Site Plan vs Floor Plan: What Contractors Need to Know

A site plan answers 'where on the property?' It's a top-down view of the whole lot: boundary, structures, driveway, and the distances between them. A floor plan answers 'how is the space arranged?' It's a top-down view inside a structure: walls, rooms, openings, and their dimensions.

Contractors mix the names up constantly, and permitting offices don't — asking for the wrong drawing type is one of the most common reasons small permit applications bounce.

The property boundary with lot dimensions, existing structures at their footprints, setback distances from structures to property lines, driveways and hard surfaces, and the proposed work located precisely on the lot. Fences, decks, additions, pads, pools, and detached structures are all site plan territory.

Rule of thumb: if the work changes what sits on the land or where, the drawing is a site plan.

Exterior walls at the building's footprint, interior walls dividing the rooms, door and window openings, room names, and dimensions on the walls that matter. Kitchen remodels, basement developments, room additions (interior portion), and layout changes are floor plan territory.

Rule of thumb: if the work changes how space inside a structure is arranged, the drawing is a floor plan.

An addition is the classic example: the site plan shows where the addition sits on the lot and its setbacks; the floor plan shows the new interior layout. Decks often want both too — a site plan for the permit, a construction-oriented layout for the build.

In SiteBuildHub Draft the two are just different templates on the same tools. Draw the site plan from the residential site plan template and the floor plan from the floor plan template, save both in the project, and export both PDFs into the same quote.