NuWallpaper vs Tempaper: Peel-and-Stick Compared
NuWallpaper vs Tempaper: which peel-and-stick roll costs less per square foot, which one forgives a crooked strip, and which comes off in one clean sheet.
The 30-Second Answer
Okay, so you have two tabs open and the rolls look identical on screen. Here’s the short version. NuWallpaper is the thinner, cheaper one, and it’s the right buy when you’re covering a lot of wall or trying peel-and-stick for the first time. Tempaper costs roughly double per square foot and earns it on one statement wall: thicker stock, matte finish, and it comes off in a single sheet instead of shredding. For a rental accent wall in a room people actually see, buy Tempaper. For a whole small room on a budget, buy NuWallpaper.
At a Glance
| NuWallpaper | Tempaper | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per sq ft | 🟢 about $1.10–1.50 | 🟡 about $2.00–3.50 |
| Roll coverage | 🟢 ~30 sq ft (20.5 inches by 18 feet) | 🟡 ~28 sq ft (20.5 inches by 16.5 feet) |
| Feel of the material | 🟡 thin, smooth, faint sheen | 🟢 thick, matte, almost fabric-like |
| Hides the wall underneath | 🟡 dark walls can ghost through | 🟢 opaque |
| Repositioning as you hang | 🟡 grabs fast | 🟢 lifts and slides longer |
| Coming back off | 🟡 often tears into strips | 🟢 usually one full sheet |
| Where you’ll find it | 🟢 Home Depot, Target, Wayfair | 🟡 brand site, Target, design shops |
Two rows carry the whole decision. Price, and what happens the day you take it down.
How to Tell Which One Your Wall Can Handle
Before you pick a brand, check the wall, because a bad wall beats both of them.
Run your palm across it. If you feel bumps, ridges, or that orange-peel texture builders spray on, stop. Neither brand sticks to texture for long. The glue only touches the high points, and in a month you’ll have bubbles and curling corners.
Now check the shine. Press a strip of clear tape onto the wall, rub it flat, and peel it off. If the wall is dead-flat with zero shine and the tape lifts away with no fight, that’s flat paint, the risky surface for both brands. A soft shine that grips the tape a little means eggshell or satin, which is what you want. (If those words mean nothing yet, the sheen guide explains all five in plain terms.)
Last check: nail holes and dents. Peel-and-stick highlights every divot instead of hiding it. Patching small holes in drywall takes twenty minutes and saves you a wall of little shadows.
What the Two Materials Actually Feel Like
Hold both and you’ll know it in about two seconds.
NuWallpaper, made by Brewster, is a thin coated paper stock. It’s smooth, slightly slick, and light enough to flutter when you carry a full strip across the room. Light patterns on white stock let a dark wall underneath show as a faint gray haze. You’ll know it when you see it, usually right after you press strip one down.
Tempaper is noticeably heavier. The face has a low matte texture that reads more like fabric than paper, it doesn’t reflect window light back at you, and it’s opaque enough that a navy wall underneath disappears. That weight is why it costs more and why it behaves better at every stage after checkout.
Price per Square Foot
NuWallpaper rolls run about $35 to $45 and cover roughly 30 square feet, which lands at $1.10 to $1.50 per square foot. Tempaper singles cover about 28 square feet and generally start around $55, with designer collections climbing past $120, so figure $2.00 to $3.50 per square foot. Tempaper double rolls bring the per-foot number down a little if your wall is big enough to use one.
Put real walls to it. A 10-foot-wide, 8-foot-tall accent wall is 80 square feet, and you always order about 15 percent extra for pattern matching. NuWallpaper: four rolls, roughly $150. Tempaper: four rolls, roughly $230 for a basic pattern and $400-plus for a collab print.
That gap is real money. It’s also the difference between a wall you like and a wall you love, which is not a number I can put in a table.
Winner: NuWallpaper.
Material and Coverage
Thickness decides how the finished wall reads from across the room.
Tempaper’s heavier stock butts seam-to-seam with almost no visible line, and because it doesn’t let light through, the pattern color stays true no matter what’s painted underneath. On a wall with a window on one side, that matters. Thin stock catches raking light along every seam and you see a faint vertical ladder down the wall at 5 p.m.
NuWallpaper covers more square feet per roll, which is a genuine win on volume. But on a dark or patchy wall you may need to prime the wall white first, and once you’ve bought primer and spent an afternoon rolling it, your cheap option got less cheap. Over an existing light neutral, none of this comes up.
Winner: Tempaper.
Install Forgiveness
This is the one nobody warns first-timers about, and it’s where the extra money quietly pays for itself.
Both brands peel off a backing sheet and press onto the wall. The difference is how long you get to fix a mistake. Tempaper stays liftable for a good while: pull a crooked strip back off the wall, slide it a half inch, press it down again, and it takes the correction without complaining. NuWallpaper grabs faster and starts to crease if you keep lifting the same strip, and a crease in thin stock doesn’t smooth back out.
Here’s the thing about the first strip. Every strip after it lines up to strip one, so if strip one leans, the whole wall leans and it gets worse across the room. Draw a plumb line first (that means a perfectly vertical pencil line, done with a level or a level app on your phone), line the edge of strip one to it, and ignore the corner of the room, because room corners are almost never straight.
Work top down and sweep outward with a plastic smoother or an old gift card, so air escapes at the sides instead of getting trapped in the middle. If a bubble stays put, prick it with a pin and press it flat.
Winner: Tempaper.
Removal
Both brands come off. They come off differently, and the day matters if your deposit is riding on it.
Tempaper usually releases in one continuous sheet. Lift a top corner, pull down and back toward the wall at a low angle, keep it slow, and the whole strip comes away like a giant sticker. Ten minutes for an accent wall is normal.
NuWallpaper’s thin face is more likely to tear partway down, leaving you picking off strips a few inches wide. Nothing is damaged, and residue is rare on either brand, but budget an hour instead of ten minutes. Warming a stubborn section with a hairdryer on low softens the adhesive and cuts the tearing a lot. Neither brand needs a wallpaper steamer, which is a traditional-paste-wallpaper tool and can push moisture into drywall.
One warning for both. On cheap flat builder paint, or on paint that hasn’t cured a full 30 days, the glue can hold tighter than the paint holds the wall, and you’ll lift paint in patches. Test a small piece inside a closet, leave it a week, then pull it.
Winner: Tempaper.
Pattern Selection and Availability
NuWallpaper’s catalog is enormous and skews small-scale: fine botanicals, faux grasscloth, subway tile prints, small geometrics, shiplap and brick looks. It’s stocked at Home Depot, Target, Wayfair, and most big online retailers, so you can often have it in two days or grab it locally.
Tempaper goes bolder. Large-scale florals, heavy stripes, murals, and designer collections with names attached to them. The company started in New Jersey in 2008 and still leans hard into pattern as the point of the product. Selection is smaller and shipping usually comes from the brand or a design retailer, so plan a few extra days.
Order samples either way. A pattern that looks calm at thumbnail size can be loud at full scale, and both brands sell sample swatches for a few dollars. If you want a faster way to test a look on the actual wall, the peel-and-stick swatch services round-up covers who ships real material instead of a printout.
Winner: NuWallpaper on breadth and speed. Tempaper on the bold stuff.
Verdict by Use Case
- Pick NuWallpaper if: you’re covering a lot of square footage, the room is a laundry, closet, pantry, or hallway, your walls are already a light neutral, or this is your first peel-and-stick project and you’d rather learn on a $40 roll than a $110 one.
- Pick Tempaper if: it’s one wall in a room guests see, the pattern is large-scale, the wall underneath is dark, or you’re renting and you want the strips off in one pull on move-out day. Short leases and strict deposits point here.
- It’s basically a tie when: the wall is smooth, already light, under about 50 square feet, and you found a small-scale pattern you love in both catalogs. Buy the one you like looking at.
Not sure wallpaper is the move at all? Paint vs peel-and-stick for renters runs the same fight against a gallon of paint, and paint still wins on cost.
Where to Start Shopping
Going with NuWallpaper? Order one roll more than your math says and get every roll in a single batch so the print color matches. Skip it and you’ll see the shift at the seam where batches meet.
Going with Tempaper? Buy the sample before the rolls. Large-scale patterns change completely at full size, and a $5 swatch taped to the wall for three days tells you more than any product photo.
Decided to paint instead? The best interior wall paint round-up covers which eggshell and satin finishes hold up in a rental and still wash clean.
If It Goes Wrong
A corner lifts. It happens to both brands, usually in a sunny spot or a steamy one, and it’s fixable in two minutes: a dab of clear-drying adhesive under the loose edge, pressed flat with your thumb for a minute. Check those seams every couple of months and re-press early, before the lift walks its way down the strip.
And if a whole strip goes on crooked, take it off and try again. Tempaper will let you. NuWallpaper might crease, so pull that one and hang a fresh strip, which is exactly why you bought the extra roll.