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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Apartment and condo

Acoustic panels for apartments: the complete guide

What makes apartments noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Quieter rooms in shared buildings, inside your unit and between neighbors. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In apartments the main sound sources are voices, TV, music and neighbors, and the most common complaints are that hard floors and bare walls make the unit echo, neighbors hear TV and conversation, and that footsteps from upstairs.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical apartment living area of 20 × 15 ft with a 8 ft ceiling has a volume of about 2,550 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 2.09 seconds. The target for apartments is 0.50 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for apartments.

The recommended starting point

For a apartment living area like the one above, we suggest about 26 24 × 48 in rectangular panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.49 s. That is roughly 35% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for apartments is about 90% on walls and 10% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our apartment and condo solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for apartments.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for apartments