Carpet Restoration Calculator

Carpet older than 10 years automatically triggers a "replace" recommendation in this calculator regardless of the cost comparison, because older carpet has less remaining useful life to justify the ongoing expense of professional cleaning after significant damage -- cleaning that would otherwise look like the cheaper option on paper. This mirrors how restoration professionals commonly reason about salvage value alongside raw dollar costs.

Both estimates scale directly with the square footage you enter, but they use different per-square-foot rates -- cleaning cost is set by damage severity while replacement cost is set by carpet grade -- so the gap between the two dollar figures stays roughly proportional as area grows rather than narrowing or widening on its own. Larger areas make both numbers bigger, not the underlying comparison different.

Independent of age and damage severity, this calculator recommends replacement whenever the estimated cleaning cost exceeds 20% of the estimated replacement cost, on the reasoning that spending a meaningful fraction of a full replacement's cost on cleaning alone starts to make less financial sense. This threshold applies on top of, not instead of, the age and heavy-damage triggers -- and note the highest ratio this calculator's own rate tables can ever produce is about 23% (Heavy damage combined with Economy-grade replacement carpet), so this trigger only fires near the top of that range.

No -- in this calculator, damage severity only feeds into the cleaning cost estimate, while replacement cost is driven entirely by the carpet grade you select (economy, mid-grade, or premium). A heavily damaged premium carpet and a lightly damaged premium carpet of the same square footage produce the identical replacement cost estimate, even though their cleaning cost estimates differ substantially.