The Easiest Way to Guess How Much Weight a Floating Shelf Can Hold

Floating shelves are a relatively easy and inexpensive way to add more storage or display space to a room, hallway or hallway. But before you load your shelves with books, glass storage containers, or potted plants, it’s a good idea to figure out roughly how much weight each of your shelves can support. Often it’s not as much as you think.

Here’s how to figure out how much weight your floating shelves can support without breaking.

How much weight can the floating shelves support?

While some floating shelves are only capable of displaying a few light items, others are strong enough to hold over 100 pounds.

Unfortunately, there is no reliable universal formula for determining how much weight any type of floating shelf can support because there are several different variables involved. These include:

• Length and depth of shelves
• Where are the shelves installed?
• How shelves are installed
• Plasterboard or plaster wall
• What the shelves are made of (e.g. chipboard, solid wood, plastic, metal, glass, etc.)

Most floating shelves are designed to mount to wall studs, so whether your walls are drywall or plaster, you should start by identifying them.

If you can’t find studs, you can usually install floating shelves using anchors such as snap bolts or mollies , though they won’t be able to support that much weight (probably no more than 20 pounds ).

When properly installed, floating shelves are usually capable of holding 40 to 50 pounds for each wall stud they are attached to. In most homes , racks are spaced 16 inches apart , so many people opt for approximately 3-foot-long floating shelves that can be easily attached to two wall racks.