COM Yardage Chart for Contract Upholstery

The short answer on yardage

As typical contract planning figures on 54-inch plain goods, an upholstered chair seat pad takes roughly half a yard, a fully upholstered side chair 1.1–2 yards, a club chair 4–6 yards and 7–11 on a high or privacy back, a three-seat sofa 10.5–14 yards, and a banquette 1–3 yards per linear foot depending on back height and whether the outside back is upholstered. Those numbers size a mill order. They do not buy one.

Every figure below is a planning range for typical contract construction — the piece you are actually building has a cut list, and the cut list comes off the shop drawings. Use the chart to budget the textile and to sanity-check a quantity before it goes to the mill; use the approved drawing to place the order.

COM is Customer’s Own Material and COL is Customer’s Own Leather — you supply the fabric or the hide and we build the piece with it. How that process runs, what to send, and where to ship the goods is covered in COM & COL explained. This page is the arithmetic behind it.

One warning before the table. Most yardage charts on the open web are residential slipcover charts, and contract seating is built differently: a commercial side chair with an upholstered seat pad takes roughly half a yard where a residential chart may say two. On a 200-cover restaurant that gap is not a rounding error. Budget contract packages off contract figures.

Yardage by piece type

All figures assume 54-inch-wide plain, non-directional goods with no repeat, in typical contract construction, before any allowance for pattern repeat, narrow width, or fabric direction. Those adders come later on this page and they stack.

Three rules fall out of that table that are worth more than any single row.

Seat-only to fully upholstered is a step, not a fixed multiple. Take one chair frame and cover only the seat and inside back, then cover the same frame inside and out: the delta runs from about half a yard to a little over a yard — roughly 1.6 to 2.5 times the partial figure, depending on how much back there is to cover. It is the same delta on the barstool version of that frame. Stool height adds legs, not cloth.

Two materials on one chair take more cloth than one material. Seat in vinyl, back in a woven, is a common contract move — but each material needs its own cut plan, and the seat-only figure plus the back-only figure generally sums higher than the seat-and-back figure for the same chair. Budget the two-tone look deliberately rather than discovering it at order stage.

Headboard yardage is set by style, not by bed size. Going from a twin to a king in the same design adds roughly 30%. Changing from a plain flat panel to a framed, bordered, or bolstered design at the same bed size can double it. Any chart that gives you one number for a queen headboard is guessing at the design.

Banquettes, booths, and benches

Banquettes are estimated the way they are priced — per linear foot. Two variables carry almost all of it: how tall the back is, and whether the outside back is upholstered or left plain against a wall.

These are planning rates, not cut quantities. Published per-foot bench yardage of this kind traces to a small number of manufacturers’ price lists and runs generous against pure geometry — a real run carries corner returns, seam allowance, and shop-built segmentation. Confirm the figure on the shop drawing before the mill order goes out.

Two scaling rules run through those figures. Every additional 6 inches of back height adds roughly half a yard per linear foot. And upholstering the outside back adds roughly a flat yard per linear foot at any height — it is close to a doubling on a low banquette and proportionally less as the back gets taller. That second one is a floor-plan decision, not a fabric decision: a divider run down the middle of a dining room takes roughly one and a half to two times the textile of the identical run pushed against a wall. Worth knowing while the plan is still moving. Back heights and seat depths are covered in banquette and booth dimensions.

Detailing moves it less than most buyers expect. Deep diamond or biscuit tufting pulls in noticeably more cloth than a smooth inside back; vertical and horizontal channeling and headrolls sit below tufting, but they are not free — a channeled back takes more than a flat panel of the same height, and deep channels on a tall back more again. There is no reliable universal percentage for any of them — the number tracks tuft depth, so ask for it against your detail and your back height rather than off a chart.

Booths are easier to estimate per unit than per foot — that is an estimating convention only; booths are still quoted per linear foot, like any banquette.

The low end of each range is a 30-inch unit — one seat per side; the high end is a 48-inch unit, which seats two.

For units off these lengths, ask the manufacturer to re-run the yardage rather than scaling it — published length adders on booth price lists often scale price, not cloth, and the two do not move together. Anything over 5 feet is better estimated on the per-linear-foot rate than as a booth. A backless bench seat takes the least fabric of any seating format — about 0.3 yard per linear foot, though short benches under about 2 feet run nearer 0.4 per foot, because a short run still carries a minimum cut and yardage is quoted in quarter-yard steps.

All of it gets settled on the drawing rather than the chart — which is what a banquette drawing is for.

What a pattern repeat costs

A vertical repeat is the distance up the roll before the motif starts over. A horizontal repeat is the distance across it, selvedge to selvedge. A fabric can have one, the other, or both, and a half-drop adds an offset on top. Repeat costs yardage for one reason: every cut part has to start at the same point in the motif, so the cutter loses up to a full repeat length of drop on each part before the useful cloth begins.

The trade method is consistent across manufacturers even where the percentages are not: add the vertical and horizontal repeat together, then apply an allowance to the plain-goods yardage.

Those bands are the range across published manufacturer allowances, not a single industry table — there isn’t one. Published allowances for the same repeat can differ several-fold between manufacturers, which is why the honest instruction is to ask your manufacturer which allowance they apply before you commit the order rather than assume a number off a chart.

Direction matters inside the allowance too. Cutting patterned goods up the roll typically costs around five percentage points more than railroading the same fabric, and a two-way match — where the motif has to line up in both directions — costs more again.

The part that explains the spread: the repeat allowance scales with part size, not with the piece. A repeat costs you drop on every part you cut, so a package of small parts absorbs a large repeat cheaply — at least one chair maker publishes a single flat 10% covering repeat and narrow width together, because a seat pad simply doesn’t lose much. A long banquette back, a sofa deck, or a headboard panel loses the most, because each part is long and there are few of them to average across. Practically: a bold repeat on a dining-chair package barely moves the yardage, and the same fabric on a 40-foot banquette run can be the difference between one mill order and two.

Fabric width, and why narrow goods cost more than the math says

54 inches is the U.S. contract standard, and every yardage figure on this page is stated on that basis. European goods woven at 140 cm measure about 55 inches and behave as 54-inch equivalents. Below 54, the penalty is not proportional.

A yard of 45-inch goods holds about 17% less cloth than a yard of 54-inch, so pure area math says buy about 20% more. The published allowance is nearer 40%. The gap is the whole point: cut parts don’t shrink with the roll. A back panel that nested two-up across 54 inches needs a full-width cut the moment it no longer fits two-up, and you lose a whole part per pass, not a percentage of one. That is why the penalty steps rather than slopes.

The buyer’s move is simple. Check the roll width before you compare price per yard — a narrower roll at the same yard price does not deliver the same cloth, and on a large seating package it is not close.

Railroading, and what it does on a long run

Most fabric is woven to run up the roll: the pattern repeats parallel to the selvedge, so the goods travel vertically over a piece — up the front, over the seat, up the back. Mills default to it because drapery and bedding consume far more yardage than upholstery and want vertical seams. A railroaded fabric runs the other way, with the pattern travelling across the roll, so the goods run horizontally along the length of a piece.

On a bench or banquette, 54 inches is the hinge. Any seat or back longer than the roll width in a non-railroaded fabric needs a seam — realistically every 52 inches once seam allowance is taken. Railroaded goods run the whole length of the bench off one length of cloth with no seam at all. On a 12-foot banquette that is the difference between a clean back and two vertical seams a designer has to place on purpose.

What it does to yardage is smaller than the internet suggests. A bench that requires one or two center seams and the same bench railroaded generally plan at the same yardage — the seams cost labor and appearance, not cloth. Where railroading genuinely saves is the repeat allowance, on the order of five percentage points against cutting the same patterned goods up the roll. Anyone quoting you a flat 30% saving for railroading is quoting one supplier’s policy, not an industry figure.

Three things stop a fabric being railroaded, and they are constraints rather than percentages:

• Nap or pile. Velvet, chenille, mohair, and corduroy reflect light directionally. Turn the pile 90 degrees and the panel reads as a different color from the one beside it. These run the stated direction or they don’t run.
• Directional motif. A tree, a script, a figure, an asymmetric stripe — railroaded, it reads sideways.
• Weave structure. Warp and weft are not interchangeable. Breaking strength and seam slippage are tested separately in each direction because they differ, so turning goods sideways can put the weaker direction under the seat load.

Leather has no roll direction to exploit at all — panels follow the shape of the hide.

One procedural point that derails projects: fabric direction is the specifier’s call, and it has to be in writing. Manufacturer terms vary on this — some default to the direction the mill publishes, some to the shop’s judgment, some require a signed direction form per model per textile. If direction isn’t specified, you inherit whichever default that workroom uses. We note fabric direction on the shop drawings and get it approved before anything is cut. On any run over about four and a half feet, either specify railroaded goods or approve the seam layout on the drawing.

Leather and COL: hides, square feet, and yield

Leather is sold by the square foot, not the yard, because a hide is an animal rather than a rectangle — irregular perimeter, a neck, a belly, two shoulders. A full hide averages about 50–55 square feet, commonly anywhere from 45 to 60.

The trade conversion is 18 square feet of leather per linear yard of 54-inch fabric. Here is the part nobody explains: 54 inches by 36 inches is 1,944 square inches, which is 13.5 square feet of actual cloth in a linear yard. The trade uses 18. That extra 4.5 square feet is the hide-waste allowance — about a third on top of the geometric area, or a quarter of the footage you order. Because the waste is already inside the factor, you do not add a further overage on top of it. It is a common way a leather order comes in materially over.

The factor is slightly conservative, which is the right direction to be wrong. At least one large contract manufacturer publishes both fabric yardage and leather square footage for the same models, and the pairs imply a working factor closer to 17. Multiplying by 18 leaves a little room rather than a little short.

Hide yield is less predictable than fabric yield for reasons worth understanding before you specify it:

• Panel width drives yield in steps, not smoothly. Parts under roughly 26 inches wide commonly take two cuts from a hide; parts in the 30–40 inch range take one, which is the worst case. A two-inch change to a cushion dimension can move consumption sharply.
• Natural marks are the hide, not defects. Brands, scars, insect bites, growth wrinkle, and range grain are normal characteristics of leather. Cutting around them where the application demands a clean face costs usable area.
• Grain and shade vary across a hide. Symmetry-critical or matched applications have to be cut from the same region, which shrinks the usable area again.
• Large continuous panels yield worst. Headboards, wall panels, and long banquette backs are where the loss lives, because there is no way to nest a big rectangle into a hide efficiently.
• Half hides and directional leathers cost more per usable foot. Buying full hides where the project allows, and avoiding printed or embossed hides with a direction, protects the count.

We accept COL on every piece we build, and we confirm the square footage required on the drawings and convert it to an expected hide count at typical hide size, so you can order the way your supplier actually ships. Choosing between a textile and a hide in the first place is covered in choosing commercial upholstery fabric.

What this chart cannot tell you

A chart estimates. A drawing specifies. The gap between them is where over- and under-buying happens, and it comes from four places.

Construction. Every figure here assumes typical contract construction on 54-inch plain goods. Tuft depth, welt and contrast welt, skirts, exposed seams, boxed versus knife-edge cushions, and whether an outside back is covered all change the cut list before any allowance is applied.

Stacking. The adders on this page do not simply add up. A 16-inch repeat on 48-inch goods cut up the roll is not a 30% problem. The manufacturers who publish width and repeat in a single combined table put it nearer 40–45%; those who apply the two allowances separately land higher again. The allowances are not additive in any standard way, so ask which method your manufacturer uses before you scale a number off this page.

Mixed materials. Every additional material on a piece needs its own cut plan, and the sum runs above the single-material figure. That is a spec decision worth making with the number in front of you.

Attic stock. If you want spare yardage for future repairs, order it deliberately as a line on the mill order. Leftovers are not a plan, and a discontinued pattern two years out is a reupholstery job rather than a repair.

None of that is about the material itself. Flammability is. The material you send has to pass as well as fit. TB 117-2013 is a cigarette smolder-resistance test, not an open-flame test, and since June 25, 2021 it has been the federal flammability standard for upholstered furniture nationwide under the Consumer Product Safety Commission, not a California-only requirement. A cover fabric that does not pass on its own can still be used over a barrier material that does. It is a different standard from CAL TB 133, the full-scale open-flame burn test — which California itself no longer mandates, though some jurisdictions and project specs still call for it. Passing one is not passing the other. Send the textile’s test data with the piece list, and verify with your architect and the authority having jurisdiction which standard your occupancy requires.

What we do about it: we produce CAD shop drawings for every piece and confirm the yardage or hide requirement on them before anything is cut, so you place the mill order against a number that reflects the frame we are actually building. COM and COL are accepted on every piece, and production runs 4–10 weeks from approved drawings and material in hand. The expensive version of this is a mill order placed off an estimate rather than a drawing — send the piece list and we will confirm the number first. See also what to send for a quote.