a few inches smaller with a tape than it looks on paper.

Scale

The scale tells you how paper relates to real life. At 1/4 inch = 1 foot, a 12 foot wall is 3 inches long on the page. Metric plans use a ratio, so at 1:50 one centimeter on paper is 50 centimeters in the room. A scale only holds if the page was printed at its true size, so look for a scale bar and check it with a ruler. PDFs from this tool have a scale bar and a test line that should measure exactly 1 inch or 5 cm.

Is this a blueprint maker?

Not in the way a builder means it. House blueprints are a full set of construction drawings: foundation and framing plans, elevations, sections, and electrical and plumbing plans, usually prepared by an architect or engineer. This tool draws one of those pieces, the floor plan, to scale and as accurate as the measurements you give it. Please don’t treat what it makes as construction blueprints.

It’s useful earlier on. You can work out what you want, get contractor quotes, and hand a scaled plan to a floor plan designer or architect so they can see what you have in mind.

How it compares to house design software

House design software is built for a bigger job. Those programs can add things like roofs, elevations, materials and realistic renderings, and they take longer to learn. Many of them also cost money.

This is a browser tool for the part you need first, which is a 2D layout you can trust. There’s nothing to install, and you can use it on a phone. The 3D view is a plain cutaway for picturing the layout, with no materials or renderings. It can’t draw a roof or an elevation, and it can’t bring in a photo or PDF of an existing plan. If you’re designing a new house down to the finishes, you’ll outgrow it. If you want to know whether a layout works, it’s plenty.

Office and restaurant layouts

It works for commercial spaces too. The furniture list has an Office group with desks, office and guest chairs, meeting tables, filing cabinets, a reception desk and a copier. Allow at least 36 inches for an aisle and 44 inches for a main aisle that a lot of people use. A common planning figure is 100 to 150 square feet per person, counting shared space, and about 30 inches of table edge per person in a meeting room.

Open a six-person office example

For a restaurant, you’ve got dining tables that seat 4, 6 or 8, a round table, dining chairs and bar stools, which is enough to see how many tables fit with room to walk between them. There’s no commercial kitchen equipment or booth seating in the list, so use Your own piece with the real sizes for those. For any business space, exits, accessibility and how many people you can have are set by local code, so check with your building department before you commit.

A worked example: a one-bedroom apartment

This apartment is made up, but it’s drawn in this exact tool and every number here comes from the plan itself. It started with the four inside room sizes you see below, typed in one at a time so each room snapped to the one before it.

The footprint with walls is 588 sq ft, so the walls themselves take up 67 sq ft. It’s worth knowing, because an advertised size often includes the walls, and that’s floor you can’t put anything on.

The clearance lines are where it gets useful. Here’s what they showed once the furniture went in:

• The sofa sits 1' 4" from the coffee table, right in the 14 to 18 inch range.
• The queen bed has 5' 4" clear at its foot, so there’s plenty of room to walk around it and get to the closet.
• The top dining chairs have 3' 0" behind them to the kitchen counters, which is enough to walk behind someone sitting there.
• The bottom chairs only have 2' 1" to the wall, and that’s the way to the bath door. It’s tight with someone seated, but fine once the chairs are pushed in. If that bothers you, the fix is a smaller table, and you can try that in about ten seconds.

That last one is the kind of thing you want to find on a screen rather than the day the table arrives. Open the plan and move things around for yourself.

Open this plan in the editor

Why draw it instead of using a floor plan generator

An AI image can look like a floor plan and still be wrong. Here, every wall is a number you can check.

Several of the floorplan makers that come up in search are AI image generators. They’ll give you a nice looking picture quickly, but it’s only a picture. The walls don’t have real lengths behind them, so you can’t check whether your sofa fits, and when I tried one the office chairs were facing the wrong way. Here, every wall is a length you gave it, and a 60 inch queen bed takes up exactly 60 inches of your 12 foot room.

Common questions