Roofing is quoted in squares — 100 square feet of roof surface — and the price of a square swings by more than a factor of ten between basic asphalt and natural slate.
Estimated roof replacement cost: $10,500, ranging from $8,800 to $13,000.
Estimated roof replacement cost
medium confidence
$10,500Installed, before contingency
$8,800 lowhigh $13,000
What makes up the typical figure
Installation labor$3,850
Architectural asphalt shingle — material$3,750
Tear-off (1 layer)$990
Synthetic underlayment$450
Everything else$1,490
United States average
+10% contingency advised
Assumptions 2026.07.1
Why medium: no state was resolved, so national averages were used; the modeled range spans about 40% of the typical value.
Quick facts
Sloped roof area
1,792 sq ftYour 1,600 sq ft footprint times a 1.12 pitch factor.
Roofing squares
17.9 squaresOne square is 100 sq ft of roof surface. Contractors quote in squares.
Cost per square
$588($494 – $727)
Cost per square foot
$5.88($4.94 – $7.27)
Cost per year of expected life
$390($328 – $483)Based on a modeled 27-year service life. Useful for comparing a cheap roof against a durable one.
Cost breakdown
Estimated cost of each component, with low, typical, and high values.
Component
Low
Typical
High
Architectural asphalt shingle — materialMaterials20.2 squares ordered, including a 13% waste allowance on 17.9 squares of roof.
$2,850
$3,750
$4,850
Installation laborLabor59 crew-hours at $66/hr billed. Difficulty multiplier 1.26x for pitch, complexity, height, and access.
$2,550
$3,850
$5,900
Tear-off (1 layer)Removal
$680
$990
$1,450
Dumpster and disposalRemovalTipping fees vary by county; heavier materials such as tile and slate cost more to haul.
$220
$320
$500
Synthetic underlaymentMaterials
$300
$450
$650
Flashing and edge metalMaterials
$180
$390
$810
Ridge ventilationMaterials40 linear feet. Adequate ventilation is usually required to keep the shingle warranty valid.
$240
$400
$640
Permit and inspectionPermitBroad national band. Many jurisdictions price roofing permits as a percentage of job value.
$150
$380
$900
Estimated roof replacement cost
$8,800
$10,500
$13,000
Recommended contingency (10%)Roofing contingency exists mainly for what is under the shingles. Budget for sheathing, rotted fascia, and chimney flashing that only becomes visible after tear-off.
$880
$1,050
$1,300
Total to budget
$9,680
$11,550
$14,300
The low and high columns above will not add up to the headline range. Each line has its own uncertainty, and every line landing at its worst case at the same time is unlikely, so the total combines them as partially independent rather than summing the extremes.
How this number was produced+
Sloped roof areafootprint x pitch factor1,792 sq ft
Squaresroof area / 10017.9
Material orderedsquares x (1 + 13% waste)20.2 squares
Crew hourssquares x 2.6 hr/square x 1.26 difficulty59 hours
Billed labor rateBLS roofer wage x contractor burden$66/hr
Totalcomponents combined as partially independent uncertainties$10,540
Adjustments applied
Regional labor — national×1.00
National 47-2181 Roofers mean wage of $27.95/hr (BLS OEWS May 2025), times the contractor burden multiplier.
Regional material index×1.00
National material pricing; no state resolved.
Roof difficulty×1.26
Medium (5:12 to 7:12), moderate — some hips, valleys, or dormers, one story, easy — open driveway, room for a dumpster.
Notes and sources3 notes, 3 sources
Worth knowing
This is an estimate, not a quote. A roofer who has walked your roof will know things this form cannot ask about.
Deck condition is the single largest source of surprise cost. If you have never seen the sheathing, treat the contingency as part of the budget rather than a cushion.
Material prices carry assumption provenance — see the sources panel below.
Sources
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), State cross-industry estimatesprimaryMay 2025retrieved 2026-07-31
PlainTotal editorial baseline, reviewed against publicly advertised supplier pricing, manufacturer specifications, and published trade guidanceassumption2026 national baselineretrieved 2026-07-31
This calculator builds an estimate from your actual roof geometry, the material you are considering, and published labor rates for roofers in your state, then shows every line that went into it.
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Methodology
How this calculator works
How the roof area is worked out
A roof is always larger than the footprint beneath it, because it is sloped. If you enter a footprint, we multiply it by a pitch factor — 1.05 for a low 3:12 roof, 1.42 for a very steep 12:12 — to get the actual surface a crew has to cover.
That surface is divided by 100 to get squares, the unit roofers quote in. Material is then ordered with a waste allowance of 10% to 17% depending on how many valleys and dormers there are to cut around, because offcuts are unusable.
How labor is priced
We start from the Bureau of Labor Statistics mean hourly wage for roofers in your state, which is published annually and is a genuine measurement rather than an estimate.
That wage is not what you pay. A roofing company bills a rate that also covers payroll taxes, workers’ compensation insurance — which is dramatically more expensive for roofing than for most trades — general liability, equipment, drive time, office overhead, and profit. We model that as a multiplier of 2.0 to 2.75 times the wage. This multiplier is our own assumption and it is the single largest source of uncertainty in the estimate.
Crew hours per square come from the material: asphalt shingle goes down several times faster than slate. Those hours are then multiplied by difficulty factors for pitch, roof complexity, building height, and site access.
Why the total range is narrower than the lines above it
Each line in the breakdown has its own low and high. If you add all the lows together you get a number lower than our headline low, and that is deliberate.
Every single line landing at its worst case simultaneously is very unlikely. We combine the lines as partially independent uncertainties — a root-sum-of-squares — which is the standard way to propagate uncertainty and produces a range that is actually useful for budgeting.
What this cannot know
It cannot see your deck. Sheathing condition is the most common reason a roofing invoice exceeds its quote, which is why the contingency line exists.
It does not know your local permit schedule, your HOA’s material rules, whether your chimney needs rebuilding, or whether your area is in a post-storm demand spike where every roofer is booked and pricing accordingly.
Location and data
Where the numbers come from
Location is optional, and we only ask for a ZIP code or a state — never a street address. A ZIP code is matched to its state using published postal prefix ranges, and that state is used to look up labor and price rows in the tables below. If you leave it blank, or your ZIP cannot be matched, the estimate falls back to a national average and says so on the result.
Nothing you enter is transmitted or stored. The calculation runs entirely in your browser, and the only place your inputs appear is in the page URL, so you can bookmark or share a result if you choose to.
primaryMay 2025v2025.05
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), State cross-industry estimates
Hourly mean wage (H_MEAN) for each trade. These are employee wages, not billed contractor rates. Billed rates are derived in the engine by applying a documented burden-and-overhead multiplier; see docs/calculator-methodology.md.
assumption2026 national baselinev2026.07.1
PlainTotal editorial baseline, reviewed against publicly advertised supplier pricing, manufacturer specifications, and published trade guidance
These are NOT published statistics. No public agency publishes a national residential material price index at this granularity, and proprietary construction cost databases cannot be reproduced. Each figure is a documented editorial baseline for material only, excluding labor, delivered to a metropolitan supply yard, before regional adjustment and before sales tax. They are the least certain inputs in the project calculators and are the first thing to replace with surveyed data. Labor hours are crew-hours for a competent crew under normal conditions.
These are the figures we chose rather than measured. For each one we record the range of values found across references, what we selected, and why — because an estimate you cannot interrogate is not much better than a guess. The 1 marked high risk are the ones most likely to be wrong and most consequential when they are.
Published contractor pricing guidance and trade-association break-even material put the wage-to-billed-rate multiplier between roughly 1.8x for an owner-operator with minimal overhead and 3.0x for an insured company with vehicles, office staff, and target profit. We narrowed the shipped band to 2.0-2.75 because the extremes describe business models a homeowner rarely encounters: below 2.0 usually means an uninsured single operator, above 2.75 usually means commercial or specialty work. Roofing sits at the top of the band because workers' compensation for roofers is several times the rate of other trades.
Applies to
United States, all states. The multiplier itself is not regionally adjusted — regional variation enters through the underlying BLS wage, not through the burden.
Known limits
The single largest lever in every project calculator. A 10% error here moves every project estimate by roughly 6%.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed annual
Recommended contingency by job charactermedium confidence+
Observed range
0.05 — 0.25 (typical 0.15)share of project cost
Why this value
Published renovation guidance clusters at 10% for like-for-like replacement, 15% where hidden damage is common, and 20% for work crossing several trades. Values below 10% assume a job where nothing is opened up; values above 25% are usually quoted for historic or structurally compromised properties, which is outside what these calculators model.
Applies to
United States. Older housing stock warrants the upper figure regardless of region.
Known limits
No additional limitation recorded.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed annual
Modelled service life by materialmedium confidence+
Observed range
15 — 90 (typical 27)years
Why this value
Manufacturer warranties overstate real service life, and observed replacement intervals understate it because roofs are often replaced for reasons other than failure. We selected values between warranty and observed replacement: 18 years for 3-tab against a 20-25 year warranty, 27 for architectural against 30-50, and 50 for standing seam against warranties that reach 50 or more. These only affect the cost-per-year-of-life metric, never the headline estimate.
Applies to
United States. Hot, high-UV climates shorten asphalt life materially; not currently varied by climate.
Known limits
No additional limitation recorded.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed biennial
Regional material price sensitivitymedium confidence+
Observed range
0 — 0.5 (typical 0.25)share of the local labor differential
Why this value
Building materials are nationally traded commodities, so the floor case is 0.0 — no regional variation at all beyond freight. The ceiling case of 0.5 would imply materials track local wages half as strongly as labor does, which overstates it: what actually varies locally is freight, yard margin, distribution labor, and sales tax, not the commodity. We selected 0.25 as a single point rather than a band because modelling it as uncertain would double-count uncertainty already carried by the material price band itself.
Applies to
Continental United States. Alaska and Hawaii almost certainly warrant a higher figure because of shipping, and are not currently distinguished.
Known limits
No additional limitation recorded.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed annual
Roofing permit and inspection feemedium confidence+
Observed range
0 — 1500 (typical 375)USD
Why this value
Municipal fee schedules range from no permit required for like-for-like reroofing in some rural counties, to over $1,000 in dense metropolitan jurisdictions that price as a percentage of job value. We excluded the zero case because the calculator only adds this line when the user says a permit applies, and trimmed the top because percentage-of-value schedules only reach four figures on jobs far larger than the typical residential reroof.
Applies to
United States. Highly local — this is the least transferable figure in the registry.
Known limits
Wide genuine variation, but a small share of total project cost, so error here barely moves the headline.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed annual
Roofing material waste allowancemedium confidence+
Observed range
0.05 — 0.2 (typical 0.12)share of ordered material
Why this value
Trade practice for a simple gable roof is 10%; complex roofs with many valleys, hips, and dormers routinely reach 15-17%. Below 10% is only achievable on a perfectly rectangular roof with no penetrations. We tie the selected value to the complexity input rather than treating it as a free-standing uncertainty.
Applies to
United States, not regionally variable.
Known limits
No additional limitation recorded.
Sources
Recorded before the richer schema; see rationale for provenance
Last verified
2026-07-31 · reviewed biennial
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Cost factors
What changes the price most
Material choice
The widest lever available. Slate or clay tile can cost ten times what basic asphalt costs per square, before the extra labor and structural work they need.
Pitch
Beyond about 8:12 a crew cannot walk the roof and needs staging and fall protection. Expect 35% to 70% more labor.
Tear-off layers
Each layer removed is both removal labor and disposal weight. Two layers of asphalt is a substantial dumpster.
Deck condition
Priced per sheet of sheathing. Invisible until the roof is off, and the usual reason a job runs over.
Roof complexity
Valleys, dormers, skylights, and multiple planes add cutting, waste, and flashing that do not scale with area.
Region
Roofer wages vary by roughly 60% between the lowest and highest states, and that flows straight through to the quote.
Season and storm demand
Not modeled here. After a regional hail or hurricane event, prices rise sharply and lead times stretch for months.
Questions
Frequently asked
How much does a new roof cost on an average house?
+
For a typical single-story home with a 1,600 sq ft footprint and a medium pitch, architectural asphalt shingles with one layer of tear-off usually land in the mid-teens of thousands of dollars nationally. The range is wide because labor rates, roof complexity, and deck condition all move it substantially. Enter your own numbers above for a figure adjusted to your state.
What is a roofing square?
+
One hundred square feet of finished roof surface. Roofers quote and order in squares, so a 2,000 square foot roof is 20 squares. Knowing the term makes quotes much easier to compare.
Can I put a new roof over the old one?
+
Often yes for a single existing layer, and most codes cap the total at two. It saves the tear-off and disposal lines. The tradeoffs are that nobody inspects your sheathing, the extra layer traps heat which shortens shingle life, and some manufacturers reduce warranty coverage. Most roofers will recommend a full tear-off.
Why is my quote higher than this estimate?
+
Common reasons: your roof has more complexity than the form captured, the quote includes deck replacement this calculator assumed you would not need, you are in a post-storm demand spike, or the contractor is pricing premium underlayment and flashing details. Ask for a line-item breakdown and compare it against the components above.
Does a metal roof pay for itself?
+
On the cost-per-year-of-life metric above, standing-seam metal often looks competitive with asphalt because it is modeled at roughly 50 years against asphalt’s 27. Whether that matters depends on how long you plan to own the house. It is a genuine consideration, not a guarantee, and it does not account for repairs or resale effects.
Do I need a permit to replace a roof?
+
In most United States jurisdictions, yes, and the roofer normally pulls it. The allowance here is a broad national band. Many cities price the permit as a percentage of job value with a minimum fee, so check your local building department for the real number.