The noise you hear at home, and what you can do about it.

If you can hear your neighbour through the wall, or footsteps from the flat above, you can reduce it. You cannot make it silent, and anyone who promises silence is selling you something. What you can do depends on where the noise is coming from, and the fixes are different enough that getting this wrong wastes money.

You do not need to know the technical words for any of this. Here is how to tell which problem you have.

• You can hear voices, the television or music from next door, through a shared wall. This is the most common one, and it is the one you can do the most about on your own side.
• You can hear footsteps, thumps or furniture being moved from the flat above. This comes down through the ceiling and needs a different fix from wall noise.
• Your own room sounds hard and echoey. Speech is tiring to follow, and everything sounds louder and harsher than it should. This one is not your neighbour at all. It is the shape of your room, and it is the easiest of the three to change.

Most people have the first one. Some have a mix of them. Work out which line sounds like your evening, and read the part below that matches it.

How do I stop hearing my neighbour through the wall?

You reduce it by adding weight to your side of the wall and a second layer held slightly apart from it, so less sound gets through. You cannot make it silent. Curtains, foam and blankets do not stop it, because they were never built to.

Voices, a television and music from next door reach you through the shared wall. To make a real difference you have to make that wall harder for sound to pass through, and the way to do that is to add weight and a second layer that is not tight against the original wall. That combination is what soundproofing actually is. It reduces how much you hear. It does not remove it, and no honest fix will.

This is also why the quick tries most people reach for do not work. Curtains, acoustic foam, egg boxes and a bookcase pushed against the wall are all either soft or thin, and neighbour noise goes straight past them. They can make your own room sound softer, which is a different problem further down this page, but they will not quiet next door.

If you own your home and can fit something to the wall yourself, our Shell system is built for exactly this. It installs on your side of the wall, it comes apart again if you move, and it is made for the voices-and-television case, not for footsteps from above. If you rent, or you want no building work at all, read the next two parts first.

Is there a way to soundproof a wall without building work?

Yes, within limits. A system that fixes to your side of the wall and can be taken down again gives you real reduction of airborne noise without rebuilding anything. It will not match a full builder's job, and it adds a little depth to the wall, but it needs no structural work and it comes off when you leave.

This is the question most renters and plenty of owners actually have. You want less noise from next door, but you are not going to knock walls about, and if you rent you may have to put things back the way they were. The honest answer is that you can get real airborne reduction from a system that mounts on your side and is designed to be removed again, without the mess and the permanence of a rebuild.

That is what Shell is. It goes on the face of your existing wall, it works on the voices-and-television kind of noise, and it is made to be reversible, so it can come off at the end of a tenancy. It is not silence. It reduces how much crosses the wall, in a way you can undo. For footsteps from above it is the wrong tool, and that has its own answer below.

If you rent, the thing to sort first is permission, which is the next part.

Why do footsteps from upstairs need a different fix from voices next door?

It comes down to how the sound gets in, not what you seem to hear it through. Voices and a television start in the air and have to cross from the air into the solid wall to reach you, and most of that energy is lost at the crossing. Footsteps are put straight into the building by contact, so far more energy gets in. That is why impact noise is harder to stop.

Sound is one chain. It is made somewhere, it travels, and it reaches you. Voices and a television are made in the air, and to reach you they have to push from the air into the wall, where most of that energy is lost. That loss is on your side. It is why adding weight and a separate layer on your side of the wall helps, because you are making that crossing harder still.

Footsteps are different. The foot hits the floor and puts the energy straight into the building, with no air gap to cross and nothing lost on the way in. Much more of it gets into the structure, which is why footsteps are harder to deal with than voices and why the fix is not the same one.

There is a common idea that footsteps only ever come through ceilings and voices only ever come through walls. That is not quite right. Once the energy is in the structure it travels through whatever is joined to it, so a heavy footstep upstairs can reach you through a wall as well as through the ceiling. What tells the two problems apart is where the sound got in, not which surface you seem to hear it through. If you want the full picture of how this works, we set it out on our science of soundproofing and acoustics page.

How do I stop footsteps and thumps from the flat above?

Footstep noise from above is treated at the ceiling, and it is a bigger job than treating a wall. It can be reduced but not removed, and how much depends on how the floor and ceiling above you are built. That varies too much for a general figure to mean anything, so we do not publish one. The honest first step is an assessment.

Footsteps, thumps and furniture dragged across a floor are impact noise, and they are the hardest of the common problems to improve from below. How far you can get depends on how your ceiling and the floor above are built, and those vary enough that any headline figure would be misleading. That is why you will not see one here.

So the sensible move is not a product off a shelf, it is an assessment of your actual ceiling. Tell us what you are hearing and how your place is built, and we will tell you what is realistic and what it would involve. You can start that with a quote enquiry, and there is no cost to asking.

Can I soundproof my flat without my landlord's permission?

Check your tenancy agreement first. Even a removable system usually counts as an alteration, so most tenancies mean you should ask. Often the stronger move is to get your landlord to deal with it, because an unresolved noise complaint is now their problem too.

Most tenancy agreements treat anything fixed to the walls as an alteration, even when it can be taken down again, so the safe step is to ask before you fit anything. That is not the whole story though. A noise complaint that never gets resolved is not only your problem. It is your landlord's, and since the rules on ending a tenancy changed, landlords have a real reason to fix the cause rather than hope it goes away.

So the move that often works better than paying for it yourself is handing it back to your landlord as something for them to solve. We have set out the landlord side of this in full, including what has changed and why acting is now in their interest, and you can point your landlord straight to it.

Do acoustic panels stop noise from neighbours?

No. Acoustic panels absorb echo inside the room they are in. They do not block sound coming from next door. These are two different jobs, and panels only do the first one.

This one catches a lot of people, because panels look like soundproofing and are often sold in the same place. They are not the same thing. A panel soaks up sound bouncing around inside your own room, which makes the room clearer and less harsh. It does nothing to stop your neighbour's television reaching you through the wall, because stopping that needs weight and separation, not a soft panel.

So if your problem is next door, panels are not the fix, and the earlier parts of this page are. If your problem is your own room sounding hard and echoey, panels are exactly right, and that is the last part below.

How do I stop my room echoing?

Add soft, sound-absorbing surfaces. Acoustic felt panels, rugs, curtains and soft furniture all soak up the echo, so speech is clearer and the room sounds calmer. This is the one noise problem that sits entirely inside your own four walls, and it is the easiest to fix.

A room echoes when sound bounces off hard, bare surfaces: plaster, glass, wooden floors and flat walls with nothing on them. The fix is to give that sound something soft to land on. Rugs, curtains and soft furniture all help. Acoustic felt panels are made for it, and they do the job in less space while doubling as something you actually want to look at.

This is worth being clear about, because it is a different problem from your neighbour. Softening your own room will not quiet next door, and it is not meant to. What it does is make your own space easier to be in and easier to hear people in. If you rent and cannot fix anything to the wall, freestanding felt screens and dividers do the same job without touching the structure.