How Much Wallpaper Do You Need? Rolls, Drops and m²

How do you calculate how much wallpaper you need?

You work it out in five steps. Measure in centimetres and only round off at the end.

1. Measure the perimeter. Add up the widths of all the walls that are being papered.
2. Work out the drop length. Take the height of the wall and add a trimming allowance, because each drop is cut to size at the ceiling and the skirting board.
3. Count the drops. Divide the perimeter by the width of the roll and round up.
4. Count the drops per roll. Divide the length of the roll by the drop length and round down. You cannot use half a drop.
5. Count the rolls. Divide the number of drops by the number of drops per roll and round up.

You usually do not subtract windows and doors when counting drops. You still need pieces of wallpaper above a door and below a window, and they come out of the same drops. Only a wide opening, such as a sliding patio door, can be deducted from the perimeter.

The width and length of a roll are printed on the label. According to the Intervos price list of 1 August 2026, the Intervos renovation fleece we work with comes on rolls 25 or 50 metres long and 1 metre wide. The roll size differs per product, just like the weight of the renovation fleece.

What does that look like in a worked example?

Take a bedroom of 3.5 by 4 metres with a wall height of 2.60 metres. In this example we allow 10 centimetres of trimming per drop, and renovation fleece on a 25 × 1 metre roll.

With a 50 metre roll you get 18 drops from a single roll, so one roll is enough. The wall itself is 15 × 2.60 = 39 m². You need that figure for a price per m², not for the number of rolls.

You calculate the ceiling separately. In most rooms the ceiling area is the same as the floor area, so 14 m² here.

How many drops do you get from a roll of wallpaper?

That depends only on the length of the roll and the length of your drop. The higher the wall, the fewer drops per roll. For the two roll sizes of Intervos renovation fleece it looks like this:

If you are papering a stairwell, the drop is long and the last drop under the stairs is often short. You can sometimes still use an offcut there. When we wallpaper a stairwell, we work with scaffolding.

How do you calculate with a pattern?

With patterned wallpaper you add the pattern repeat to each drop. The repeat is the height over which the pattern repeats, and it is printed on the label. Because each drop is shifted up a little so that the motif lines up, you lose up to one repeat per drop.

Take the same example with a repeat of 64 centimetres. The drop length becomes 2.70 + 0.64 = 3.34 metres. From a 25 metre roll you then get 7 drops instead of 9, and for 15 drops you need 3 rolls instead of 2.

With a drop-match pattern, the motif shifts half a repeat on the next drop. Then also calculate with the full repeat, and buy an extra roll to be safe. Also allow more time if you have a pattern hung.

Can’t you simply divide the m² of your wall by the m² per roll?

No, that gives you a minimum, not a shopping list. With m² alone you calculate as if you could use every centimetre of a roll, and that is not the case.

In the example above, 39 m² ÷ 25 m² per roll gives 1.56 rolls, which you round up to 2. That happens to work out here.

But with a higher wall, a pattern or a roll with fewer metres, the trimming loss is greater, and the m² method leaves you short of rolls. Rolls you buy later may come from a different production batch and have a slightly different shade.

Conversely, there is one place where m² is exactly the right figure: the price. For a quote we work with the m² of your walls. You can work these out with our m² calculator. As a rule of thumb, a home has about 2.5 times as many m² of wall as of floor, with a ceiling height of 2.60 metres.

Do you need to work this out if you hire a wallpaper hanger?

Not with renovation fleece. Our complete package includes the Intervos renovation fleece, the adhesive and one coat of paint using Sigma paint. You pay per m² of wall, and trimming loss and leftover rolls are our concern.

Renovation fleece costs €18.99 per m² between 30 and 100 m², €15.99 between 100 and 150 m² and €14.99 above 150 m², including sanding, hanging, filling the joints and painting.

Prices exclude VAT. For the renovation of a home more than 10 years old, VAT is usually 6%.

For the bedroom in the example, that means 39 m² of wall. If you add the ceiling and the old wallpaper, you get a good idea of what a wallpaper hanger costs per room.

If you choose patterned or photo wallpaper yourself, you order it yourself. Please state in your request which wallpaper it will be and the repeat from the label; you will receive your free quote within 24 hours. Only order after the site survey: we then measure every wall, so that you order the right quantities and do not have to buy a roll from another batch.

One of our 40 wallpaper hangers carries out the work; they are all permanent employees, within a team of 97. Besides renovation fleece, they also hang glass fleece and glass fabric, and for those too we work with fixed prices per m².