How Many Sheets of Plywood for 600 Square Feet?

How that number is worked out

These are the figures this page was built with and every line the calculator produces from them. Change anything above and all of it moves.

Wall area compared

The same wall sheathing question at every common area. House wrap is quoted off the gross wall with ten percent for laps, so it does not fall when openings are deducted, because you wrap over an opening and cut it out afterwards.

What else matters here

Twenty one sheets with nothing deducted, and this is the page to read before deciding whether to deduct anything.

Openings come off fast. Put 30 sq ft of openings into this calculator, one large window, and the order falls to 20 sheets. At 60 sq ft it is 19, and at 90 sq ft it is 18. Three sheets of a twenty one sheet order is real money on a wall that has a door and three windows in it, which most walls do.

The argument against deducting is that the offcut round an opening is rarely reusable and the sheet over a header often gets cut from a full sheet anyway. The honest answer is to deduct the big ones and not the small ones: a patio door or a picture window is worth taking out, a bathroom window is not. Note that the house wrap figure does not fall when you deduct, and that is correct, because the wrap runs over the opening and is cut out and folded into the jamb afterwards.

What this calculator assumes

• A sheet is 4 by 8, which is 32 square feet, so three and an eighth sheets cover a square.
• Openings come off in full here, not at half. A window hole in a sheathed wall is a real hole and the offcut around it is what the waste line is for.
• The nail count is the fastener schedule rather than a rule of thumb: six inches around every edge and twelve inches into the framing in the field, so a sheet at 16 inch spacing takes 64 nails and one at 24 inch spacing takes 56. Eight penny common runs about 100 nails to the pound.
• Subfloor adhesive is figured on the linear feet of joist under the sheets, at about 84 feet of quarter inch bead from a 28 ounce tube, which is the size subfloor adhesive actually comes in.
• Roof sheathing wants H clips in each bay along the unsupported joint between rafters, which is four per sheet at 24 inches on center. At 16 inches most panel thicknesses do not need them, so the list leaves them off below 19.2 inch spacing.
• A subfloor gets screwed rather than nailed on most jobs, so the list carries the same fastener count in number eight screws at about ninety five to the pound and leaves the nail line under it as the alternative. Only one of those two lines gets bought.
• Thickness does not change the count, only the price and the span rating. Check the panel span rating against your framing spacing before you buy the thin one.

Questions people ask

Other common sizes