In March 2002, the Swedish Work Environment Authority performed an inspection at Skottsundsbackens home for elderly in the municipality of Sundsvall. The Swedish Work Environment Authority came to the conclusion that the ergonomic problems many employees had experienced were related to the floor covering in the building. The municipality lodged an appeal, but in October 2005 the appeal was rejected by the Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden. In the decision you can read that “The Swedish Work Environment Authority points out that if the floor covering has got a suitable springiness or not can not be objectively judged, since there are no test methods for this”. In spite of this, the Swedish Work Environment Authority believes that the best way to minimise the risks of strain injuries is to replace the current floor covering with a softer floor covering. Since there are existing test methods to quantify properties of springiness (i.e. shock absorption and vertical deformation) for sport surfaces, the aim of this study has been to find out whether these methods can be applied to ordinary floor coverings. If it’s possible, this might be a way of objectively judge if a floor covering is suitable or not for a certain work activity. The test methods chosen were EN 14808 Surfaces for sports areas – Determination of shock absorption and EN 14809 Surfaces for sport areas – Determination of vertical deformation. The study could also bee seen as an inventory of what values that could be expected for ordinary floor coverings in Sweden. Another goal for the study was to find out whether or not it was possible to quantify the difference between the floor covering that was replaced at Skottsundsbacken and the softer one that was finally installed. The conclusions of the study were that the mentioned test methods are suitable for measuring mechanical comfort properties of floor coverings, exceptions made for homogeneous and heterogeneous floor coverings without any kind of foam backing. These floorings has got very little ability to absorb energy and the results from the measurements can not be used to discriminate between them. Keywords: Floor covering, comfort, shock absorption, springiness, vertical deformation, EN 14808, EN 14809