Siding replacement cost dataset

From floor area to wall area

Vinyl on a stripped wall, rectangular plan, fourteen windows and two doors, national wages. Only the house changes down this table. The gross wall column is the number a contractor measures and the number siding is sold in; the floor column is the number homeowners have.

The constants inside that conversion are ours and they are declared rather than hidden: 10 feet of wall on the ground floor and 9 on each storey above, a gable triangle at an assumed 6:12 pitch, 15 square feet and 16 linear feet per window, 21 and 20 per door, an assumed 16-inch eave overhang inside the soffit band, and a 20-square-foot line below which an opening saves no material at all, because cutting a lap course around a small window consumes almost the whole width of every board that crosses it. A measured wall beats every one of these. If you have one, use it.

Roof shape moves it the other way, and it is the one nobody expects. The two gable ends are wall, and they are the wall nobody counts. On a 1,500 sq ft ranch they add over 200 sq ft of siding — and they are the part that needs staging even on a single-storey house. No triangular ends, so no gable siding at all. The same house costs measurably less to side with a hip roof than with a gable one. The model prices the gutter on the eave rather than on the perimeter for the same reason: on a gable roof nothing hangs off the two sloping rakes.

What the material changes

The 1,500 square foot single-storey house, national wages, only the material changing. Hours per square foot are the honest difference between these seven and they are bigger than the price tags suggest, which is why the crew days move with the material and the staging rental moves with the crew days.

Two of those rows are worth reading together. Primed fibre cement painted on site and the factory-finished version of the same board land within a few per cent of each other: one pays a painter and the other pays the mill. What actually separates them is written in the manufacturer’s own warranty document and in who owns the touch-ups afterwards, and neither of those is ours to summarise. Days come from the modelled crew hours divided by a 3-person crew, with a two-day floor, and that is what the staging rental line is charged on.

Stripping the old siding, or siding over it

The fork that changes the most lines at once, on the 1,500 square foot house at national wages.

The five lines that disappear on the cheaper route are the tear-off labour, the sheathing material and its carpenter hours, and both halves of the water-resistive barrier. Four of those five are the ones that keep the wall dry or find out that it is not. That is the trade, stated in full rather than sold as a saving.

What is on the wall today

Stripping hours and skip capacity both depend on what is being torn off, and until this dataset was audited it asked neither. Vinyl unzips from the top course down; wood comes off board by board with every nail. The skip column is for a 3,000 square foot two-storey house, because on the small house every option rounds up to one container and the difference is invisible.

Where the new siding goes over the old, these three rows give the same total, and that is correct rather than a gap: nothing is being stripped, so nothing about the old cladding is being paid for. It has not stopped being true about the wall.

The pre-1978 lead-safe rule, priced

Stripping old siding disturbs paint. EPA publishes that lead-based paint was banned for home use in 1978 and that roughly three quarters of US homes built before then still contain some, and its EPA, Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Program requires anyone paid to disturb that paint to be certified in lead-safe work practices. The regulation text is 40 CFR 745 subpart E, Residential Property Renovation. Both retrieved 2026-08-22. No siding cost guide carries these two lines, so here they are with their quantities.

Two things are worth saying next to that figure. EPA states that in general the rule does not apply to homeowners doing this kind of project in their own pre-1978 home, which is a real exemption and worth knowing before assuming a quote is padded. And lead abatement — deliberately removing or permanently enclosing lead paint — is different work under a different certification, and it is not in any total on this site at any figure. It is in the exclusions below, where it belongs.

The staging line has a similar shape. OSHA 29 CFR 1926.501, Duty to have fall protection says that each employee on a walking or working surface with an unprotected side or edge six feet or more above a lower level shall be protected from falling. Retrieved 2026-08-22. It does not order anybody to erect staging; our 10-foot wall and our gable peak are what put a person up there, and those are our assumptions.

Line items

Conditional lines appear only when the corresponding answer applies, which is why the default job in the calculator carries 22 of the 42 defined here. Trim is three families rather than one, because a vinyl corner post and a 5/4 cellular PVC corner board are not the same linear foot and charging them alike was wrong in both directions at once.

The reasoning behind each figure

Written out so a siding contractor can point at the exact assumption that is wrong, including the ones this dataset got wrong before and has since corrected. A number with no reasoning behind it cannot be corrected.

Staging: pump jacks, ladder jacks or scaffold, and fall protectionestimated, ±65%

• This line is on every siding job, including single-storey ones, and that surprises people. The verified text of OSHA 1926.501 says that each employee on a walking or working surface with an unprotected side or edge six feet or more above a lower level shall be protected from falling. That is the rule, and it is all the rule says.
• The rest is ours, not OSHA's: our assumed one-storey wall height is ten feet to the soffit, and a gable peak is higher still, so the top of the wall is worked from a platform — and a platform that high is a platform that has to be protected. The standard does not order anybody to erect staging; it sets what has to be true once somebody is up there.
• Days are the days the crew is on the house, taken straight from the modelled labour hours divided by a three-person crew, with a two-day floor. That is why a cedar job rents more staging than a vinyl job on the same wall: the equipment stands there while the work happens, not while the panel goes up. Until 2026-08-22 this line was modelled from wall area alone and was blind to the material, which rented identical days for jobs that differ by half.
• The bottom of the band is pump jacks and planks on a ranch, rented by the week and priced here per day of that rental. The top is tube scaffold or a towable lift where the ground falls away, the wall is three storeys, or there is no room to set poles.
• Rental and haulage of equipment, so it carries no regional labour adjustment. The hours to put it up and take it down are the line below.

Labourer: set, move and strike the staging

• Four hours fixed plus 0.04 hours per linear foot of perimeter per storey. Pump jack poles have to be braced to the wall and moved along it as the work goes; a tower on a two-storey house has to be built, levelled on whatever the ground is doing, and taken down again.
• It is its own line because the rental line above is equipment only, and equipment does not put itself up. A quote that carries staging as a single lump is carrying these hours inside it whether or not it says so.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Labourer: strip the old siding, trim and fasteners

• Four hours fixed plus a rate per square foot per layer that depends on WHAT is on the wall today, which is the question this model did not ask until 2026-08-22: 0.006 hours per square foot for vinyl or aluminium, 0.014 for wood clapboard, shingle or hardboard, 0.018 for cement board. Vinyl unzips; wood comes off board by board and every nail with it.
• A house with aluminium over the original wood siding is two layers, and it is charged as two.
• Zero where the new siding goes over the old. That is the whole saving of that route, and it is worth seeing next to what it costs you: nobody looks at the sheathing, and the barrier line below goes to zero as well.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate.

Skip: delivered, filled and removedestimated, ±33%

• A 20 cubic yard container, delivered, collected and tipped. It is carried as equipment and haulage rather than as material, which is what it is and what the crawl space page already called it: nobody buys a skip.
• ⚠️ How many is arithmetic, and until 2026-08-22 this line got it wrong by a factor of three. A wall of half-inch wood siding is about 2.4 cubic yards of solid material per 1,575 square feet, four times that loose; vinyl is a twentieth of an inch and fills a fifth of what wood does. Modelled at one container per 3,000 square feet of wall per layer for vinyl or aluminium, per 2,000 for wood, and per 1,600 for cement board — where the skip fills on weight before it fills on volume. The old divisor of 900 bought forty cubic yards of capacity for ten cubic yards of rubbish.
• One container even where the new siding goes over the old, because the trim, the soffit, the fascia and the offcuts of the new material still have to go somewhere. Pricing that route at zero waste would be pricing a job nobody has ever done.
• The band is the delivered-and-collected price with a normal tonnage allowance. This figure is a flat national band and it will be wrong in both directions at the extremes: what a skip costs is mostly what your county charges to receive it, and that is one of the most variable numbers in the country. Check it locally.

Replacement sheathing where the wall is rottenestimated, ±42%

• Sheathing board and nothing else: 7/16 OSB at the bottom of the band, half-inch CDX plywood at the top. ⚠️ It does NOT include the framing behind it. An earlier version of this line said it covered "the framing repair that goes with the worst of it" while the exclusions said structural repair was not budgeted — two statements about the same job, on the same page, that could not both be true. The exclusion is the one with the trade behind it: what is behind the sheathing is not visible when the quote is written, so it is quoted as a variation when the wall is open. The band came down accordingly.
• Priced across the share of the wall you expect to be bad, because nobody knows the real figure until the old siding is on the ground.
• Five per cent is the default and it is a guess by anybody, ours included. Under a window that has leaked for a decade it is local and it is total; on a wall that was covered in vinyl over sound sheathing it is nearly zero.
• This line is zero when the new siding goes over the old, and that is not a saving: it is the same rot, still there, now under two layers. It is the single strongest argument for stripping.

Carpenter: cut out, replace and re-nail the damaged sheathing

• Modelled at 0.035 hours per square foot replaced, roughly 29 sq ft an hour. Patching sheathing is slow work: the bad area has to be cut back to sound framing, the edges have to land on studs, and blocking has to go in where they do not.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate.

Water-resistive barrier, seam tape and flashing tapeestimated, ±52%

• House wrap or felt, plus the tape at the laps and the self-adhered flashing tape at every opening. Cheap material doing the most important job on the wall: siding is a rain screen, not a seal, and what keeps the sheathing dry is what is behind it.
• The bottom of the band is builder-grade wrap and standard tape. The top is a high-performance or self-adhered barrier with butyl flashing at the openings.
• Quantity is the wall area plus 10% for laps at every course and corner.
• Zero where the new siding goes over the old, because there is no way to install a barrier without taking the old siding off. That is the second thing that route gives up.

Carpenter: hang the barrier and tape the openings

• Modelled at 0.006 hours per square foot of wall plus 0.25 hours per opening. The open wall goes fast; the openings do not, and they are where the water actually gets in.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Rainscreen furring or drainage matestimated, ±65%

• A ventilated gap between the barrier and the back of the siding, so anything that gets past the face can drain and dry instead of sitting against the sheathing. The bottom of the band is battens ripped from framing lumber; the top is a bonded drainage mat, which is a manufactured product and costs three or four times what a strip of wood costs.
• It is the cheapest thing on this page that measurably extends the life of everything else, and it is also the first line a competitive quote drops, because the finished wall looks identical either way.
• It costs more than the material alone: furring pushes the trim out by three quarters of an inch, which is why the trim and flashing lines below get bigger with it.

Carpenter: set out and fix the furring or mat

• Modelled at 0.012 hours per square foot. Furring has to land on the studs, stay plumb and stop short of the openings so the gap can vent top and bottom, which is more setting out than it sounds.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate.

Continuous rigid insulation board and tapeestimated, ±44%

• Rigid board over the sheathing, taped at the joints. A re-side is the only moment in a house's life when this is cheap to add, because the wall is already open and the trim is already coming off.
• The band separates half-inch XPS or polyiso from a full inch with taped joints and the longer fasteners the siding then needs.
• Whether it is optional at all depends on where you live: continuous insulation requirements come from the energy code your state has adopted, and states adopt different editions at different times. The link on this line is the federal register of which state is on which code — it is a lookup, not advice.

Carpenter: fix and tape the insulation board

• Modelled at 0.011 hours per square foot. Board goes up quickly; taping every joint and detailing it into the window flashing is what takes the time.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate.

Vinyl lap siding, panels and starterestimated, ±42%

• The band is thickness and grade: builder-grade 0.040-inch panel at the bottom, a 0.046-inch premium profile with a heavier nail hem at the top. Both are vinyl and they do not weather the same. Whatever cover comes with either is set by the manufacturer’s warranty document, which is worth reading before choosing on price.
• Quantity includes 10% for cutting waste, which is material bought and not material installed. The hours below are charged on the net wall area only.
• ⚠️ What gets ordered is the GROSS wall less the large openings, and then the waste on top of that — not the net wall. Until 2026-08-22 this page ordered the net area plus waste and ended up buying five per cent LESS material than there is wall, which is not a trade practice, it is an arithmetic slip. Cutting a lap course around a three-by-five window consumes almost the whole width of every board that crosses it; a patio door or a garage opening is big enough to save material, a window is not.
• Manufactured and shipped nationally, so geography barely moves this line. What geography moves is the labour underneath it.

Insulated vinyl siding, panels and starterestimated, ±35%

• Vinyl with contoured EPS bonded to the back. It costs roughly twice plain vinyl per square foot and it buys three things: a flatter wall, a quieter one, and a little continuous insulation.
• If you are also ticking the rigid board option above, price both and compare — you are buying the same thing twice, and the board is usually the cheaper way to get more of it.
• Quantity includes 10% for cutting waste.

Steel siding panelsestimated, ±40%

• Coated steel, usually 26 or 28 gauge. The band separates a plain painted panel from a textured, printed one with a heavier coating system.
• It is the material that survives hail as a dent rather than a hole, and the one that does not go brittle at minus twenty. Both of those are regional arguments, not national ones.
• Quantity includes 12% for cutting waste: steel is cut to length and the offcuts are not re-usable the way a vinyl offcut is.

Engineered wood siding, primedestimated, ±33%

• Resin-bonded wood strand board with a factory primer. The band separates plain lap from deeper textured or shake profiles.
• It arrives primed and not finished, so the field-finishing lines below apply. A quote for engineered wood that does not carry a painter is a quote for an unfinished house.
• Quantity includes 12% for cutting waste.

Fibre cement siding, primedestimated, ±32%

• Primed lap board. The band separates standard 8.25-inch lap from wider boards, panel products and the trim-grade material used at corners.
• The board is cheap and the hours are not: it weighs roughly two and a half pounds a square foot, so it is hung by two people, and cutting it releases silica, which is why it is cut with shears or a dust-collecting blade rather than a normal saw.
• Primed board has to be painted on site, and those hours are on their own lines below. Compare this option with the factory-finished one: the totals land close together, so the decision is made on the manufacturer’s own warranty document and on who is expected to do the touch-ups — read the first and ask about the second.
• Quantity includes 12% for cutting waste.

Fibre cement siding, factory finishedestimated, ±31%

• The same board with a baked-on factory colour and a matched touch-up kit. It costs roughly 70% more per square foot than the primed version and it removes the painter from the job entirely.
• The band separates a standard colour from a custom one with matched trim and accessories, which is where the top of it goes.
• Quantity includes 12% for cutting waste. Waste matters more here than anywhere else on the page: a cut end is a raw edge that needs sealing, and an offcut in the wrong colour is scrap.

Cedar bevel siding or shinglesestimated, ±61%

• The widest band on the page, and honestly so: the bottom is knotty bevel from stock and the top is clear vertical-grain or hand-split shingle. They are the same species and nothing else about them is the same.
• Cedar is the only material here whose cost does not stop at handover. It has to be refinished on a cycle for as long as it is on the wall, and that is a running cost this figure does not include.
• Quantity includes 15% for cutting waste — higher than the others, because bevel siding is cut to length at every course and the offcuts are short.

Carpenter: set out, cut and hang the siding

• Hours per square foot are the honest difference between these materials, and they are bigger than the price tags suggest: 0.028 for vinyl, 0.034 for insulated vinyl, 0.040 for fibre cement either primed or factory finished, 0.042 for engineered wood, 0.050 for steel and 0.058 for cedar.
• Fibre cement came down from 0.052 on 2026-08-22. Nineteen square feet an hour per man was slower than a two-man crew actually hangs it: four to six courses a day on a wall is 25 to 37 square feet an hour per man. Steel went the other way and now sits above fibre cement rather than below it, because a steel panel is cut with shears, hemmed at the cut edge, and a dent in it is scrap rather than a blemish.
• Fibre cement is still slower than vinyl by nearly half. It is heavy enough to need two people on a plank, brittle enough that a dropped board is scrap, and it is cut with shears or a dust-collecting blade rather than a normal saw.
• Charged on the NET wall area, not on the material ordered. The 10 to 15% cutting waste is board bought and thrown away, not board installed, and charging labour on it would bill the offcuts twice.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate. BLS publishes no siding installer occupation, so the hour is priced at 47-2031, Carpenters.

Vinyl starter strip, corner posts, J-channel and undersill trimestimated, ±52%

• For vinyl and insulated vinyl. Priced per linear foot across the whole run rather than piece by piece: starter at the bottom, undersill and trim at the soffit line, and a corner post at each of the four corners running the full height of the wall.
• Stock vinyl accessory is cheap and the band says so. Starter strip, J-channel and undersill are the cheapest linear feet on this page; the corner post is several times any of them and is what pulls the top of the band up. Insulated vinyl needs a deeper starter and a deeper post, and sits at the top.
• Quantity is twice the perimeter — the bottom course and the top — plus the four corners at full wall height.

Matched metal starter, corners and trimestimated, ±45%

• For steel siding. The accessory is the same coated steel as the panel, in the same colour and from the same batch, and it is bought as a system rather than off a rack.
• Quantity is twice the perimeter plus the four corners at full wall height.

Corner boards, water table and frieze in PVC, fibre cement or woodestimated, ±43%

• For engineered wood, fibre cement and cedar. These materials do not take a snap-in corner post: the corner is a pair of boards, mitred or butted, and the bottom of the wall gets a water table with its own flashing.
• The band separates 5/4 cellular PVC and fibre cement trim board from clear cedar or a wide profile with a moulded edge. It is several times the vinyl accessory band on purpose, because it is several times the material and several times the cut.
• Quantity is twice the perimeter plus the four corners at full wall height.

J-channel and window trim around openings, vinylestimated, ±49%

• Measured around the perimeter of every opening: 16 feet for a typical window, 20 for a door. Sixteen openings on an average house is over 260 linear feet of trim, which is more than the perimeter of the house.
• J-channel around a vinyl window is the cheapest trim on the page and the band starts there. The top is a wider lineal or a two-piece surround, which is what makes a vinyl re-side stop looking like one.
• This is the line that separates a re-side that looks new from one that looks re-sided. It is also the first thing a low quote quietly downgrades, because it is invisible on a specification and obvious on the house.

Matched metal trim around openingsestimated, ±49%

• For steel siding: the same coated steel formed into a surround, with the head detail bent to shed water over the face rather than behind it.
• Measured around the perimeter of every opening: 16 feet for a typical window, 20 for a door.

Casing around openings in PVC, fibre cement or woodestimated, ±50%

• For engineered wood, fibre cement and cedar. The opening gets a real casing — 5/4 cellular PVC or fibre cement trim board — with a sloped sill and a drip cap over the head.
• Measured around the perimeter of every opening: 16 feet for a typical window, 20 for a door.
• It is roughly four times the vinyl band, and that ratio is the whole reason these lines were split: charging a cedar job vinyl accessory money, or a vinyl job casing money, was wrong in both directions at once.

Carpenter: fit trim, corners, accessories and penetration blocks

• Modelled at 0.035 hours per linear foot of trim, plus 0.35 hours per penetration and three hours of setting out. The result depends only on the geometry, not on the material — so on the default vinyl house it is close to two thirds of what hanging all the siding costs, and on a cedar or fibre cement house, where the panel hours are much higher, it is closer to a third. Either way it is real work that no quote itemises.
• Trim is slow because it is all ends. A run of siding is one measurement; a window surround is four mitres, a sill detail and a drip cap, and it is at eye level where every gap shows.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Head flashing, drip cap and kick-out flashing at openings and roof linesestimated, ±70%

• One per opening: the metal that sends water out over the trim instead of down behind it. Priced per opening because that is how it is fabricated and fitted, not per foot.
• The bottom of the band is aluminium bent on site from coil stock over an ordinary window — a few feet of flat sheet and nothing else. The top is a factory kick-out at the roof-wall junction, which is the single most common place a re-sided house starts leaking afterwards. The old floor of this band priced every one of the eighteen pieces as if it were the expensive one.
• Flashing is the part of this job that is completely invisible when it is done right and completely invisible when it is done wrong, until a ceiling stains two winters later.

Sheet metal worker: bend and fit the flashings

• Two hours fixed plus 0.2 hours per opening. The fixed block is setting up the brake and bending the profile; after that a straight head flashing over a window is a measure, a cut and a fit, and it is quick. The kick-outs at the roof line are the pieces that earn their time, and there are two of them.
• Priced at the sheet metal wage rather than the carpenter one, because bending coil stock on a brake is the skill being sold in that hour. Many siding crews do it themselves; that does not make it a different trade.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Mounting blocks and hooded vents at lights, taps, meters and dryer outletsestimated, ±74%

• Every light fitting, hose tap, electric meter, dryer outlet and vent that comes through the wall needs a flat, flashed surface to sit on. Siding cut around a round object is a leak and it looks like one.
• Count is modelled at one per 30 feet of perimeter plus four, which is our estimate. Nobody counts their wall penetrations before asking what a re-side costs, and on a typical house there are about ten.
• The band separates a stock vinyl block from a metal hooded vent that matches the siding colour.

Carpenter: take off and rehang lights, numbers, dish, line covers and shutters

• The blocks on the line above are the material; this is the hours. Every light fitting, house number, satellite dish, hose tap cover, refrigerant line cover and downpipe bracket on the wall comes off before the siding does and goes back on after, and most of them do not go back in the same place, because the wall moved out by the thickness of the new material.
• Modelled at two hours fixed plus 0.3 hours per wall penetration, plus 0.2 hours per window where the house has shutters. Fourteen windows with shutters is twenty-eight leaves to unscrew, keep in order and rehang, and it appears on every real invoice that has them.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Soffit panel and fascia coverestimated, ±53%

• Vented soffit panel and a wrapped or clad fascia, priced per linear foot of eave and rake. The band separates stock vinyl soffit from aluminium coil wrap over a repaired wood fascia.
• ⚠️ The band assumes an overhang of about sixteen inches, which is our estimate and not a measurement of your house. A two-foot overhang carries half again as much soffit panel per linear foot and takes correspondingly longer to fit; a twelve-inch one carries less. It is declared here for the same reason the storey height is declared: it is a geometric assumption inside a price, and an assumption inside a price should be visible.
• It is optional here and it is nearly always done, for a reason worth knowing: the fascia is where the gutters hang, and a re-side is the only time in twenty years that they are coming off anyway.
• Vented soffit is also the intake half of a roof ventilation system. Replacing it with solid panel because it was cheaper is how a re-side ends up causing an attic moisture problem.

Sheet metal worker: strip, fit and wrap soffit and fascia

• Modelled at 0.055 hours per linear foot, about 18 feet an hour. All of it is overhead work off staging, and the fascia has to be bent to fit whatever shape twenty years of weather left behind.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per foot are our estimate.

Sheet metal worker: take the gutters down and rehang them

• Modelled at 0.028 hours per linear foot of GUTTER, which is not the same as the perimeter of the house and this page used to treat it as if it were. On a gable roof the gutter runs along the two long eaves only: nothing hangs off a sloping rake. On a hip roof there is eave on all four sides and the gutter does run the whole perimeter. On the default house that is the difference between about 98 feet and about 159, and the old formula charged the larger number on both roof shapes.
• Gutters hang off the fascia and the fascia is part of the wall being worked on, so they come down on every job of this kind whether or not anybody quoted for it.
• They go back on new hangers and at the same fall, which is why this is hours and not a swap. Sectional gutter that has been up for fifteen years often does not survive coming down, and replacement is not in here.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per foot are our estimate.

Primer, paint or stain for site-finished sidingestimated, ±52%

• Two finish coats over factory primer on engineered wood and fibre cement, or a penetrating stain system on cedar. Materials only; the hours are the line below.
• The bottom of the band is two coats of ordinary exterior acrylic at normal spread rates. The top is a premium acrylic in a deep colour, which needs an extra coat to cover, or a solid-body stain on cedar that has to go on all six faces of every board — and staining six faces is roughly twice the paint of covering one, which the old ceiling of this band did not reach.
• Zero on vinyl, insulated vinyl, steel and factory-finished fibre cement: those arrive finished, and painting them is a different job for a different reason.

Painter: prime cut ends, caulk and apply two coats

• Modelled at 0.017 hours per square foot for two coats plus the cut-end sealing and the caulking that goes before them. On a typical wall that is about 27 hours, and it is the reason a primed material and a factory-finished one land at a similar total.
• Sealing every cut end matters more than the field coats do: a raw fibre cement or engineered wood edge is where water gets into the board itself.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours per square foot are our estimate.

Lead-safe containment: ground cover, tape, signage, suits and HEPA filtersestimated, ±50%

• EPA publishes that lead-based paint was banned for home use in 1978 and that roughly three quarters of US homes built before then still contain some. Anyone paid to disturb paint in a pre-1978 home has to be certified in lead-safe work practices, and on an exterior job that means covering the ground around the whole house, containing the debris and cleaning up with verification.
• Quantity is the perimeter times ten feet of ground cover — sheeting, tape, warning signs, disposable suits and HEPA vacuum filters. Materials only; the hours are the line below.
• The band is a one-storey ranch on open lawn at the bottom and a taller house with paved surfaces, planting beds and a neighbour ten feet away at the top, where the sheeting has to be weighted, taped and re-laid daily.
• This is the line no siding cost guide carries, and it is not small: on a typical pre-1978 house the rule adds around 9% to the total.
• It applies to paid work. EPA states that in general the rule does not apply to homeowners doing this kind of project in their own pre-1978 home — which is a real exemption and worth knowing before assuming a quote is padded.

Certified renovator crew: lay containment daily, contain debris and clean to verification

• Eight hours fixed plus 0.12 hours per linear foot of perimeter. The fixed block is the set-up, the signage and the final cleaning verification; the per-foot part is laying the ground cover out and taking it up again at the end of every working day, which is what the rule requires and what nobody budgets.
• These are ordinary trade hours done by a crew whose renovator is certified — routine, legal work, not a specialist intervention. That distinction is the whole point: it is why this belongs in a budget instead of in a warning.
• Our roof page prices the same EPA rule at 0.02 hours per foot of roof edge and this one at 0.12 per foot of perimeter, six times as much, and the two numbers have to explain each other. They do: containment is laid out and taken up again at the end of every working day, a re-side runs three times as long as a re-roof, and the ground cover on a siding job wraps the whole house at every level rather than following one edge.
• What is NOT here, at any figure: lead abatement. Removing or permanently enclosing lead paint is different work under a different certification, and this calculator does not price it. It is in the exclusions.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Fasteners, sealant and consumablesestimated, ±50%

• Stainless or hot-dipped nails, screws, exterior sealant, blades, and the shears and saw blades that fibre cement eats.
• ⚠️ Priced per square foot of wall, not as a lump. It used to be a flat lot, which meant a 900 sq ft cabin and a three-thousand-square-foot cedar house nailed with stainless paid exactly the same for fasteners. The stainless nails alone on that cedar job are more than the whole old lot was.
• The top of the band is a job with rigid insulation or furring behind the siding, where every fastener has to be long enough to reach the framing through the extra thickness, or a cedar job where the fastener has to be stainless because anything else stains the wood. That is a real cost of those options and it is easy to forget when pricing them.

Delivery and offloading of the siding to siteestimated, ±50%

• Fibre cement, steel, engineered wood, cedar and insulated vinyl arrive on a lorry and have to be put down somewhere flat, dry and close to the wall. A house of fibre cement lap is on the order of two tons of board, and it is not carried in on a pickup.
• Modelled at one load per 2,500 square feet of material ordered. Zero on plain vinyl, which is light enough that the delivery is absorbed into the supply price and nobody bills it separately — which is exactly why this line was missing from the model until 2026-08-22 and why it is worth showing on the other six.
• Haulage, so it carries no regional labour adjustment. The bottom of the band is a local yard delivery inside its free radius with a boom offload; the top is a longer haul, a crane offload or a second drop because the first load will not fit on the drive.

Dust control for cutting fibre cement: HEPA saw attachment, filters and respiratorsestimated, ±62%

• Cutting fibre cement releases respirable crystalline silica. The trade answer is a shear where a shear will do and, where a saw is needed, a blade and a saw fitted with dust collection, plus the filters and the respirators that go with it. Those are consumables and hire, and they belong in the budget of a fibre cement job rather than in a footnote.
• A lot rather than a rate, because it is a saw attachment, a vacuum and a box of filters for the duration, not something bought by the square foot. Zero on every other material on this page.
• ⚠️ Source gap, declared: OSHA has a construction standard on respirable crystalline silica, and we are not citing it on this line because we have not verified the exact page that serves its text. The cost is modelled; the legal citation is not made. That is the honest order of those two things.

Labourer: ground protection, magnet sweep and final clear-up

• Four hours fixed plus 0.002 per square foot of wall. A siding job scatters several thousand nails and offcuts over the ground around a house, and a magnet sweep of the whole perimeter is the difference between a finished job and a flat tyre in March.
• Charged at the labourer wage, not the carpenter one — which is what our roof page already does for the identical task. Sweeping a lawn with a magnet is not carpentry, and pricing it as carpentry added nearly thirty per cent to every hour of it.
• Metro-adjusted wage from official BLS data; the hours are our estimate.

Not included in this dataset

What your homeowners insurance covers

It is the most asked question on this subject and we will not guess at it. What your policy covers is set by your own documents and your own insurer, and by the deductible and the depreciation terms written into them — read them, and ask your insurer. Nothing on this page is modelled on an insurance outcome, and no figure here should be read as one. We removed a sentence from this entry on 2026-08-22 that characterised how policies generally behave: we had no source for it, and a general claim about what insurance does is not ours to make.

Asbestos cement siding

The flat cement shingle on many houses built between the 1920s and the 1970s may contain asbestos, and it is exactly the siding people most often want replaced. It is not budgeted here at any figure. It has to be tested first and removed under separate licensed rules, and putting a low number against that work would be worse than putting none.

Lead abatement

The lead-safe work practices required on a pre-1978 house ARE priced on this page, because they are routine legal work by a certified renovator. Abatement — deliberately removing or permanently enclosing lead paint — is a different job under a different certification with a different scope, and it is not in any total here.

Permit fees

Many jurisdictions require a permit for a full re-side, and some require inspection of the water-resistive barrier before the siding goes on. Fees vary by jurisdiction with no national source and are excluded rather than averaged into a number that would be wrong everywhere.

Windows, doors and the openings themselves

This page trims and flashes the openings that are already there. Replacing the windows is separate work, and if it is going to happen it should happen during the re-side, while the wall is open and the trim is off — doing it afterwards means cutting into a finished wall.

Below-grade foundation walls

Everything here is above grade. The split between the two pages is clean and worth stating out loud: /basement-waterproofing-cost prices the wall BELOW grade, where most of the money is the excavation needed to reach it; this page prices the façade ABOVE grade, where the money is staging, tear-off, trim and carpenter hours. Same house, two surfaces, no overlap in either direction. Siding stops a few inches above the ground for a reason, and that reason is where the other page starts.

Structural repair behind the sheathing

Replacing rotten sheathing is priced here, board only. Replacing studs, a rotted sill plate or a rim joist is not: that is structural work found after the wall is open, it is quoted as a variation, and it is the commonest reason a siding job comes in over its quote. This entry and the sheathing line used to disagree about that — the sheathing line claimed to include the framing repair. The exclusion won, and the sheathing band came down to what board alone costs.

Gutter replacement

Taking the gutters down and rehanging them is in here, because it happens on every job. Replacing them is not. If they are fifteen years old and sectional, ask before the work starts whether they are expected to survive coming down.

Brick, stone and stucco

Masonry veneer, manufactured stone and stucco are not siding in the sense this calculator uses. They are wet trades on a different schedule with different failure modes, and none of the rates here would produce a number worth reading for them.

Refinishing cycles on wood

Cedar and site-finished siding are painted or stained once here, at installation. Everything after that is a cost of ownership on a cycle of years, and it is not in any installation figure on this page.