Grout in Malta: cement, epoxy and when to regrout

Grout is the cheapest material in a tiling job and the first one to fail. It is also the part most buyers never ask about until a shower starts going black along the bottom course. This page sets out what the codes on a Maltese bag mean, what the bags cost, and what a regrout actually involves.

The codes on the bag

EN 13888 is the European standard for grout, and it is the same standard whether the bag was bought in Msida or Manchester. The lettering is short:

• CG — cementitious grout. Class 1 is standard, class 2 is improved.
• W — reduced water absorption.
• A — high abrasion resistance.
• RG — reaction-resin grout, meaning epoxy or polyurethane. Chemically resistant and waterproof.

So a bag marked CG2 WA is an improved cement grout that both absorbs less water and takes more wear than the baseline. A bag marked RG is a different material entirely, not a better version of the same one.

For a domestic bathroom, a CG2 W grout with an anti-mould additive is usually adequate. That is the honest position and it is worth knowing before a showroom talks you into epoxy for a guest en suite.

A real product, read properly

Kerakoll Fugabella Color is a resin-cement grout classed CG2 WA under EN 13888 (ISO 13007-3). The manufacturer's data gives joints of 0–20 mm, and use on interior and exterior floors and walls — including swimming pools and underfloor heating. At 28 days: flexural strength ≥2.5 N/mm², compressive strength ≥15 N/mm², water absorption ≤2 g at 30 minutes and ≤5 g at 240 minutes, abrasion ≤1000 mm³, shrinkage ≤3 mm/m.

Two of those numbers matter to a Maltese reader more than the rest. The 0–20 mm joint range covers almost anything you will do in a Maltese flat, including the wide joints people use on rustic terrace tiles. And the application temperature range is +5 to +30 °C. That is an air and substrate figure, and on an exposed terrace in July the substrate is the problem, not the air. Grouting outdoors in high summer is an early-morning job or it is a job for another month.

Joint width decides the product

UK trade guidance divides grout by joint width: up to 3 mm, unsanded; 3–10 mm, sanded; over 10 mm, a wide-joint product. Some products, Fugabella among them, span the whole range in one bag, but not all do. The Iperceramica listing does not state joint widths for anything it sells, so check the sack or the technical sheet before you buy. If you are matching a regrout to existing joints, measure the joint first.

What grout costs in Malta

Prices as listed by Iperceramica (Msida):

The shape of that table is the whole argument. Cement grout comes in 3 kg packs at mid-teens euro. Epoxy comes in packs half that size at up to €49.39. UK trade guidance puts epoxy at three to five times the cost of cement grout, and the Maltese shelf prices are consistent with that.

Note that the listing does not give coverage figures, so you cannot turn these prices into a cost per square metre without the technical sheet. Colour choice is wide — about 50 codes for Fugabella Color — which matters if you are matching a partial regrout rather than doing a whole room.

When epoxy earns its price

Epoxy is the right answer in a defined and fairly short list of places: swimming pools, commercial kitchens, food-preparation counters and steam rooms. The common thread is standing water, aggressive cleaning chemicals or hygiene requirements that a cement joint cannot meet.

In Malta that list has one addition most British buyers do not expect: pools are common here in a way they are not at home, and a lot of them are private. If you are tiling a pool, epoxy is not a luxury specification. A kitchen worktop tiled in porcelain with a grouted joint is the other obvious case — that joint is a food surface.

What epoxy does not fix is a bathroom that was built wrong. If water is getting behind the tiles because a wet room was never tanked, or because a terrace above was never waterproofed under the screed, epoxy grout on the surface will delay the symptom and not the cause.

Regrouting: what the job is

Regrouting is not scraping the surface and smearing new grout over it. The joint has to be raked out to a reasonable depth, the bed cleaned, the new grout worked in, and the silicone renewed at every internal corner and at the junction with the tray, bath or floor. Those corners are movement joints and they must be silicone, not grout, or they will crack again.

While the joints are open, the tiler can see what is behind them. In Maltese flats the common findings are hollow-sounding tiles over a screed that debonded, and a wet patch at the bottom of a shower wall that means the problem is the tanking. Replacing cracked or lifted tiles found along the way is a separate line and is also quoted on site.

Timing: UK trade guidance gives 24 hours to light traffic and 7 days to full cure. Plan the bathroom to be out of use for the first day and treat the first week gently.

What a regrout costs here

No Maltese tiler publishes a regrouting rate, and this site does not either. On the Tiler.mt rate card, Regrouting — rake out and regrout, silicone renewed carries no price band at all: unit is per square metre, quoted on site. The reason is that the variables — joint depth, how hard the old grout fights, what is found behind it — swing the labour more than the area does. A first visit to look at a small job falls under the small-jobs call-out at €35–50 per hour, one-hour minimum.

The only per-square-metre figures that exist are British. They are reproduced here as a sanity check on order of magnitude, nothing more:

Do not treat those as Maltese prices. They are shown so that a quote of a wholly different order prompts a question.

Malta-specific points

Floor-to-ceiling tiling means more joint. A Maltese bathroom tiled to the ceiling, which is the norm here rather than the exception, has far more linear metres of grout than the half-tiled British bathroom you may be picturing. A regrout is correspondingly bigger than it looks.

Apartments. If the work touches common parts, condominium rules under Cap. 398 apply, and that includes the obvious case where a regrout turns into an investigation of a leak reaching the flat below. Agree access and responsibility before anyone starts raking.

Gozo. Every bag crosses on the ferry. Grout is a small part of a materials order but it is the part people forget, and running out of a specific colour code mid-job costs a day, not an hour.

Shell form. A property bought in shell has no grout in it because it has no tiles. Grout specification belongs in the first-fit conversation, with the tanking and the waterproofing — not in a phone call three years later.

Trade licensing. There is no trade licence for tilers in Malta. Specifying the grout class in writing, on the quote, is one of the few checks a buyer actually has.