Floor Plan Symbols and Abbreviations: A Visual Guide

Floor plan symbols are the shorthand drafters use to show what is in a building without drawing it in full: a door is a gap in the wall with a quarter-circle swing, a window is a break with thin lines for the glass, and stairs are parallel treads with an arrow marked UP or DN. Fixtures, appliances and electrical items have their own symbols, and abbreviations such as WIC (walk-in closet), DW (dishwasher) and R&S (rod and shelf) fill in the rest.

There is no single mandatory national standard for residential symbols. The ones below are the common conventions on US house plans; when a drawing set includes a legend, the legend wins. If you are drawing your own plan, how to draw a floor plan shows where each one goes.

Walls and openings

Walls are drawn as two parallel lines at the wall's thickness, filled solid or hatched. Outside walls are usually heavier than inside ones. On a remodel plan, existing walls, new walls and walls to be removed are told apart by the fill: solid or hatched for new, outline for existing and dashed for demolition is a common scheme, but check the legend.

Door symbols

A door is a gap in the wall plus a line for the door leaf and an arc showing its swing. The arc tells you which side the hinges are on and which way the door opens, which is the information a plan reader needs most.

Door sizes are often written in feet and inches without punctuation: 2868 is a door 2 ft 8 in wide by 6 ft 8 in high, and 3068 is 3 ft 0 in by 6 ft 8 in. Other sets tag each door (D1, D2…) and list sizes in a door schedule. Standard door sizes lists the common widths and heights.

Window symbols

A window is a break in the wall with two or three thin lines: the glass, and the sill on the outside face. A casement window may show its swing like a door; a sliding window shows two offset panes; a bay window projects beyond the wall. Window sizes are often written the same way as doors, so 3050 is a window 3 ft 0 in wide by 5 ft 0 in high, or listed in a window schedule with tags such as W1.

Floor plan symbols on a real plan

The plan below is FloorGen's 3-bed ranch with a 2-car garage. Almost every common symbol is on it. The garage has a 16 ft overhead door, drawn as a dashed line across the opening. The entry opens to the living room and kitchen through cased openings, drawn as dashed lines across gaps with no door. Bedrooms and baths have swing doors with their arcs, and the windows are breaks in the outside walls with thin glass and sill lines.

The room labels show each room's net floor area, measured to the inside faces of the walls: the garage is 507 ft², the living room 305.3 ft², the primary bedroom 266.1 ft² and the kitchen 211.7 ft².

Stairs

Stairs are drawn as parallel lines for the treads. An arrow runs along the stair with UP or DN (down) at its tail, always written from the floor you are looking at. Because the plan is cut about 4 ft above the floor, the cut passes through the stair partway up; a diagonal or zigzag break line marks it, and treads above the cut are often dashed. On the floor above, the same stair shows DN. Plans for a building permit often add the number of risers and their height, such as "14R @ 7½"".

Plumbing fixtures

Kitchen and laundry appliances

Appliances are rectangles at their real footprint, identified by a label more than by their shape. A range or cooktop may show four burner circles; a refrigerator is usually a 30 to 36 in wide rectangle marked REF; a dishwasher sits under the counter beside the sink and is marked DW; a washer and dryer are two squares marked W and D, or one stacked pair marked W/D. A dashed rectangle above the counter line usually means upper cabinets.

Electrical symbols

Electrical items often go on a separate electrical plan to keep the floor plan readable. The common symbols:

Smoke alarm locations matter for a permit; see smoke detector placement for where the IRC requires them.

Floor plan abbreviations

How FloorGen draws them

FloorGen draws doors with a solid leaf and a dashed swing arc, sliding doors with arrows for the slide direction, windows with glass panes and a sill line, and stairs with a break line, dashed treads above it and a walking line ending in an UP arrow (DN on the floor above). Plumbing fixtures, appliances and furniture are drawn as top views of their 3D models rather than as line symbols, which reads well for layout and client plans. The catalog includes outlets, light switches and an electrical panel, but they are drawn the same way, not as the standard electrical symbols in the table above; for a full electrical plan, a dedicated drafting tool or an electrician's drawing is the better route. The door and window schedule tags every opening D1, W1 and so on.

Once the symbols make sense, the next step is the numbers: how to read a floor plan covers dimension strings, scale and schedules.