Roof Replacement Cost Calculator

Where these numbers come from

Labour rates by area

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for roofers, carpenters, construction labourers and heavy truck drivers in your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. BLS publishes wages, not productivity, so every hours-per-square figure on this page is our estimate and is labelled as one on the line that uses it.

Fall protection is a legal cost, not a surcharge

OSHA 29 CFR 1926.501, Duty to have fall protection requires that each employee on a walking or working surface with an unprotected edge six feet or more above a lower level be protected from falling, and the same standard covers holes, skylights included. Every residential roof clears six feet, which is why anchors, lifelines and staging are a visible line here rather than something folded into an hourly rate. What that equipment has to meet is set out in OSHA 29 CFR 1926.502, Fall protection systems criteria and practices. Both retrieved 2026-08-22.

The truck that takes the old roof away

The haulage rate is FEMA cost code 8720, a class M2 dump truck, from the FEMA Schedule of Equipment Rates, retrieved 2026-08-21. That published rate explicitly excludes the operator, so the driver’s hours are added separately from BLS wage data rather than hidden inside the machine rate. The landfill tipping fee is the one line on this page that geography moves and our model does not: the regional index adjusts hours, because hours are what BLS publishes by area, and a gate charge per ton is not anybody’s time. Its band is wide enough to hold both ends of the country, and you should read the top of it in an expensive metro.

Lead-safe work on a house built before 1978

EPA, Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Program states that in 1978 the federal government banned the sale of lead-based paint for use in homes, that approximately three-quarters of US homes built before then still contain some of it, and that anyone paid to perform work that disturbs paint in pre-1978 housing must be certified in lead-safe work practices. A re-roof disturbs painted fascia, soffit and trim. The pamphlet the firm has to hand you before it starts is EPA, Renovate Right, and the rule itself is 40 CFR 745 subpart E, Residential Property Renovation. Retrieved 2026-08-22. This is routine certified-renovator work and it is priced as such; lead paint abatement is a different activity and is excluded.

Why the same shingle costs different money in different colours

EPA, Using cool roofs to reduce heat islands states that a cool roof absorbs and transfers less heat from the sun to the building compared with a more conventional roof, and that a high solar reflectance is the most important characteristic in how well it does so. Reflective versions exist across every covering priced here and they sit at the top of their bands, which is part of why those bands are as wide as they are. Retrieved 2026-08-22. Where the roof has skylights, ENERGY STAR, Windows, doors and skylights is why the right unit in Minnesota is not the right unit in Florida: the criteria are certified by the NFRC and vary by climate zone.

The 25% rule: the shape of it, and no number

There is no citation in this block on purpose. The threshold above which a roof repair stops being treated as a repair lives in the code for existing buildings that your jurisdiction has adopted, and that text is copyrighted by the code council. We do not reproduce it, we do not link a copy of it, and we do not publish our own version of the percentage or the period it is measured over, because doing either would be rebuilding somebody else’s text. Your local building department is the authority on which code applies to your address, what the threshold is, and what it triggers. The same applies to whether another layer may be laid over your existing roof.

Where this page stops and the attic begins

This calculator covers the roof plane from the outside: deck, membranes, edge metal, covering and cap. Attic insulation cost covers the same plane from the inside, with different materials and a different trade, and the two models do not share a single line item. Gutters come off for a re-roof and go back on, and they are priced on gutter replacement cost rather than duplicated here, because the same number kept in two places drifts apart. Below 300 square feet of house the calculator prices nothing at all rather than adding up fixed costs on a job that is not a re-roof.

Insurance and tax credits: what this page will not tell you

We do not model what an insurance policy pays and we will not guess at it. What your policy covers is written in your policy, and your insurer is the only party who can tell you how it applies to your roof. These figures are what the work costs, which is a different question from what anyone will pay towards it. On tax, the only thing stated here is the published deadline: the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit could be claimed for improvements made through 31 December 2025, so work carried out in 2026 does not have it available. Which improvements ever qualified is a reading of the rules that a tax professional should make, not this page.

Material prices

Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.

Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-22.