What GSM Floor Protection Do I Need? Cardboard Weight & Roll Size Guide

If you're buying cardboard floor protection, you'll see products described as 250gsm, 260gsm, 350gsm, 500gsm or even heavier. The obvious question is: what GSM do I actually need?

For many painting, decorating and normal refurbishment jobs, you don't necessarily need the heaviest floor protection available. A lighter protection board can be perfectly suitable where the main risks are foot traffic, dust, paint and everyday decorating work. As the job gets longer, traffic gets heavier, equipment starts moving across the floor or the consequences of damage increase, it makes sense to consider heavier-duty protection.

The important thing is not to treat GSM as a quality score. GSM tells you the weight of the material per square metre. It doesn't tell you everything that material will withstand. The international standard ISO 536:2019 covers the method for determining the grammage of paper and board. In other words, GSM is a measurement of mass per unit area, not a rating of how well a product protects a floor.

So before deciding that 690gsm must be better than 260gsm, start with the job.

What floor protection should I use for painting and decorating?

For a normal residential painting or decorating job, the protection usually needs to deal with boots, dust, paint splashes, tools and people moving around the property. You're probably not expecting loaded trolleys or heavy equipment to cross the floor all day.

This is exactly the sort of situation where lighter temporary protection can make sense. You don't automatically need a heavy-duty construction board simply because it has a higher GSM. A product around 260gsm may be appropriate for normal decorating and temporary protection if it has been designed for that purpose.

What matters is whether the protection stays in place and provides sufficient protection against the normal hazards of the job. If paint or liquids are a realistic risk, you should also check the product's spill resistance rather than assuming GSM tells you how it will behave when wet.

This is where the difference between weight and performance becomes important. A heavier untreated board isn't automatically more resistant to a paint spill than a lighter product specifically designed with a spill-resistant surface.

What floor protection should I use for a refurbishment?

"Refurbishment" covers a huge range of jobs, so this is where we'd start asking more questions.

If you're redecorating several rooms over a week, the requirements may still be fairly light. If you're doing a six-week refurbishment with electricians, plumbers, decorators and joiners repeatedly walking through the same hallway, the protection has a much harder job.

Duration matters because wear accumulates. The board gets walked over repeatedly, edges can move, seams can open and the surface may encounter dirt, moisture, tools and equipment over time. Traffic matters for the same reason. A couple of decorators moving around a property isn't the same as several trades using the same protected corridor all day.

For longer or busier refurbishments, moving up to a heavier-duty protection product can therefore be sensible. The reason isn't simply that higher GSM is better. It's that you're asking the protection to survive a more demanding job.

Is 260gsm floor protection strong enough?

For normal temporary protection during decorating, painting and many light-to-normal refurbishment jobs, 260gsm can be an appropriate specification.

That doesn't mean 260gsm is the correct choice for every site. If you're protecting a floor through prolonged heavy traffic, regularly moving equipment across it, expecting significant impact or working on a surface where damage would be particularly expensive, we'd consider whether a heavier-duty protection system is more appropriate.

There isn't an industry rule saying that decorators need one GSM and builders need another. A more useful way to make the decision is to look at what will actually happen on top of the floor.

Job type	What matters most	What to consider
Painting a residential room	Paint splashes, dust, normal foot traffic	Suitable 260gsm protective cardboard
Short refurbishment	Foot traffic, cutting waste, spills	Cardboard with appropriate spill resistance
Multi-trade refurbishment	Duration, repeated traffic, tools	More substantial protection where required
Newly finished wooden floor	Curing, moisture, finish compatibility	Flooring manufacturer approval first
Tiled kitchen renovation	Grit, equipment, impact risk	Cardboard or Correx, depending on site risks
Heavy equipment movement	Concentrated loads and impacts	Purpose-designed load and impact protection

The principle is that you should start with what could damage the floor and then choose protection appropriate to that risk.

What if I'm using ladders, trolleys or heavy equipment?

GSM alone is not the right way of thinking about this.  Here you need to think about weight displacement. A person's weight is spread across their feet. A narrow trolley wheel, ladder foot or piece of equipment can concentrate force into a much smaller area. A dropped tool creates another type of risk again.

If those are significant risks on your site, ask whether the product is actually designed for heavy traffic or impact protection.

It's useful to look at how specialist heavy-duty manufacturers describe their products. Ram Board's heavy-duty floor protection, for example, is described in terms of several different performance characteristics, including resistance to heavy site traffic, liquid holdout through its Spill Guard technology and breathability through its Vapor-Cure technology. The manufacturer also separately describes Flex-Fiber technology as providing cushioning against drops and impacts.

That demonstrates something useful for contractors: these are separate performance characteristics. One GSM number cannot tell you all of them.

If you're regularly rolling heavy equipment across an expensive finished floor, we'd want to know that the protection system is suitable for that use rather than choosing between products purely because one says 260gsm and another says 690gsm.

What does GSM actually tell me?

GSM means grams per square metre, also known as grammage. A 260gsm board therefore has a mass of approximately 260 grams per square metre. A 690gsm board has considerably more material by weight per square metre.

ISO 536:2019 is the international standard covering the method for determining grammage of paper and board. The standard was reviewed and confirmed in 2025, so the 2019 edition remains current.

This makes GSM useful. It gives you an objective specification that can help you understand and compare products.

But GSM doesn't directly tell you how much liquid a product will resist, whether moisture can escape through it, how it behaves under a trolley wheel, how well it absorbs an impact, whether it is suitable for a particular finished floor or how long it will survive under your particular site conditions.

Those require other information. Think of GSM as one useful line on the specification sheet rather than the answer to the entire floor-protection question.

What Size Floor Protection Cardboard Roll Should I Buy?

GSM tells you how much the material weighs per square metre, but it doesn't tell you how much floor a roll will cover. For contractors buying protection for an entire property, the roll dimensions and total coverage are just as important as the material weight.

TI-Pro 260gsm protective cardboard is available in rolls covering 50m². For example, a decorator protecting a 40m² room could theoretically cover the entire area with one roll, leaving some material available for cutting. A contractor protecting 100m² would need two rolls for the nominal floor area, although additional material may be required for cutting waste and overlaps.

Before ordering, check the roll width, total length and overall coverage. Wider rolls can reduce the number of strips and joints needed in large rooms, while narrower rolls may be easier to handle in corridors and smaller spaces. A roll with a lower purchase price is not necessarily better value if it covers considerably less floor.

For a worked example comparing cardboard with Correx, see our guide to the cost of protecting 100m² of flooring.

Does higher GSM mean stronger floor protection?

A substantially heavier board may be designed for more demanding protection than a lightweight paper product, but you shouldn't use GSM alone as a proxy for strength or suitability.

Product construction matters. Surface treatments matter. The type of board matters. Most importantly, the risk you're protecting against matters.

If your concern is water, investigate spill or water resistance. If your concern is curing, investigate breathability. If your concern is heavy traffic, check whether the protection is designed for that environment. If you're worried about dropped tools, look at impact protection.

What floor protection should I use on a newly finished floor?

Here, the answer may have less to do with GSM than you think.

If the floor is newly laid, recently finished or still curing, you need to understand whether moisture or vapour needs to escape from underneath the protection. Putting a very heavy barrier over a floor isn't automatically the safest option if that barrier interferes with the curing requirements of the floor beneath it.

This is why specialist protection manufacturers discuss breathability separately from weight. Here you'll want a protection that is specifically designed to allow moisture and vapour to escape from curing floors. The manufacturer lists applications including concrete, stained floors, epoxy, refinished floors, laminate and glue-down floors.

Trades International has looked at this issue separately in our guide, How to Protect a Floor That Needs to Breathe, which explains why protection from spills above and the movement of moisture from below are two different problems.

Our TI-Pro cardboard floor protection uses Spillux Technology, which is designed around this same principle: providing temporary resistance against spills from above while allowing moisture and vapour from the subfloor to escape. You can see how we account for this alongside other products in our 2026 cardboard floor protection price and value comparison.

If you're protecting a newly installed or curing floor, check the flooring manufacturer's or installer's requirements before covering it. Those requirements are more important than simply choosing the biggest GSM number you can find.

Can cardboard floor protection get wet?

This is another area where GSM can be misleading.

Ordinary cardboard and specialist temporary floor protection aren't necessarily the same thing. Some floor-protection products incorporate treatments or technologies intended to resist spills.

For example, many providers claim that their boards provide liquid holdout against water, mud and paint splatter. But, it also makes it clear that this is temporary floor protection rather than a permanent waterproof covering.

That distinction is important and if water or paint is a risk on your job, don't simply ask whether the board is heavy enough. Find out what happens when liquid lands on it, whether the product has been designed to resist spills, and how the protection needs to be installed.

Of course the installation is a critical part of spill resistance too. A spill-resistant board won't protect a floor properly if liquid simply runs through an open seam or around an unprotected edge.

Does floor protection need to breathe?

Sometimes it does, particularly when you're dealing with a surface that is curing or releasing moisture.

This is another good example of why GSM alone isn't enough. A very heavy protection product doesn't automatically solve a moisture problem and could be the wrong choice if the system doesn't allow the required vapour movement.

Our TI-Pro allows moisture and vapours to escape and is intended to help avoid curing problems on surfaces including concrete and refinished floors. We've explored the same problem in our Trades International guide to protecting floors that need to breathe.

The practical lesson is that if the floor is new, recently laid or still curing, find out whether breathability matters before covering it. Don't assume heavier automatically means safer.

Should I buy heavy-duty floor protection just to be safe?

Sometimes paying for heavier protection is entirely justified. The cost of damaging a high-value finished floor can dwarf the cost of the protection covering it. 

But "buy the heaviest" isn't a particularly useful purchasing strategy either. Imagine you're protecting 500m² during a relatively straightforward decorating job. At £0.43 per square metre, the material cost is approximately £215. At £0.85 per square metre, it's £425. At £1.20 per square metre, it's £600.

The useful question isn't whether the £600 option is better than the £215 option in the abstract. It's what the additional £385 buys you and whether the risks on this particular job require those additional properties.

If you're protecting a newly installed, expensive floor through weeks of heavy construction traffic, spending considerably more on protection may be cheap insurance. If you're painting an empty house for three days, you may simply be buying protection you don't need.

We've looked at this using actual UK product pricing in our Cardboard Floor Protection Price Comparison. One of the reasons we compare products by price per square metre is that roll prices can be misleading when different rolls cover different areas.

How much should cardboard floor protection cost?

Start by comparing price per square metre rather than price per roll.

A £25 roll isn't necessarily cheaper than a £35 roll if the more expensive roll covers twice the area. You also need to check whether you're comparing products intended for roughly the same type of work.

In our August 2026 UK price check, we compared TI-Pro with products including Proguard, X-Board and Ram Board. TI-Pro 260gsm was approximately £0.43/m² excluding VAT at the time of the check, while the heavier and premium products we examined ranged considerably higher.

That doesn't prove the cheapest product is best. Some of those products have different constructions, weights, technologies and intended uses. In fact, that's exactly the point of this guide. The useful comparison is not simply "Which roll costs least?" It is "What protection does my job require, and what does suitable protection cost me per square metre?"

Is cardboard or Correx better for protecting floors?

Cardboard protection is convenient in rolls, can be quick to lay over larger areas and, depending on the product, can offer useful properties such as spill resistance and breathability.

Correx is a fluted polypropylene sheet rather than a fibre-based roll product. Its properties and applications are therefore different.

If you're considering Correx, we've separately explained whether all 2mm Correx is actually the same. That guide looks at thickness, grammage, material and the importance of matching the specification to the job rather than judging a protection product from one headline number.

For larger projects, it can also be useful to calculate coverage and total project cost rather than simply looking at the unit price. Our Maths of Correx guide looks at coverage, quantity, reuse and the economics of different buying decisions.

What should I check before buying floor protection?

If you're standing in a merchant or looking at products online, you don't need to become an expert in paper manufacturing. Start with the job.

First, consider what you're protecting. A finished timber floor, tile, concrete and a floor that's still curing may have different requirements. Then think about what's happening on top of it. Painting and decorating, normal foot traffic, ladders, trolleys and heavy construction activity create different risks.

Next, think about how long the protection needs to stay down. A two-day decorating job and an eight-week refurbishment shouldn't automatically get the same answer. Consider liquids and moisture as well. If spills are possible, check spill resistance. If the floor needs to cure or release moisture, check whether the protection needs to breathe.

Only then look at GSM, coverage and price per square metre. At that point, the specification has context. You're no longer buying 260gsm or 690gsm because one number sounds more impressive. You're buying protection that makes sense for the work you're actually doing.

So, what GSM floor protection do I need?

For normal painting, decorating and many light refurbishment jobs, TI-Pro 260gsm protective cardboard may provide a practical balance of coverage, temporary spill resistance and cost, provided it is suitable for the floor and expected site conditions.

The best way to compare products is to establish the protection required, then calculate the cost per square metre. A 50m² roll at an illustrative £21.60 costs approximately £0.43/m² excluding VAT, before cutting waste and any applicable delivery charges.

You can explore the TI-Pro floor protection range, read our 100m² floor protection cost guide, or compare Correx with protective cardboard to decide which material best suits your next job.  If you're ready to compare actual products and prices, see our 2026 Cardboard Floor Protection Price Comparison, where we've compared several protection products by specification, roll coverage and price per square metre.

Last reviewed: October 2026. Technical information in this guide is based on published manufacturer information and recognised standards. Site conditions vary, and particularly vulnerable, newly installed or curing flooring should always be protected in accordance with the flooring manufacturer's or installer's requirements.