Guide

How to draw a floor plan online — free & to scale

A floor plan is a top-down drawing of a space: walls, doors, windows and measurements that help you explore a layout and plan where things fit. You don't need CAD software or a design background; a browser is enough. This guide covers the free drawing workflow in FloorPlan Creator, from an empty grid to an image or view-only link. Printing a PDF at an architectural scale is available on Pro and Studio plans; see plan features before you start.

1 · Choose your starting point

There are three good ways to begin, depending on what you have:

Blank canvas — drag out a rectangle with the Room tool and adjust from there. Best when you're sketching an idea.
A template — open a ready-made floor plan template (single room, studio, L-shape or 2-bedroom) and reshape it. Fastest way to a complete plan.
A paper plan or photo — use the Trace tool: upload a photo or scan of an existing plan, click both ends of one distance you know (a wall, a doorway), type its real length, and the image snaps to true scale so you can draw directly over it. The reference image never appears in your exports.

2 · Draw the walls

Draw the outer shell first, then divide the inside. Walls snap to the grid, angles and each other's endpoints, so corners meet and connected walls stay together. Enclosed rooms are detected automatically and compute their floor areas, including irregular shapes.

New walls start at 15 cm as an editor default, not as a construction standard. Select each wall and enter the real Thickness in the Properties panel. Length is measured along the middle of a wall. If you know a rectangular room's clear dimensions, set wall thicknesses first, then select the room and enter its final inside width and depth.

3 · Add doors and windows

Doors and windows live inside walls, the way real openings do. Place one on a wall, then drag it along to position it. Pick the style that matches your plan: single, double, sliding or pocket doors, plain archways, and windows. For a single door, the swing arc is drawn automatically; use Flip swing and Flip hinge until the opening matches the room. Select an opening to enter its width and its clearance from either wall end in the Properties panel.

4 · Furnish and label the rooms

Furniture is what makes a floor plan legible at a glance. Drop in symbols from the library — 50+ true architectural top-view symbols across living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, office, outdoor and structural categories — and resize, rotate or mirror them to fit. Name each room and its area appears beneath the label automatically. The room schedule (click the area total in the status bar) lists every room's area and share, with optional cost-per-m² estimates.

5 · Set and check the measurements

FloorPlan Creator uses three related measurements: clear room size between the inside wall faces, wall length along the centerline, and overall size between the outside faces. The reference points matter, so use this small example to see each number in context.

Create a 4 m × 3 m inside room

Choose m in the toolbar.
Choose Room (R). Drag a rectangle, or click one corner and then the opposite corner. The editor returns to Select with the new room selected.
Select each wall and enter its measured Thickness. New walls begin at 15 cm, which is the value used in this example.
Select the room. In Properties, enter 4 m for Inside width and 3 m for Inside depth. Press Enter or move focus out of each field. The room area becomes 12.00 m².
Choose Dimension (M), then drag between two points or click the first and second points. The tool places the annotation and returns to Select; there is no third click.

This is a measurement illustration, not an editor screenshot. A wall-endpoint Dimension annotation follows the wall centerline; the automatic chains separately show the clear inside span and the outside overall span.

Inside: 4.00 m × 3.00 mClear space between the inner wall faces; use the room's Inside width and Inside depth fields.
Centerline: 4.15 m × 3.15 mWall lengths and a Dimension snapped to wall endpoints use the middle of each 15 cm wall.
Overall: 4.30 m × 3.30 mOutside face to outside face; the outer automatic dimension chain shows this footprint.

With snapping on, place a Dimension between the endpoints of the long wall and it reads 4.15 m, not the 4.00 m inside width. Its Properties show Measured length, Line offset and Flip side. When both endpoints attach to walls, the measured length follows later wall edits and cannot resize the wall. Dimension annotations help document a plan; confirm important distances against physical measurements of the space.

6 · Export, print to scale or share

Print-to-scale PDF export is available on Pro and Studio. Open Export, which displays the Download or print dialog, then choose Print / PDF and work through this checklist.

Choose a Paper size: A4, A3, A2, A1, US Letter or US Tabloid. Page orientation is selected automatically.
For metric drawings, choose the fixed Scale 1:50, 1:100 or 1:200. Feet and inches use architectural scale choices. Fit to page automatically chooses a supported scale that fits; choose a fixed option when you need a particular ratio.
Check the Preview. If a fixed scale does not fit, choose a larger paper size or a coarser scale. For a multi-floor plan, choose All floors — one page each or the current floor.
Room list starts at Not included. Choose Add a final page only when you want the schedule in the PDF.
Choose Download PDF. In the print dialog, print at 100% or Actual size; turn off Fit to page because it changes the drawing scale.

Check the printed scale with a ruler

For the example room, measure the automatic chain segment labelled 4.00 m.

At 1:504.00 m prints as 80 mm

At 1:1004.00 m prints as 40 mm

The separate 4.15 m centerline annotation would measure 83 mm at 1:50 or 41.5 mm at 1:100. The scale bar changes length to fit the title block, so read its terminal label before measuring it. Paper millimetres = labelled metres × 1,000 ÷ scale denominator. In this A4 example, the automatically selected landscape page shows a 0–2 m bar measuring 40 mm at 1:50 and a 0–5 m bar measuring 50 mm at 1:100.

Free includes one project with one floor, templates, tracing, 3D preview, sharing, and watermarked PNG or JPEG export up to 2K. Pro and Studio add SVG, images up to 8K without a watermark, and print-to-scale PDF. Studio also adds DXF and OBJ. Compare the current plan features. If you do not need a file, Share creates a view-only link to the latest saved version of the plan.

Common beginner mistakes (and easy fixes)

Guessing measurements. Measure the longest wall of the real room first and draw it exactly; everything else hangs off it. Tracing a photo? Calibrate off the longest known distance for the best accuracy.
Drawing rooms as separate boxes. Let walls share corners — connected walls resize together, and shared walls are how real buildings work.
Forgetting door swings. Use the swing arcs to check that doors clear nearby walls, fixtures and furniture.
Skipping the scale check. After printing, use a ruler to verify a labelled dimension and the scale bar before relying on the paper measurement.

Frequently asked

Is it really free to draw a floor plan? Yes. Free includes the editor, one project with one floor, templates, tracing, 3D preview, sharing, and watermarked PNG or JPEG export up to 2K. Print-to-scale PDF and SVG are on Pro and Studio; DXF and OBJ are on Studio.

Can I draw a floor plan on my phone or tablet? Yes. The editor is touch-friendly — pinch to zoom, two fingers to pan — though a bigger screen makes detailed work faster.

Do my plans save? Automatically, to the cloud, with version history — and offline edits sync when your connection returns.

Start your floor plan — it's free

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