How do I stop hearing footsteps from upstairs?

Footsteps are impact noise: the foot puts energy straight into the floor structure, which carries it through the joists and re-radiates it as sound from the ceiling below and from the walls. Because the energy never travels through air until the last moment, treatments that work on airborne noise — mass, sealing — help much less than people expect, and the closer to the source you intervene, the better the result.

Step by step

1. Confirm it is impact noise.Footsteps, dropped objects, chair legs, doors, a washing machine on spin. If you can also hear speech and television clearly, you have an airborne problem as well, and it needs different measures.
2. Start at the source if you possibly can.Carpet with a good quality underlay in the room above is the most cost-effective impact treatment there is, by a very large margin. In a flat, this is often also a lease condition — many leases require carpet or an equivalent acoustic layer in habitable rooms above another dwelling.
3. If the floor above is hard, look at acoustic underlay.Where laminate or engineered wood has been laid, a dedicated acoustic underlay under it makes a real difference and is a fraction of the cost of anything done from below. Rugs help too, and cost nothing to try.
4. Check the lease or the tenancy if it is a flat.Leases commonly prohibit removing carpet in favour of hard flooring above another flat, or require a specified acoustic performance. If a hard floor was fitted in breach of that, the route is the freeholder or managing agent rather than a construction project in your own ceiling.
5. Understand what a ceiling treatment can and cannot do.Adding mass to a ceiling that is rigidly connected to the same joists helps only a little, because the joists still carry the vibration. Meaningful improvement requires breaking the mechanical connection.
6. Consider a resilient bar ceiling.Existing ceiling removed or overboarded, resilient metal bars fixed across the joists, and new dense board fixed to the bars only — never touching the joists. Combined with mineral wool between the joists, this is the standard effective treatment from below.
7. Consider an independent ceiling where the loss of height allows.A completely separate frame carried on the walls, not touching the joists at all, with insulation in the void. It performs better than resilient bars and costs more headroom — typically 100mm or more.
8. Fill the void with mineral wool.Absorbent material between the joists reduces the cavity resonance and improves any of these treatments substantially. On its own it does very little.
9. Seal every penetration.Downlights are holes in an acoustic layer, and a ceiling full of them performs much worse. Acoustic hoods, or fewer fittings, or surface-mounted lighting.
10. Be realistic about the outcome.Impact noise between floors in an ordinary timber-floored house is very difficult to eliminate. Substantial reduction is achievable; silence is not, and anyone promising it is selling something.

Common mistakes

• Sticking acoustic foam or egg boxes to the ceiling — Absorbent material on a surface changes how the room below sounds. It does nothing whatever about vibration arriving through the joists.
• Screwing a second layer of plasterboard to the existing ceiling — It adds mass but keeps the rigid connection, so the improvement is small for a lot of work. The isolation is what does the job, not the board.
• Letting a screw touch the joist through a resilient bar — A single screw bridging the isolation short-circuits the entire system for that area. Screw length and care are the whole discipline of that method.
• Treating impact noise as an airborne problem — Sealing gaps and adding mass are the right answers for speech and television, and largely the wrong ones for footsteps.

Alternatives

• Carpet and underlay above: The cheapest and most effective measure by a large margin, because it stops the energy entering the structure. Needs the cooperation of whoever lives upstairs, which is the whole difficulty.
• Acoustic underlay under a hard floor above: A resilient layer under laminate, engineered wood or LVT. Much less effective than carpet but far better than nothing, and often acceptable to someone who does not want carpet.
• Resilient bar ceiling below: New dense board hung on resilient metal bars with insulation in the void. The standard treatment from below. Costs 30 to 50mm of ceiling height and needs care that no screw touches a joist.
• Independent ceiling: A separate frame carried entirely on the walls, isolated from the floor structure. The best performing option from below, at a cost of substantial headroom.
• Deal with it as a nuisance: Where the noise is genuinely unreasonable rather than ordinary living noise, environmental health and, in a flat, the lease and the managing agent are the routes.

Questions people ask