Home Improvement Interior Remodel Flooring & Stairs Carpet

Carpet on Stairs: How It's Done and Pros and Cons

Carpet covered staircase behind armchair

The Spruce / Christopher Lee Foto

When carpeting your home, the flooring company may offer to carpet the stairs, too. On a per-square-footage basis, stairs are more difficult to carpet than floors because of the cutting, tucking, and tacking required to get the carpeting tight on the stairs. The offer to carpet the stairs usually represents an extra fee. Should you install carpet on the stairs?

Pros
  • Quieter

  • Softer, for minor falls

  • Quick fix

  • Easier than refinishing stairs

Cons
  • Slippery

  • Added charge

  • Collects dirt

  • Eventually may pull away

When to Add Carpeting to Stairs

Stairs Need Freshening

Functional, builder-grade stairs—stairs that exist only to move people up and down, with zero concern for aesthetics—can be improved with carpeting. It is difficult to fix unattractive stairs because they do not lend themselves to painting. Carpet works wonders on stairs like this.

Beautiful hardwood stairs will be ruined by the addition of carpeting because the tack strips need to be nailed down, creating holes in the wood.

Stairs Are Noisy

Carpet is great at blunting or even completely eliminating the sound of people walking on wooden stairs. Consider that you've got both padding and carpet working for the cause, and you'll realize that bare wooden stairs can in no way match the quiet that carpet offers. One thing it doesn't fix, though: squeaky stairs.

Where carpeted stairs really excel is in houses that have noisy stairs. This noise is often caused by young children. And once young kids learn all about the staircase, they will use them relentlessly. Or it might be that the stair materials are too thin to adequately absorb sounds. Rather than replacing risers and treads or limiting the kids, it's often easier to carpet the stairs.

Stair-Carpeting Installation Techniques

Waterfall Technique

Waterfall is considered to be the faster method of installing carpet on stairs and uses only one strip of carpeting.

After cutting a strip of the carpet the width of the stairs, you start at the bottom and work upward. If you know what a stair runner is, it's much like this—a continuous strip of carpet. We only recommend this method on staircases that do not have nosing (a section of the tread that protrudes beyond the riser).

Cap-and-Band Method

Cap-and-band is also called wrapped nose. Each stair receives two separate sections of the carpet: one for the tread, another for the riser.

The tread carpet butts up against the tread and then wraps down and around the stair nose. Then another piece is added for the riser. More laborious than the waterfall technique, for novices it can produce a cleaner, crisper look because you don't have to deal with trying to tighten up uncooperative carpeting. Essentially, the cut pieces do the tucking for you.

3 Ways Carpeted Stairs Are Hazardous

Stair Treads Are Eased

One reason is that carpet eases the stair tread's edge. Carpet materials such as olefin and polyester are slippery. Carpeting creates a softened curve on the nose of each stair. Typically, this sharp edge helps to provide grip. But when carpet blunts that edge, your foot cannot grip as well. Walking downward on carpeted stairs is especially hazardous.

Depth Perception Is Altered

Uncarpeted stairs have crisp lines that your eye can immediately identify. The edge is clear, and it's this edge that your foot needs to meet. Carpeted stair treads tend to visually merge, making the target difficult to identify. Every stair has the same color and texture. When going up carpeted stairs, both the tread and the riser have the same color.

Tread Depth Is Shorter

Carpet shrinks stair tread depth. Stair treads are, by code, 10 inches deep, minimum. Carpet on stair risers shrinks stair tread depth by up to 1/2-inch. This can present a slight trip hazard since your foot has less area to rest on.

Cleaning Carpeting Stairs

Cleaning carpeted stairs usually means using a handheld vacuum. Still, it is difficult to completely clean carpeted stairs. Extracting dirt from the corners is hard with smaller vacuums. Larger, floor-mounted vacuums with attachments do an excellent job of cleaning carpeted stairs. But these are unwieldy and difficult to move up and down the stairs.

By contrast, wooden stairs can be cleaned with a whisk broom and dustpan. You can start at the top and gently brush debris down the staircase, one stair at a time. Or you can clear each stair individually before moving down to the next stair.

Stair-Carpet Installation Speed

Installing carpet on stairs is a fairly quick job for straight stairs with no landings. For professional carpet installers, it usually only takes a few minutes per stair to complete the entire staircase.

Once the strips and padding are installed and the carpet cut to size, carpet installers can pick up speed when laying carpet waterfall-style. This is because that long, narrow section of carpet just keeps getting tucked and tacked upwards, with no interruptions.

Tip

Unless you specify in advance, the carpet installers may default to the waterfall installation technique since it is faster and easier. So, be sure to talk to the installers ahead of time and even put your choice in writing to avoid confusion.

Should You Put Carpet on Your Stairs?

Install Carpet on Stairs
  • Noisy stairs or common staircases

  • Homes with young children

  • Stairs that see a lot of use

  • For a quick fix

Avoid Carpet on Stairs
  • Hardwood treads in good shape

  • Stairs to basements, attics

  • If you dislike vacuuming

  • Homes with elderly people

If your staircase in particular or house in general is noisy, carpet on the stairs is one way to help reduce noise. Any home that has active children can benefit from installing carpet on the stairs. The carpet not only quiets down the children when they go up or down the stairs but carpet provides a softer landing for falls.

Stairs that are in need of a quick fix can also benefit from carpet. The carpet covers surface problems and blemishes in the wood.

If your staircase is built with quality hardwood on the treads, you may want to avoid installing carpet on the stairs. Tacks and nail holes will ruin the appearance of the treads if you should later decide to refinish and stain the stairs.

Carpeted stairs leading to basements or work areas will get dirty and require more frequent cleaning. If you don't like carrying a vacuum, or if you just dislike vacuuming, you'll probably want to avoid carpet. Vacuuming carpeted stairs is a painstaking job that requires you to haul the machine up and down the stairs.