Carpet area, built-up, super built-up: what you are paying for

Ask how big a flat is and you can get three different answers, all of them honest, all describing the same home. The difference between them is what gets counted.

Carpet area is the usable floor area inside the walls of your home. It is the space you can actually put furniture on, room by room, excluding the thickness of the external walls. This is the number that matches what you experience standing in the flat.

Built-up area adds the walls themselves, and usually the balconies. Because walls have real thickness, this is meaningfully larger than carpet area without giving you any more room to live in.

Super built-up area adds a share of everything held in common: the lobby, the staircase, the lift shafts, sometimes the clubhouse and the corridors. It is always the largest of the three, and the share loaded onto each flat is a decision the builder makes rather than a fixed rule. Two projects can load it very differently.

This is how a flat can be advertised as considerably larger than one it is genuinely comparable to. Nobody has to lie to produce that effect. They only have to quote a different measure.

Since RERA, homes must be sold and documented on carpet area, which is what makes comparison possible again. The habit to build is simple: when weighing two projects, ask for the carpet area of both and compare only those. If a brochure quotes super built-up, ask for the carpet figure. It is on the filed plan, so it exists.

When you look at floor plans, check that room dimensions are marked rather than implied. An architect's drawing with measurements on it is a document you can hold up against the finished room. A rendered illustration of a furnished flat is a mood board, and furniture in a drawing is always drawn slightly small.