Standard Door and Window Sizes in India

Door and window sizes look like a builder's problem, decided long before the interior designer arrives. In practice they are an interior problem that simply arrives late. A bedroom door that is only 750 mm wide turns moving a king-size bed into a demolition exercise. A window with a 600 mm sill puts the glass right where the back of a sofa wants to be. A main door at 900 mm wide means the new refrigerator comes in tilted, scratched, and argued about. These sizes are decided once, in concrete and brick, and they punish every furniture decision for the life of the flat.

Indian homes complicate the question because the market works in two systems at once. Builders and carpenters talk in feet and inches — a 3-foot door, a 7-foot height — while drawings, factories and modular systems work in millimetres. The translation between the two is where errors creep in: a 3-foot door ordered as 900 mm can arrive as 915 mm at the factory, and suddenly the frame does not fit the opening. This article works entirely in millimetres, with the feet-and-inches equivalents alongside, so the numbers survive translation from drawing to site to factory.

What follows settles the whole question: the standard sizes for main, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom doors, the standard window sizes and sill heights, the building-code figures behind them, and the drawing rules — frame allowances, swing clearances, wheelchair minimums — that separate a correct opening from a troublesome one. Every number is either from Indian building norms or marked as common trade practice.

The standard sizes — one table

Six numbers cover ninety percent of Indian homes. The rest of this article explains what sits behind them.

The code behind the table is worth knowing. The Delhi Unified Building Bye-Laws 2016, derived from the National Building Code of India, set door sizes at 0.90 m × 2.1 m for habitable rooms and 0.75 m × 2.0 m for kitchens, baths and WCs. Note the bathroom height: 2000 mm, not 2100 mm, because bathroom lintels in Indian construction commonly sit lower. Hotel guestroom standards in the Time-Saver Standards for Building Types use 900 × 2100 mm room doors, confirming the 900 mm bedroom figure across building types. These are minimums, not ideals — a main door at 900 mm meets code but fails daily life, which is why the market standard runs 1000–1200 mm.

Reading a door: frame, shutter, opening

A door is three things, and drawings confuse them constantly. The structural opening is the hole in the wall. The frame sits inside it — typically a 100 × 60 mm section in Indian carpentry, though 125 × 75 mm appears in older construction. The shutter hangs inside the frame. When a drawing says 900 mm door, it should mean the shutter width; the structural opening must then be roughly 1000 mm — shutter plus two frame legs plus fixing tolerance. Carpenters who order a 900 mm shutter for a 900 mm opening discover the error on installation day, when the frame has nowhere to sit.

Two details in the plate deserve emphasis. First, the holdfast: the metal flat that ties the wooden frame into the masonry. Frames in Indian homes are usually fixed with holdfasts grouted into the wall as it is built, which is why replacing a door frame later is a small civil job, not a carpentry job. Second, the handle height at 1000 mm — a common trade convention, comfortable for most adults and consistent across the flat so every door feels the same. Three hinges on a 2100 mm shutter is the other convention worth keeping; two hinges on a tall shutter is how doors start to sag and drag within a few years.

Dimensioned doors and windows, room by room

The plate below draws the four openings that matter most, at a consistent scale, with the dimensions that must appear on any drawing a contractor works from. Note the window: its sill at 900 mm is not arbitrary. A 900 mm sill keeps the glass above the back of a standard sofa (850–900 mm high) and above a dining table (750 mm), so furniture can sit against a window wall without blocking light. Drop the sill to 600 mm and the window becomes a full-height glass wall in furniture terms — beautiful, but it removes that wall from furniture planning entirely.

Three judgements sit inside these drawings. The 1200 mm main door is drawn as a double shutter (the centre line) because a single 1200 mm shutter is too heavy to hang well and too wide to swing in a foyer; above 1050 mm, Indian practice splits the shutter. The bathroom door at 2000 mm high matters for waterproofing: the 100 mm saved at the top is where the lintel drops, and it is also why bathroom doors are the first to be specified in PVC or WPC rather than wood — the shutter lives in steam. The window shows a four-pane sliding or openable split with a mid-rail, the commonest Indian window pattern, sitting on its 900 mm sill with the floor line drawn so the relationship reads at a glance.

Swing, clearance and access: the drawing rules

Size is only half the drawing. A 900 mm door drawn swinging the wrong way can make a bathroom unusable: the shutter should never swing in to strike the WC or the basin. The rule is simple — doors swing against the nearest wall, opening flat against it, so the open shutter disappears from the room. In bathrooms, the swing must clear every fixture with the door at 90 degrees. For wheelchair access, the ADA Standards call for 32 inches (815 mm) of clear width at a doorway, and India's CPWD Harmonised Guidelines set the same expectation for barrier-free design — a 900 mm shutter with a standard frame delivers roughly 810–830 mm clear, which is why 900 mm is the practical minimum for an accessible bedroom or bathroom, and why a 750 mm bathroom door fails an elderly parent even though it meets code.

The fixing detail explains why door frames are a one-way decision. Holdfasts are grouted into the wall as it is built; changing a frame size later means cutting masonry. This is the practical reason the standard sizes exist at all: factories, carpenters and builders all work to the same few openings, so a 900 × 2100 shutter is a stock item and a 940 × 2080 shutter is a custom order with a custom price and a custom wait. Non-standard openings are the single most expensive millimetre in interior work — not because the material costs more, but because everything around it stops being standard.

What doors and windows cost to finish

The opening itself is the builder's cost. The interior cost is the finishing: painting or polishing the frame and shutter, both faces. Painting rates in India are quoted per square foot of paintable area, all-in with putty, primer and two coats, and a standard door has a surprisingly large paintable area — both faces of a 900 × 2100 shutter plus the frame come to roughly 45–50 sq ft. The table below applies the October 2026 painting rates to that reality, so the finishing cost of each standard door can be read directly.

Two cost truths follow from the table. First, the finish can cost more than the shutter: a budget flush door with a premium designer finish is a common and defensible choice for a main door, because the entrance is seen and touched every day. Second, every non-standard size multiplies finishing labour — edges, architraves and custom frames all take longer to finish than stock sizes, and painters charge for time. The cheapest door is very often the standard one, finished well.

Where each size works — and where to avoid

• Main door 1000–1200 mm: the only correct choice for the entrance. Below 1000 mm, furniture and appliances enter sideways. Above 1200 mm, go double shutter.
• Bedroom 900 × 2100 mm: correct for every bedroom. Resist the urge to shrink it to 750 mm to gain wall space — the wall gained is useless and the door is compromised for life.
• Kitchen 900 mm preferred: a 750 mm kitchen door meets code, but a gas cylinder, a service trolley and a carried thali all prefer 900 mm.
• Bathroom 750 × 2000 mm: correct here, and the one place a smaller door is genuinely fine — nothing large ever needs to pass through it. Specify a water-resistant shutter.
• Window sill 900 mm: keep it. Lower sills belong only to full-height glass walls planned as such, never as an accident.
• Ventilator 600 × 600 mm above 1800 mm: correct for bathrooms and kitchens. Do not enlarge it into a window — privacy and exhaust both suffer.
• Avoid: a 900 mm main door, a 750 mm bedroom door, and any window whose sill height was decided by the mason's convenience rather than the furniture plan.