You can specify the lenght of the line break with \\[2cm]
but I would use another approach that manually increase the spacing in this way. The same apply to alternative commands as \vspace{2cm}
, \bigskip
, etc to add a specific space.
In order to obtain a consistent format across the the pages, ideally you must try to set all your format preferences in the preamble and avoid messing your text with low format code. For example, you can modify globally as you want the paragraph skip, so that the table is spaced as any paragraph simply adding a blank line (\par
). If you prefer mora spacing between text and tables than among the paragraphs, you can also set a different space around a table
float, as well as the spacing between the caption and the table, if ther are one (it is not clear in your example if the line above the table is the caption).
Example to play with global spacing:

\documentclass{article}
\setlength{\parskip}{.5cm} % change this length as you want
\setlength{\intextsep}{1cm plus .1cm minus 1.cm} % change this length as you want
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{.2cm} % change this length as you want
\begin{document}
Text before tabular
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
\hline
\textit{Surface} & \textit{Area ($m^2)$} & \textit{Coefficient of absorption}\\
\hline
ceiling & 140 & 0.8 \\
walls & 260 & 0.03 \\
floor & 140 & 0.06 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
Text after tabular % test space between paragraph
Text before float
\begin{table}[htb]
\caption{Volume of the hall V = 1500 $m^3$.}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
\hline
\textit{Surface} & \textit{Area ($m^2)$} & \textit{Coefficient of absorption}\\
\hline
ceiling & 140 & 0.8 \\
walls & 260 & 0.03 \\
floor & 140 & 0.06 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Text after float
\end{document}
May be enough?
(Note that many people hate the excess of vertical and horizontal rules. I also suggest booktabs
commands instead of \hline
for better results.)
\bigskip
before \\ on your first line may be what you want. Alternatively you can use\vspace{2cm}
if you want to precisely choose how much space should be in between. Yet another alternative is to place the tabular in a\begin{center}
/\end{center}
environment, which centers the table but also adds some appropriate space.\begin{ccenter}<table>\end{center}
and maybe a minipage in between.table
environment? Do you want the table prevent from floating and have it typeset Iexactly at this place*? Do you need captions for your table?