- 53 sourcesAcross 33 publishers. The ones behind published rates are linked below.
- 197 figures checkedEvery one refetched by a second reader.
- 22 rejectedReal numbers that did not mean what they appeared to.
- August 2026When the rates were gathered.
The formula, in full
Five steps. You can run all of them on a pocket calculator, which is the point.
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Footprint to roof area
A roof sits at an angle, so its surface is always larger than the ground it covers. The multiplier is the square root of one plus the pitch squared.
roof area = footprint × √(1 + (rise ÷ 12)²)At 6 in 12 that is 1.118. At 12 in 12 it is 1.414. This is plain geometry, not an estimate, and it is the same for every roof of that pitch.
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Roof area to squares
A roofing square is 100 square feet of roof surface. Exactly 100, by definition.
squares = roof area ÷ 100 -
Squares to a tear-off price
Taking the old roof off is quoted separately, at a rate that depends on what is up there now.
tear-off = squares × the rate for the existing roof -
Squares to an installed price
The new roof is quoted as one figure per square with materials and labor together. That is how the trade prices it, and no source we could verify splits the two for the same product.
new roof = squares × the installed rate for the material -
The steep slope charge, above 7 in 12
Past 7 in 12 a roof stops being walkable and the crew needs staging and harnesses. Estimating software carries a line for it, charged as a percentage of the install.
steep charge = new roof × 14.6% to 18.8% (7 to 9 in 12)
steep charge = new roof × 22.9% to 29.5% (10 to 12 in 12)Estimators bill this a second time against the tear-off. We do not, because we could not verify that adder, so a steep roof costs at least this much more, not at most.
Waste is not in the arithmetic. An installed per-square rate already carries the contractor's waste inside it, so applying a waste factor on top would count it twice. The calculator shows the material figure separately, because it is what gets ordered.
The rates
All figures are per roofing square of roof surface, not per square foot of floor, and not per square foot of roof.
Putting the new roof on, installed, before tear-off
Where a headline range is narrower than the full span, it means one publisher sits well outside the others. Both are shown rather than quietly dropping the outlier.
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Asphalt shingles, 3-tab $300 – $500
Three sources, close agreement. Bill Ragan $400 to $500, Fixr $300 to $500, RoofingCalc $425 to $450.
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Asphalt shingles, architectural $450 – $700Full span of the sources $400 to $800
Four sources, the tightest agreement in the table. Only RoofVista states plainly that tear-off is excluded.
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Asphalt shingles, luxury or designer $550 – $1,600
The widest disagreement of the three asphalt grades. RoofingCalc $550 to $950, Bill Ragan $800 to $1,000, Fixr $650 to $1,600. The ceiling is Fixr alone.
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Metal, corrugated steel panels $650 – $1,200Full span of the sources $350 to $2,600
A manufacturer says $700 to $1,200 and an aggregator says $650 to $1,050, so between them they cover $650 to $1,200. The wider span is one Fixr table row whose own page prose calls corrugated the least expensive option.
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Metal, standing seam steel $1,000 – $1,600
Manufacturer range, with an aggregator floor of $1,150 sitting inside it.
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Concrete tile $700 – $2,350
Three sources, tiered by grade. Heavy enough that the framing may need checking.
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Clay tile $567 – $2,200
One publisher prints three mutually inconsistent clay figures on a single page. All three were confirmed verbatim, and all three sit inside this span.
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Natural slate $1,000 – $3,000Full span of the sources $1,000 to $4,500
Most jobs $1,000 to $3,000, on two agreeing sources. One source reaches $4,500.
Taking the old roof off
Removal, haul away, dump fees and nail cleanup. A second layer adds roughly a third, not a doubling, because the crew and the dumpster are already there.
| What is up there now | Per square |
|---|---|
| Asphalt, one layer | $100 – $125 |
| Asphalt, two layers | $125 – $175 |
| Wood shake | $150 – $200 |
| Tile or slate | $200 – $400 |
SquareDash · Fixr · RoofVista · RoofingCalculator.com
The steep slope charge
Read from two real estimates as a priced line item, not from a cost guide. The percentage applies to the shingle install line only.
| Pitch | Added to the install |
|---|---|
| 7 in 12 to 9 in 12 | +14.6% – 18.8% |
| 10 in 12 to 12 in 12 | +22.9% – 29.5% |
Workflow Solutions (Xactimate estimate) · Your Virtual Adjuster (Xactimate estimate) · Roofing Contractor
Waste, shown but not priced
15% on an ordinary roof, which is what live estimates actually apply. 29% is a measurement report's suggested figure for a genuinely cut-up roof, 44 facets with 33 hips and 20 valleys. Insurance carriers separately allow 10% on a gable and 12 to 15% on a hip. Those allowances are reported to bundle starter and ridge cap into the percentage, so they are not the same quantity as the figures above.
Balance Claims · RoofersCoffeeShop · Assistimate (Xactimate estimate) · Workflow Solutions (Xactimate estimate) · JK Roofing (EagleView report) · EagleView · Roof waste reference (PDF)
Labor as a share of the installed price
Useful for reading a quote. Not enough to put a dollar figure on your materials line, which is why the calculator does not. On metal, three sources converge on 60 to 70%; one of them states a wider 50 to 80% band on its own.
| Job | Labor share |
|---|---|
| Asphalt and general roofing | 40% – 65% |
| Metal | 60% – 70% |
RoofingCalc · Fixr · This Old House · Western States Metal Roofing
What we left out, and why
These are numbers we found, could quote verbatim, and still would not publish. If you are comparing this calculator against another one, this is the section to read.
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Materials priced separately from labor
No source we checked publishes both a materials-only and a labor-only figure for the same asphalt product. The materials-only numbers that do get published usually cover the field shingles alone, leaving out starter, ridge cap, underlayment, fasteners and waste.
We could have split the installed price by the 40 to 65% labor share and printed two confident lines. That would be arithmetic wearing a source's clothes.
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Standing seam aluminum, metal shingles, stone-coated steel
Each rests on a single figure, and two of them are a starting price rather than a range. One source says metal shingles are the cheaper choice than standing seam; another prices both at an identical floor. Nothing adjudicates between them.
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Cedar shake and synthetic slate
The one cedar aggregator figure, $550 to $1,350 installed, is undercut by that same page's own material-only price of $725. A figure that contradicts itself cannot be repaired by averaging. Synthetic slate spans $400 to $2,000 across three sources and tear-off does not explain the gap.
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A surcharge for tall houses
There is a real line item for roofs two stories and above, and we found it priced at 8.3% of the install. That is one estimate, from 2021, on one regional price list. The 15 to 25% figures circulating on cost sites could not be verified at all.
One data point is not a rate, so the calculator does not apply it.
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Where you live
The only instrument that prices an identical job across regions covers four of nine census regions. Five were never archived and the live source returns a 403.
Published roofer wages look like a substitute and are not one. Washington DC roofers earn 1.065 times the national wage while the job there costs 0.946 times national. Kansas City earns 1.013 and costs 0.809. Solving the verified regions for the labor share that would reconcile wages with prices gives 0.78, 1.33, 2.48 and minus 0.09. It is unstable and it changes sign, so any calculator using wage data as a price multiplier is guessing.
Cost vs. Value 2025 (archived) · US Bureau of Labor Statistics
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Extra labor for a cut-up roof
The extra material is documented. The extra labor is not. The tidy tables we found, hip plus 5 to 10%, valleys plus 10 to 20%, dormers plus 15 to 25%, trace back to machine-written content with no underlying survey.
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The 600 pounds per square rule
Widely repeated as a code trigger for structural reinforcement under heavy roofing. We could not find it in the IRC or the IBC. The one documented threshold we did find is a product classification, not a reinforcement mandate. Treat it as trade lore.
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Sources dropped on scope, not on accuracy
One aggregator's shingle page quotes verbatim but its own headline total cannot be reproduced from its own per-square table. Another publishes a unit-cost build-up that excludes contractor overhead, markup, tax, permits and disposal, which is a different number from a price. A contractor page turned out to include tear-off where our reader had recorded it as excluded.
All three were quoting real figures. None of them meant what they would have meant on this page.
How every number was checked
Rates were gathered in six separate passes, one each for asphalt, metal, tile and slate, tear-off and decking, difficulty surcharges, and regional variation. Each pass had to return a live URL and the verbatim sentence or table cell a figure came from. Recalled numbers and industry rules of thumb were not accepted.
Every figure then went to a second reader whose instructions were to refute it, not to agree with it: refetch the page, confirm the quoted sentence actually carries the claimed numbers, and check the scope. Scope is where cost data goes wrong. A rate of $450 per square that quietly includes tear-off is a different number from one that does not, and mixing the two is how a calculator ends up confidently wrong.
Of 197 figures, 175 were confirmed and 22 were rejected. Every rejection was a scope problem rather than a misquote, which is the failure mode worth guarding against, because a scope error survives proofreading.
What no source could tell us
There is no government price series for roofing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes roofer wages by state and metro, and the Census publishes house price indexes, but nobody publishes an installed cost per square. That is a structural gap in the data, not a gap in the looking.
The trade bodies are closed. The roofing contractors' association keeps its labor and material data behind membership. The main trade journal returns a 403. The standard construction cost index is paywalled except for two cities, and both are whole-building composites across all trades rather than roofing.
Two of the largest consumer cost sites returned a 403 to every attempt across all six passes. No figure from either is used in any rate on this site, and none was substituted from memory. Their published national averages appear in one comparison table on the homepage, which is a table about other people's numbers, not a rate we price from.
So the sources below are what remains: manufacturers, one regional supplier, real insurance estimates, roof measurement reports, and consumer cost aggregators clearly labeled as such. It is not the evidence base we would have chosen. It is the one that exists, and saying so is more useful to you than a confident average.
Rates read August 2026. The pages they were read from are older in places: the aggregator pages are stamped 2025, the regional job-cost report is the 2025 edition, and the two insurance estimates behind the steep-slope and height charges are from 2021. Where that matters it is said on the rate itself.
When a rate changes, this page changes with it and the date changes too. If you find a figure here that you can show is wrong, that is worth more to us than a figure nobody checks.