How Much Should a Roof Replacement Cost?

Nobody in America publishes an official price for a roof

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks producer prices for thousands of things. Asphalt shingle manufacturing has an index. Plywood has one. OSB has one. The index for roofing contractors, series PCU238160238160, returns nothing at all. The series does not exist. At the federal level, what it costs to install a roof is simply not measured.

So every clean per square foot range you find was published by somebody. Usually a lead-generation site that earns money the second you fill out the form, or a roofing company that wants the job. That does not make the number a lie. It means the number is marketing, and you should read it that way.

What the quoted ranges are, and what they are worth

The range you will see over and over is about $4 to $11 per square foot installed for asphalt. We are printing it because you will find it anyway and you deserve to know where it came from: the same lead-generation sites the section above just described. Use it as a rough sanity check, never as proof your quote is wrong.

Roofers price by the "square," which is 100 square feet. Twenty squares is 2,000 square feet of roof surface. That unit matters more than the dollar range does, because the whole game is knowing how many squares you actually have. Most homeowners guess high, and guessing high is how you accept a bid that is double what it should be.

The one measured number that exists

Verisk, the company that builds the estimating software most insurance adjusters use, put the average residential roof replacement at $17,631 in its 2025 U.S. Roof Report, up 33% over the 2021 to 2024 average. Average repair: $4,699. Read that with the limit Verisk itself implies: the figure is built from insurance claim estimates, so it heavily oversamples storm driven full replacements. It is a ceiling signal, not a typical price. If your quote comes in well under it, that is not automatically a red flag.

Your roof is not the size of your house

Before any dollar figure means a thing, you need your square count, and this is where homeowners lose the most money. Roof surface is driven by the ground the building covers and by how steep the roof is. Living area is not part of the calculation at all.

Line up two houses that both list at 2,000 square feet. The ranch spreads across the dirt and can easily carry north of 20 squares. The two story stacks that same living space onto a much smaller patch of ground, and it can come in around 12. One of those roofs is twice the other, and no listing sheet tells you which one you own.

Guess high and you will nod along at a bid built for a roof you do not have. That is the most expensive mistake on this page and it is entirely avoidable. Our guide to working out your roof's square count walks you through the pitch math with the multipliers laid out. Run your own house through it before the first roofer knocks, because every number below is priced by the square.

Where the money actually goes

BLS does track roofer wages, and this one is worth knowing. In the May 2025 occupational survey, the median American roofer earned $26.65 an hour. The mean was $27.95. Even the top 10% of the trade came in under $39.29. That is 135,490 people.

Now look at your quote. The hourly number a roofing company bills is a large multiple of what the man on your roof takes home, and homeowners read that gap as greed. It usually is not. Between the wage and the bill sit payroll taxes, workers compensation (roofing carries one of the highest comp rates in all of construction, because men fall off roofs), general liability, the truck, the fuel, the office, the warranty he has to stand behind for a decade, and profit. Strip those out and the price drops fast.

That is the honest explanation for the cheap bid. It is often cheap because it is not carrying them. A crew with no comp coverage costs less, right up until somebody falls and the claim lands on your homeowner’s policy.

One more thing the wage data tells you: the spread between the highest paying and lowest paying states is better than two to one, in the wage alone, before any of the overhead above. Comparing your quote to a national average is comparing yourself to a place you do not live.

The nine things that decide your number

Here is the part no cost calculator will give you, because a calculator cannot see your house. These are what actually separate a $12,000 roof from a $26,000 one on the same street.

1. Pitch, and the line at about 7/12

Up to roughly 6/12, a roofer walks your roof. Past about 7/12 he stops walking and starts rigging: toe boards, harnesses, staging, slower everything. Steepness is not an add-on line. It is a multiplier on every labor hour in the job, which is why a flat "steep roof fee" of a few hundred dollars is a tell that somebody has not looked at your house. On a big job the steep surcharge runs into thousands, not hundreds. Steepness also grows the roof itself, since a steep plane covers more surface than a shallow one over the identical patch of ground.

2. Access, the gap nobody explains to you

This is the biggest unexplained difference between two honest bids on one house, and almost nobody names it. Can a dump trailer back to the eave, or does every bundle of shingles go up a conveyor, or up a man’s shoulder? Is there a pool under the drip line, a deck, a bank of AC condensers, mature landscaping you will be furious about? Is the driveway shared? Will the HOA let a dumpster sit at the curb for three days? Two roofers can be $4,000 apart on access alone and both be right. If a bid is high, ask about access before you assume padding.

3. Stories, which most people get backwards

A two story house has a smaller roof than a ranch of the same living area, and a more expensive one per square. Both are true at once. Everything has to go higher: longer ladders, more staging, longer carries, more fall protection, slower cleanup. Smaller total, higher rate. Do not let a roofer charge you ranch squares at two story rates, or the reverse.

4. Layers, and what the dump actually costs

The Environmental Research and Education Foundation surveyed 494 U.S. landfills in 2024 and got rates back from 351 of them. Construction and demolition tipping averaged $65.84 a ton, up about 10% in a year. Shingles weigh roughly 250 pounds per square, so a 25 square tear off is about 3.1 tons. That is about $206 at the landfill gate for one layer and about $412 for two, before anyone hauls the dumpster or pays the driver.

Two layers also tends to blow past the six ton cap on a standard 20 yard dumpster, which means a second haul, not a bigger box. If your roof has two layers on it, that is not a small line item and a bid that ignores it is a bid that will grow.

There is a ceiling, too. Section R908.3.1.1 of the International Residential Code says a roof recover is not permitted where the existing roof already carries two or more applications of any type of covering. In practice that is a two layer limit. It applies where your jurisdiction has adopted that edition, and states amend the roofing chapter freely, so check your local adoption rather than assuming.

5. Decking, the one true unknowable

Nobody knows what the plywood under your shingles looks like until the shingles are gone. Not the roofer, not you, not the guy with the drone. So the fight is never about the price of a sheet. It is about whether the price was agreed before the tear off or after.

A sheet of OSB at the lumberyard runs about $10 to $15 right now. Roofers commonly bill $65 to $100 a sheet installed. Do the subtraction: roughly 85% of that sheet is labor, markup, and the premium you pay for changing a job that is already open to the sky. That is not automatically a ripoff. It is exactly why an open ended decking line is where a lowball bid earns its money back. Get the per sheet unit price written into the contract before the first shingle comes off, and make him state how many sheets are included at no charge. That one sentence in the contract is worth more to you than any number on this page.

6. Ice barrier, which the north pays for and the south never sees

A peel and stick ice barrier at the eaves is an IRC requirement, but the trigger is not a climate map and it is not a rule of thumb about cold states. Whether your town has a history of ice backing up at the eaves is a determination your own jurisdiction makes, and that one call is what switches the requirement on. Look up your own local adoption rather than assuming. The code language itself is printed on our roofing quote checklist.

When it is on, it is real material and real labor across every eave, and it runs farther up a steep roof than a shallow one. When it is off, it never appears on the quote at all. So a Buffalo bid and a Phoenix bid on the identical house cannot be compared, and no national range can know which one you are.

7. Waste, and how cut up your roof is

A plain gable roof gets ordered at about 10% waste. A cut up roof full of hips, valleys, dormers, and skylights runs 15% or more, because every angled cut throws away part of a shingle. That is our own ordering practice, not a published standard. Cut up roofs eat labor hours even faster than they eat material, and every valley and every penetration is another place a roof can leak, which is why they cost more to do right.

8. Permits, which have no national number

A roofing permit fee is set by your city’s ordinance, which means the true number is sitting on a public web page with your town’s name on it. Pull up your own city’s fee schedule and read the actual line. It takes five minutes and it is the only permit number that is true where you live. Then make sure it appears on the quote, with the roofer pulling it, not you.

9. The post storm surge

After a big hail or wind event, every crew inside a couple hundred miles is booked solid and the out of state trucks roll in. Verisk reported replacement costs in the Dallas Fort Worth area jumping about 7.5% within weeks of a May 2024 storm. If your roof is damaged but not open, and you can wait a season, wait. You will get a better price and a crew that is not exhausted.

What happened to material prices

BLS producer price data, May 2026: asphalt shingle and coating manufacturing sits at 354.9 against 251.1 in May 2020. That is up 41% in six years and still near a record. Meanwhile the wood under the shingles collapsed. Softwood plywood is down about 54% from its June 2021 peak. OSB is down about 55% from peak and 13% year over year.

So a roofer who blames "lumber prices" for your number is two years out of date, and you can say so. The shingle went up. The deck sheets got cheap. That is one more reason to nail down the per sheet decking price in writing while plywood is on the floor.

On material choice: asphalt is the cheapest and it is what most American roofs are. Metal, tile, and slate all cost multiples of it and all last longer. Skip the per square foot table by material you will find on every other site and do this instead. Decide how many more years you intend to own the house, pick the material that has to survive that long, and get three real quotes on that one material. A comparison you had priced beats a comparison somebody published.

What is the cheapest time to replace a roof?

We used to say late fall. The employment data says we were wrong, and so is most of the internet. BLS payroll counts for roofing contractors, not seasonally adjusted, show October 2025 at 263,100 workers, essentially tied with the July peak of 263,600. The bottom is February 2026, at 238,000. Late fall is not the slow season. It is one of the two busy ones.

The dead weeks are January and February. Whether a slow crew will actually knock money off is our own experience talking, so weigh it as experience. What is certain is that a roofer with an empty February calendar picks up the phone. Cold carries its own tradeoff: asphalt needs heat to seal down, so a January roof may not fully bond until spring and the crew has to hand seal in the meantime. Ask how they handle it.

Is it cheaper to shingle over the old roof?

Upfront, yes. You skip the tear off labor and you skip the tipping fee, and from the numbers above you can see that is genuinely a few hundred dollars of dump cost plus the hours to strip it. Then you look at what you bought.

A layover means nobody ever saw your decking, so any soft spot stays down there and gets nailed through. It piles weight on framing that was sized for one roof. It traps heat, which shortens the life of the shingles you just paid for. And the IRC caps the stack anyway: no recover where two or more layers are already on. Our position, plainly: tear it off. The money you save on a layover is money you borrowed from the next roof.