Stair Flooring near you

Clause 11.2.2 of the ABCB Housing Provisions is specific. For a standard stairway, risers must be between 115 mm and 190 mm, goings between 240 mm and 355 mm, and the slope relationship of two risers plus one going between 550 mm and 700 mm. Spiral stairs have their own set. The flight must have constant goings and risers, with adjacent risers or goings varying by not more than 5 mm and the largest and smallest in a flight varying by not more than 10 mm.

Those tolerances exist for movement in materials and minor deviations, not as a budget to spend on a new covering. Queensland's guide says the same thing from the other direction, noting that stairs must be built with constant goings and risers except as permitted by the variations in the NCC, that the variations are intended to account for conditions such as movement of materials due to atmospheric moisture changes or minor deviations, and that the finished going and riser dimensions must not exceed the maximum and minimum dimensions in the code.

Put together, this is why a stair covering is a design exercise. If you add 20 mm of timber tread to every step, the risers stay the same but the top and bottom steps change by 20 mm relative to the floors they meet, unless those floors change by the same amount. If you tile the landing but carpet the flight, the top riser is now different. The competent answer is to draw the whole set of levels — floor below, every riser, landing, floor above — before anything is ordered.

Clause 11.2.4 of the ABCB Housing Provisions deals with slip resistance and gives two ways to satisfy it. A tread must either have a surface with a slip-resistance classification not less than that listed in Table 11.2.4 when tested to AS 4586, or have a nosing strip with a classification not less than that listed. The table requires a tread surface of P3 or R10 in dry conditions and P4 or R11 in wet conditions, and for a nosing or landing edge strip, P3 dry and P4 wet.

The two-way option is the useful part for a homeowner. It means a beautiful timber tread that would not pass as a surface can still comply if it carries a nosing strip with the right classification, because the nosing is where a foot actually lands on the way down. The same clause requires the same treatment on a landing where the edge leads to the flight below, either across the surface for not less than 190 mm from the nosing, or as a nosing strip.

Wet is defined by exposure rather than by room name — the explanatory material describes a wet surface as one that is normally wet or likely to be made wet, including areas exposed to the weather. An external entry stair is a wet surface. A stair from a pool deck is a wet surface. An internal stair in a dry house is not. That distinction is what moves the requirement from P3 to P4, and it is worth being clear about which one your stair is before choosing a finish.

Measure every riser before anything is ordered. Existing stairs, especially in older houses, are rarely perfectly uniform, and the recovering either improves that or makes it worse. Write down every riser height, the going, and the floor thickness at the top and the bottom. It takes twenty minutes and it prevents the one mistake that cannot be fixed afterwards.

Then decide the build-up on each element separately: tread thickness, riser board thickness, nosing profile, and the floor finish above and below. Queensland's guide allows the top and bottom risers to be varied so that risers are uniform after the documented finishes are installed, which is the mechanism that makes most recovering jobs work — but it has to be planned, and on an existing stair it may mean packing or cutting down the bottom step.

Structure comes next. A stair that squeaks or flexes should be fixed from underneath before it is covered, because once the treads are on, access is gone. And the balustrade needs checking: adding tread thickness raises the walking surface, which reduces the effective height of the handrail and the barrier above it. That is a safety dimension, and it is the one most often forgotten in a recovering quote.

A stair quote should include the measured riser schedule, the proposed build-up on each element, what happens at the top and bottom step, the nosing product and its slip-resistance classification, and whether the balustrade height is being checked or adjusted. If a quote has none of that, it has priced a covering and not a staircase.

Which trade does it depends on the covering and the state. Carpet and resilient coverings on stairs are floor covering work; timber treads and riser boards are usually carpentry or joinery; tiled stairs are tiling. Queensland's QBCC has separate licence classes for these, and Service NSW's licence check covers residential building work and the occupational trades in New South Wales. Ask which class the contractor holds and whether it covers the whole job or only part of it.

The Australian Consumer Law guarantees of acceptable care and skill and fitness for stated purpose apply. Keep the riser schedule and the nosing product documentation with the house papers, since those are what a building inspector, a future buyer or an insurer will want if the stair is ever questioned. Use LokalMatch to compare quotes against the same measured schedule rather than against a photograph of the stair.