Tile materials
Porcelain vs ceramic tiles: which should you actually buy?
7 min read · Updated 1 August 2026
The short answer
Porcelain for floors, wet rooms, outdoors and anywhere heavy: it absorbs under 0.5% water, is frost resistant and holds up to traffic. Ceramic for walls and splashbacks: cheaper, lighter, easier to cut, but too soft and too porous for a busy floor or an external surface.
The one technical difference that decides everything
Both tiles are fired clay. Porcelain is made from finer clay and fired hotter and longer, which vitrifies the body — the particles fuse into something close to glass. The measurable result is water absorption: porcelain absorbs less than 0.5% of its weight in water, ceramic typically absorbs 3–10%.
That single number cascades into everything else. Low absorption means frost cannot get inside the tile and expand, so porcelain survives outdoors. It means the body is denser, so porcelain resists impact and abrasion. It also means porcelain is harder to cut, heavier to handle, and needs a better adhesive — which is why it costs more to lay, not just more to buy.
Where ceramic is genuinely the better choice
Ceramic is not the budget compromise people assume. On a bathroom or kitchen wall it is often the smarter tile: lighter, so it puts less load on plasterboard; easier to cut cleanly around sockets and pipes; and available in glazes, crackle finishes and hand-made looks that porcelain simply cannot reproduce.
Zellige, traditional metro, hand-glazed brick and most decorative wall ranges are ceramic for good reason. If the surface will never be walked on, never be frozen and never be scrubbed with an industrial cleaner, the extra money for porcelain buys you very little.
Where porcelain is non-negotiable
Any floor that gets real traffic. Any wet room or shower floor. Any external patio, balcony, step or pool surround. Any commercial space. Any floor over underfloor heating, where the thermal cycling would eventually craze a softer glaze.
It is also the only sensible answer for large format. Once a tile passes 600mm on a side, it needs a dense, dimensionally stable body to stay flat during firing. That is why the huge 1200x600mm and slab-format tiles you see in showrooms are always porcelain.
Rectified, full-body, glazed: the words that matter on the box
Rectified means the tile has been mechanically cut square after firing, so every piece is identical to within a fraction of a millimetre. Rectified tiles can be laid with a 2mm joint and look almost seamless; non-rectified tiles need 3mm or more to absorb the size variation. If you want minimal grout lines, you must buy rectified.
Full-body (or through-body) porcelain has the same colour all the way through, so a chip does not reveal a pale core — the right call for commercial floors and stair nosings. Glazed porcelain has a decorative surface layer on a porcelain body: this is the majority of what is sold, and it is perfectly fine for domestic use.
What it costs in London, laid
Materials vary from £20/m² for a plain ceramic to £120/m² for premium porcelain. Labour is the more predictable half: expect roughly £45–£60/m² for straightforward ceramic wall tiling and £60–£90/m² for large-format porcelain floors, which need levelling clips, back-buttering and a lot more preparation.
The cheap tile is rarely the cheap job. A thin, warped, non-rectified tile takes longer to lay well, and the extra labour usually eats the material saving twice over.
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