Wear layer depth is the number everyone publishes and nobody can check

Depth is a dimension, not a performance. It says how much clear material sits above the print, and nothing at all about how that material behaves when a chair is dragged across it.

A wear layer is the transparent film on top of a vinyl plank. The pattern underneath it is a photograph; the layer is what stands between that photograph and the room. Its depth is quoted in mils, thousandths of an inch. It is the number that leads almost every product page, every showroom conversation and every comparison table on the consumer web.

Depth is also routinely confused with the plank’s overall thickness, which is quoted in millimeters and describes something else entirely: the core, which governs how the floor sits over an uneven subfloor, not how it wears. A thick plank with a shallow wear layer will show traffic before a thin plank with a deep one.

Every one of the 16 products on this site declares how deep its wear layer is. Nine products say what that layer is made of. Two products publish a laboratory abrasion result for it.

The depth figure is also the least discriminating of the three. 13 products in this release carry the same declared depth, which means that on the column most shops lead with, most of the market is a tie. The column that would break the tie, meaning how the layer behaved under a rotating abrader, is published for two products.

Seven products publish the depth and nothing else about the layer: no chemistry, no abrasion result. For those, the depth is the whole of what the maker is willing to say, and it should be read as the thinner promise it is.

Two wear layers of equal depth are not equally durable if one carries a reinforced coating and the other carries a plain urethane finish. Manufacturers know this, which is why the ones that treat their layers give the treatment a name and put it on the sell sheet. The name is a marketing term, not a specification. Nothing obliges a maker to say what is in the coating, or to test it against anything. But it is at least a statement that something is there.

The check that would settle it exists. A rotating abrader run against a sample under a stated load, for a stated number of cycles, produces a figure that can be compared between products. It is a laboratory test, it costs money, and its result is published for very few of the products here. Where it is published, the cycle count is printed beside the depth. Where it is not, the depth stands alone and should be read as the weaker claim it is.

This note does not say that a deeper wear layer is no better than a shallow one. All else equal it is, and all else is sometimes equal. What it says is that all else is usually unknown, and that a column of depths, ranked, presents unknowns as a ranking.

The three columns also leave out the finish itself as a separate layer, gloss retention, and the resistance of the print film to light. Those are named in the warranty exclusions rather than in the specification, and the exclusions are published per product and compared on the exclusion matrix.