How much is 1000 square feet of siding?

First, make sure you mean 1,000 square feet of wall and not a 1,000 square foot house, because those are very different numbers and the second one has more wall than you think. On wall area, the honest answer depends on what is included. If you use the field ranges for material and labor, 1,000 square feet of standard vinyl is a few thousand dollars and cedar or fiber cement climbs from there. But Zonda's Cost vs. Value report prices a full vinyl job, tear-off and factory trim and weather barrier included, through the industry's own estimating software, and that lands at $14.36 a square foot, or roughly $14,000 across 1,000 square feet. The distance between those two answers is the tear-off, the trim, the wrap, and the overhead. Measure your walls, then judge the bids against each other rather than against a number on a blog.

How much does it cost to put new siding on a 1500 sq ft house?

We will not give you one number, and here is why. A 1,500 square foot house is a floor plan, not a wall area, and siding is sold by the wall. A compact two-story and a sprawling ranch with the same 1,500 square feet can differ by hundreds of square feet of siding. So measure it: perimeter times wall height, minus the windows and doors, plus half the base times the height for each gable, plus 10 to 15 percent waste. Then multiply that by a material range. For scale, the industry's own Cost vs. Value figure for a defined 1,250 square foot vinyl re-side, trim and weather barrier included, is $17,950. A real bid on a real house lands where your wall area, your material, and the condition of your sheathing put it.

How much is 2000 sq ft vinyl siding?

If you take the industry's own number rather than a cost guide's, the arithmetic is straightforward. Zonda's Cost vs. Value report prices 1,250 square feet of vinyl, installed with factory trim at every opening and corner and a weather resistive barrier underneath, at $17,950. That is $14.36 a square foot, so 2,000 square feet of wall comes to roughly $28,700 on the same basis. That will look high next to the $3 to $8 range you have read elsewhere, and it should: those figures are the panels going on the wall, not the whole job. What moves yours down is a simple boxy house, thinner panel, and no tear-off. What moves it up is a cut-up elevation, thicker or insulated panel, two-story staging, and whatever is found under the old siding.

What's the cheapest siding to put on your house?

Standard hollow vinyl is the cheapest common material to buy and the fastest to hang, which is why it is on so many houses. Basic aluminum is in the same conversation in some regions. But the cheapest material and the cheapest job are not the same thing, and the cheapest job is rarely the cheapest outcome. The savings on a low bid usually come from somewhere specific: no tear-off, no house wrap, no proper flashing, or a crew billing at a rate that cannot cover workers comp. Any of those can cost you far more than you saved. Pick the cheapest material if the budget says so, then refuse to let anyone save you money by leaving the wrap or the flashing off the wall.

How long does it take to side a 1500 sq ft house?

From what we see, a competent crew is on a house that size for roughly one to two weeks, and that is field experience rather than a published statistic. What stretches it: fiber cement, which is heavy and slow to cut and hang compared to vinyl; a cut-up elevation with dormers and gables; rain; and rotted sheathing that nobody could see until the old siding came off. What shortens it: a simple boxy house, vinyl, dry weather, and a crew whose people are not spread across three other jobs. Ask your contractor how many bodies will actually be on site and how many other jobs are running that week. What he says tells you more about the schedule than the square footage does.

How Much Should Siding Cost Per Square Foot?

Published by TradeIQ · Updated July 12, 2026

You came here for a number, and this page is going to give you fewer of them than the last five pages you read. That is on purpose. We went looking for the source of the siding averages everyone quotes, found out who publishes them, and threw most of ours away. What is left is the labor math, the industry's own project cost, your city's actual permit fee, and a way to measure your own house so you walk into the bids holding a figure nobody sold you.

A siding contractor holds dark and white siding color samples in front of a modern black-and-white farmhouse clad in lap and board-and-batten siding.

Key takeaways

The "national average" for siding traces back to Angi, which owns HomeAdvisor, so the two sources that appear to confirm each other are one company whose business is handing your phone number to siding contractors. We deleted our version of that number.
There is no "siding installer" occupation federally. The work sits under Carpenters, at a mean of $31.55 and a median of $29.12 an hour in the May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey. Add 25 to 40 percent payroll burden and a carpenter costs a contractor roughly $39 to $44 an hour before the truck, the ladder, or the office.
A crew billing $40 an hour is not making money on your job. It is paying under market, running 1099 subs, or carrying no workers comp.
Zonda's Cost vs. Value report prices a defined 1,250 square foot vinyl re-side, with trim and weather barrier, at $17,950. That is $14.36 a square foot, against a blog vinyl ceiling of about $8. The gap is tear-off, trim, wrap, and overhead.
Siding is priced by wall area, not floor area. Measure the perimeter times the height, subtract openings, add the gable triangles, add 10 to 15 percent waste, and divide by 100 for squares.
The permit is the one honestly published number, and it swings hard: Chicago exempts like-for-like siding entirely, Minneapolis charges $310, and most cities scale the fee to your declared job value. Ask your building department whether siding is exempt and whether the fee is flat or valuation-based.
Pre-1978 homes require a Lead-Safe Certified firm under EPA's rule. We will not print a national lead or asbestos figure, because every one of them is published by people who sell abatement.

The national average you keep reading is one company

This page used to say a full re-side averages around $10,000 to $14,500, with most homeowners between roughly $5,500 and $18,000. We traced that back. It came from Angi, blended with one other cost site. Angi owns HomeAdvisor. So the two numbers that look like independent confirmation are one company publishing under two names, and that company's business is selling your phone number to siding contractors. We deleted the range instead of dressing it up, because a number that exists to generate a lead is not a number that protects you in a negotiation.

There is no federal index, no standards body, and no disclosed-methodology survey that tracks what homeowners pay for siding. When you cannot find a clean source, the honest move is to say so and hand you the tools instead. So here is everything below that comes from somewhere you can check: what the federal government says the labor is worth, what the remodeling industry's own estimating software says a defined vinyl job costs, and what a handful of real city fee schedules charge for the permit. Everything else on this page is field experience, and we will label it that way every time.

Start with what the labor is worth

Search the federal occupation database for "siding installer" and you get nothing. No quick matches found. The work is classified under 47-2031 Carpenters, whose official definition says a carpenter "may also install cabinets, siding, drywall." That is the closest the government gets. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey for May 2025, carpenters earn a mean of $31.55 an hour and a median of $29.12.

Be honest about what that figure is and is not. Carpenters is a broad bucket, and the same people framing walls and hanging cabinets are in it, so it is not a siding-specific wage. More importantly, it is a wage paid to a worker. It is not a rate billed to you. Those are two different numbers, and the distance between them is the whole point.

Now do the arithmetic. On top of the paycheck, an employer carries payroll burden: FICA, unemployment, general liability, and workers compensation, which for exterior work up on ladders is a high-rate class. That burden routinely adds 25 to 40 percent. So a carpenter costs a real contractor somewhere around $39 to $44 an hour before anyone has paid for a truck, a ladder, an office, or the owner.

Which gives you a red flag you can actually use. A crew billing you $40 an hour is not making money on your job. It is paying under market, running its people as 1099 subs, or carrying no workers comp. All three of those become your problem the day somebody falls off a ladder in your side yard. You will never see that sentence in a cost guide, because cost guides are paid to send you toward the cheap bid.

The gap between blog numbers and the real job cost

Zonda publishes the Cost vs. Value report, and it prices its jobs through Verisk XactRemodel, the same estimating software insurance adjusters and remodelers use. Its vinyl siding project is defined verbatim as "replacing 1,250 square feet of existing siding with new vinyl siding installed to the manufacturer's specifications, plus factory trim at all openings and corners and a weather resistive barrier underneath." The job cost: $17,950.

Divide it out. That is $14.36 a square foot. For vinyl. Meanwhile the vinyl range you will read everywhere, including the one further down this page, tops out around $8. Print those side by side and the gap is not a mystery, it is a confession: the blog per-foot number is the panels going on the wall, and the real number includes tearing off the old siding, hauling it away, factory trim at every window and corner, the weather barrier behind it, and a company with insurance and overhead that will still exist next spring.

So use the per-foot ranges to sanity-check a line item, never to predict your total. If a bid on a real house lands near the bottom of a blog range, do not read that as a windfall. Read it as a bid with the tear-off, the trim, or the wrap quietly left off the page, and our breakdown of why one siding quote doubles another walks through exactly where the money hides.

Per square foot by material, and what moves it

These are installed ranges, drawn from the bids we read and the walls we have hung. Call it field experience, because that is all it is, and it is not a published statistic. It covers the panels and the labor to hang them, not the full job the $14.36 figure above describes. Every range below gets the same treatment: what drives it up, what drags it down, and where it quits applying:

Standard vinyl: roughly $3 to $8 per square foot. Up: thicker panel, since two bids that both read "vinyl" can sit hundreds of dollars a square apart on a mil thickness nobody bothered to write down. Down: builder-grade panel, a simple boxy house, long uninterrupted walls. Does not apply if the wall has to be furred out or the substrate is failing.
Insulated (foam-backed) vinyl: about $5 to $12. Up: thicker foam, premium profiles. Down: standard backer, simple layout. Does not apply if you are only re-siding one elevation, where the mismatch at the corners costs more than the upgrade.
Aluminum: about $3 to $10. Up: heavier gauge, custom color, bent trim. Down: standard gauge on a straight ranch. Does not apply in a hail belt, where dents are the whole conversation.
Engineered wood: about $7 to $14. Up: wider boards, prefinished factory color, board-and-batten patterns. Down: primed and site-painted, standard lap. Note that the $4 to $6 you see quoted online is material only, so it is not comparable to this.
Fiber cement: about $5 to $14. Up: factory finish, panel and shake styles, mixed textures, two-story staging. Down: primed lap on one plane. It rides the high end on labor because the board is heavy, slow to cut, and takes two people to hang.
Natural wood and cedar: about $8 to $14, and clear-grade or specialty species run past $20. Up: grade, species, a stained or oiled finish, mitered corners. Down: rough sawn, a painted grade, simple butt joints.
Stucco: about $7 to $17. Up: a traditional three-coat system, heavy texture, lath over an irregular wall. Down: a synthetic system on a flat, simple elevation.
Brick and stone veneer: roughly $8 to $35. Up: natural stone over manufactured, custom patterns, a full wrap rather than an accent. Down: manufactured panels on a small accent area. This is a masonry job wearing a siding label, and it should be bid by a mason.

The ranges overlap on purpose. A premium fiber cement job can cost more than basic cedar, and a high-end vinyl can pass a low-end engineered wood. Picking the material puts you on the right street. It does not hand you the house number. If you want to know which material belongs on your house rather than what it costs, that is a different question, and we answer it in our guide to the siding types.

Measure your own wall area. It takes an afternoon.

Siding is priced by wall area, not floor area. A 2,000 square foot house does not have 2,000 square feet of wall, and a compact two-story carries far more wall than a sprawling ranch of the same floor plan. Contractors talk in "squares," and a square means 100 square feet of wall. Here is the method they use, and you can run it yourself with a tape measure and a phone calculator:

1Measure the perimeter of the house and multiply it by the wall height. That is your gross wall area.
2Subtract the area of the windows and the doors.
3Add the gable triangles: half the base times the height, for each gable.
4Add waste. About 10 percent for a simple boxy house, up to 15 percent when there are a lot of corners, dormers, and angles to cut around.
5Divide by 100. That is your number of squares, which is how material actually gets ordered and priced.

Now you own a number that came from your own house instead of somebody's traffic funnel. Multiply it against a material range above for a rough floor, then check the bids against the arithmetic and against each other. If a contractor's square footage is wildly under yours, ask him to walk you through his takeoff before you argue about price. Most of the time, that is where the disagreement actually is.

The line items an honest bid shows you

We are not printing dollar figures for these, because every figure floating around for them traces back to somebody selling the service. What matters more is that each one appears on the page, priced, in writing. A bid that skips them is not cheaper. It is vaguer, and the vagueness comes back to you as a change order in week two. Insist on seeing:

Tear-off and disposal of the old siding, including the dump fees.
Whether the crew is tearing off at all or siding over what is there, which is the biggest single reason two bids on one house are pricing different work.
House wrap, meaning the weather-resistive barrier that goes on before the panels.
Flashing at windows, doors, and rooflines, including kickout flashing where a roof meets a wall.
Sheathing repair, priced as an allowance or a unit rate, because nobody knows what is behind the old siding until it comes off.
Fascia, soffit, and window casing, and whether they are in the price or extra.
The permit, and who files it.

Tear-off versus siding over, and what happens when the sheathing under there is soft, is the fork in the road that separates two bids by thousands. We take that apart line by line in the quote comparison guide, and it is worth reading before you sign.

Permits: two questions, one phone call

This is the one cost on your job with a real published number attached to it, and it varies more than anyone expects. On a $12,000 re-side, real fee schedules today: Chicago charges nothing, because the city's building code exempts like-for-like work outright, stating that "a building permit is not required for... repairing or replacing (in-kind) exterior wood, vinyl, aluminum, fiber cement, stucco, or EIFS siding." Nashville is around $91. Lansing is a flat $130. Madison lands between $132 and $182. Minneapolis is $310. Thornton, Colorado charges $140 for the permit and then adds a $225 construction use tax, so the tax costs more than the permit does.

Notice what is really going on. Most cities do not charge a flat fee at all. They charge a percentage of your declared job value, which means the permit rises with the bid, and a bigger job automatically carries a bigger fee. So pick up the phone, get your building department, and put two questions to them. Is siding exempt here? And is the fee flat, or is it pegged to the value of the job? Two minutes on that call beats any number you will read on a cost guide, including this one.

Lead and asbestos, and why we will not price them

If your house was built before 1978, the contractor you pay has to be one of EPA's Lead-Safe Certified firms, and he has to work under the RRP rule the moment he disturbs painted surfaces. That is federal, it is not optional, and it is a fair question to put to him on the phone before anyone comes out. Old cementitious siding can also contain asbestos, and disposing of it correctly is a real cost line on a real bid.

We are not going to print a national figure for either one, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. Every number we could find for lead containment or asbestos disposal traces back to abatement contractors selling abatement. What drives your cost instead: whether testing comes back positive at all, how much area is affected, what rules your state has, what rules your city stacks on top, and what the landfill down the road charges to take the material. Get it tested, then get it priced locally. Anything else is a guess wearing a decimal point.

One more thing people ask at this stage, and it is not a cost question: whether new siding pays you back at resale. It does better than most exterior projects, and we cover the recoup figures in our siding types guide rather than muddling them in with what the job costs to buy.

Got a number and not sure it holds up?

A range gets you close. It cannot tell you whether this bid, on your wall area, in your material, with your sheathing under it, is square. Hand the quote and your square footage to a TradeIQ installer, one who cannot bid on your house. He will tell you what that figure should look like on a wall like yours, and whether it is quietly loading up change orders for week two.

Check the bid against your house, not against an average

This page argued itself out of most of its own numbers. We threw out the national average once we found out who publishes it, refused to price the lead and asbestos work, and pointed you at your own tape measure and your own city's fee schedule instead. A web page can only carry you so far, though, because it has never laid eyes on your sheathing. Send your quote and your wall footage over to a TradeIQ siding installer who has no shot at winning the work, and he will say plainly whether the number is fair, high, or short a step.

Best fit: a Written Review, turned around fast.

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Frequently asked questions

How much is 1000 square feet of siding?: First, make sure you mean 1,000 square feet of wall and not a 1,000 square foot house, because those are very different numbers and the second one has more wall than you think. On wall area, the honest answer depends on what is included. If you use the field ranges for material and labor, 1,000 square feet of standard vinyl is a few thousand dollars and cedar or fiber cement climbs from there. But Zonda's Cost vs. Value report prices a full vinyl job, tear-off and factory trim and weather barrier included, through the industry's own estimating software, and that lands at $14.36 a square foot, or roughly $14,000 across 1,000 square feet. The distance between those two answers is the tear-off, the trim, the wrap, and the overhead. Measure your walls, then judge the bids against each other rather than against a number on a blog.
How much does it cost to put new siding on a 1500 sq ft house?: We will not give you one number, and here is why. A 1,500 square foot house is a floor plan, not a wall area, and siding is sold by the wall. A compact two-story and a sprawling ranch with the same 1,500 square feet can differ by hundreds of square feet of siding. So measure it: perimeter times wall height, minus the windows and doors, plus half the base times the height for each gable, plus 10 to 15 percent waste. Then multiply that by a material range. For scale, the industry's own Cost vs. Value figure for a defined 1,250 square foot vinyl re-side, trim and weather barrier included, is $17,950. A real bid on a real house lands where your wall area, your material, and the condition of your sheathing put it.
How much is 2000 sq ft vinyl siding?: If you take the industry's own number rather than a cost guide's, the arithmetic is straightforward. Zonda's Cost vs. Value report prices 1,250 square feet of vinyl, installed with factory trim at every opening and corner and a weather resistive barrier underneath, at $17,950. That is $14.36 a square foot, so 2,000 square feet of wall comes to roughly $28,700 on the same basis. That will look high next to the $3 to $8 range you have read elsewhere, and it should: those figures are the panels going on the wall, not the whole job. What moves yours down is a simple boxy house, thinner panel, and no tear-off. What moves it up is a cut-up elevation, thicker or insulated panel, two-story staging, and whatever is found under the old siding.
What's the cheapest siding to put on your house?: Standard hollow vinyl is the cheapest common material to buy and the fastest to hang, which is why it is on so many houses. Basic aluminum is in the same conversation in some regions. But the cheapest material and the cheapest job are not the same thing, and the cheapest job is rarely the cheapest outcome. The savings on a low bid usually come from somewhere specific: no tear-off, no house wrap, no proper flashing, or a crew billing at a rate that cannot cover workers comp. Any of those can cost you far more than you saved. Pick the cheapest material if the budget says so, then refuse to let anyone save you money by leaving the wrap or the flashing off the wall.
How long does it take to side a 1500 sq ft house?: From what we see, a competent crew is on a house that size for roughly one to two weeks, and that is field experience rather than a published statistic. What stretches it: fiber cement, which is heavy and slow to cut and hang compared to vinyl; a cut-up elevation with dormers and gables; rain; and rotted sheathing that nobody could see until the old siding came off. What shortens it: a simple boxy house, vinyl, dry weather, and a crew whose people are not spread across three other jobs. Ask your contractor how many bodies will actually be on site and how many other jobs are running that week. What he says tells you more about the schedule than the square footage does.

Related Siding resources

Why Is One Siding Quote Double Another?Types of Siding: How to Choose the Right One for Your House Questions to Ask a Siding Contractor Before Signing