Hi Monica! Well, here's what I was able to come up with: most new home construction in the US is built with subfloors. Homes with basements or crawl spaces are built with subfloors. Cement slabs are more common in the southeastern region of the US. The pros of subfloor are that you can access stuff if you want to remodel or need to re-do your plumbing and you don't want to have to crack up the cement slab to get to that stuff. Laying down hardwood can be trickier with cement slabs because they often retain moisture. Also, cement is hard. Hard on joints of us old folks who aren't getting any younger. However, you can do pretty neat radiant heat with a cement slab, so toes stay toasty! Some people like slabs because they don't get the critters and bugs like you get in your crawl space. Also, you can use it as a finished floor, unlike a subfloor, where you have to lay something on top of it. But that brings us back around to the "hardness" issue. It is hard to stand on cement all day because it's hard. Of course, that is also true of tile, if you choose to lay that down over your subfloor. So, I quickly read 4-5 articles on the topic, and this is pretty much what they all had to say. The subfloor people and the cement people each argue theirs is superior; however, as you guessed, there are simply a lot more homes with wood subfloors in the US, and it's pretty much becoming the "assumed" floor of choice.

So, if you live in the southeast, it seems like people should ask if your home is on cement or a wood subfloor, but if you live anywhere else, there just aren't that many around. I hope that helps! :-)

We're in the northeast, and our house was built on cement slab. No basement.

Thanks for the research Debbie. I'm in Texas where the vast majority (unless they're really older homes) are on concrete. I know many people in CA and midwest. All of their homes are on a slab. Just seems odd that when asking for help (concerning the floor) most answers assume the floor is a subfloor type.

Yeah, I see where that would be irritating. Obviously, not ALL homes on slabs are in the southeast, that is just where they are the most common. I've always lived on the west coast, and I've never lived in a house that didn't have a subfloor and a crawl space. I've never had a basement. Well, a daylight basement, but really it was just the ground floor. I guess if I were posing a question about flooring, plumbing, whatever, I would specify the house is on a slab so that I could get answers that were actually useful. Hope this helps! :-)

Guilty as charged. Guilty even if not charged.

Part regional bias for me. I grew up in the northeast where basements are common. Traveled and lived all over the USA, including slab and basement locales. Then settled back in the northeast.

Part two-story house bias. Most questions have to do with master baths, most masters are on a second floor. Sure, not all. But in my mind they are.

I sorta figure wood is wood. Easy to work in, through, and around. If a concrete slab is involved, I sorta figure because "it's there" it's going to be mentioned by the poster.

If a poster has no region listed, then I figure wood. If a poster is from the south, I sometimes ask about "slab vs subfloor" when posting. If a floor plan gets posted and I see the master is on the first floor, I usually ask if it's slab or basement.

If I err in a reply by assuming a subfloor, I have no heartache with someone correcting me.

As usual, Mongo is right. It's a regional thing. I've been in one basement since I moved to Florida 3 years ago and that was new construction. Virtually everything is on a slab here.

What a stand up guy you are Mongo...but I already knew that :) Honestly, I had no one in mind and don't recall who the poster was that finally made me ask this question.

I do totally understand that concrete slabs vs subfloor is largely a regional thing. But, it also seems like those qualified enough to answer questions concerning floors would know that they'd need to know the type of floor their dealing with if the person asking the question failed to identify which type of floor they had. Sometimes I remembered and sometimes I didn't.