Data checked August 13, 2026 · source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

How much does it cost to replace a roof?

A 2,200 square foot asphalt shingle roof, priced bundle by bundle and linear foot by linear foot, with the labour hours derived from what roofing crews actually publish about their own schedules.

Where the money actually goes

The low column takes the cheapest verified material at every line and the fastest labour figure our sources support. The high column takes the most expensive material and the slowest labour. Nobody's real quote is all-low or all-high, so treat the two columns as the edges of the plausible range rather than as quotes.

How we got the labour hours

29 hours low, 46 typical, 66 high, and all three are total crew man-hours including tear-off rather than elapsed days. At the typical 46 hours, a crew of five finishes in one long day — which is exactly what every roofer we read describes for a roof this size. We derived it: no free source publishes man-hours per square, so we took published crew sizes and published durations and multiplied them.

Sources: RoofVista roof replacement timeline (4-6 crew, 2,000 sq ft gable, 1 day) · Global Exterior Experts (crew of 5-6, under 2,000 sq ft, 8-12 hours) · Elevated Roofing crew guide 2026 (4-6 workers on a 25-square roof) · GAF - how long does it take to replace a roof. Where a source gives a crew size and a duration but not man-hours, we multiply the two ourselves and say so.

What the permit costs

Wildly jurisdictional. Morgan Hill, California charges $256 up to 15 squares, $384 for 16-30 and $448 above that. A 22-square roof falls in the middle tier, so $384 is both our typical and our high — the $448 tier belongs to roofs bigger than the one priced here. The low is $0 because Seattle genuinely charges nothing. Chicago's across-the-board minimum is $302, and the $900 figure other sites quote is Chicago's scope-of-review line for a reroof with structural repair — a different job from this one, so it is not in our high column. Seattle requires no permit for a one- or two-family reroof that leaves the building envelope alone.

Source: Morgan Hill CA re-roof permit fee schedule.

The one thing that changes this number more than anything else

Not the shingle. The roof.

A trade magazine put two roofs side by side that are the same size — 20 squares each. One is a ranch with no dormers and no valleys. The other is steep, has several dormers and valleys, and needs the sheathing replaced. The first takes the crew one day. The second takes three. Same squares, triple the labour.

The ×3 figure is the trade-magazine worked example above (Roofing Contractor), which also included deck replacement. The ×1.5–2 band is our reading of A Better Roofing (1-2 days simple, 3-5+ days steep and complex) and GAF. Additive alternatives, if your contractor quotes it that way: decking repairs add half a day to two days, a second existing shingle layer adds half a day to one day.

Why your quote is probably written per square, and what that hides

Most roofing quotes are one number per square with everything inside it. Published tear-off rates run $100–$300 per square and all-in installed rates $300–$600 per square (HomeGuide).

On our 22-square roof that is $6,600–$13,200 all in — which overlaps the $5,779–$14,805 we calculate from parts and hours — a sanity check and nothing more, since a range 2.0× wide overlapping one 2.6× wide is not hard to achieve. But the per-square number tells you nothing about why. If a quote is $480 a square and the one next to it is $310, the per-square figure cannot tell you whether the difference is the shingle, the crew, the dump fee or the margin. The table above can.

What the shingles cost, per square

A square is 100 square feet, or three bundles. This is the single biggest line on the bill and the one you actually get to choose.

Source: Lakefront Supply and Builders Warehouse GAF shingle listings, checked 2026-08-13.

Specific products, with the price we saw

Not a recommendation and not an affiliate link. These are the listings we checked on 2026-08-13, so you can see whether the equipment line on your quote is close to retail.

Retail prices move. If one of these is wrong now, tell us and we will fix it with the date.

Parts list

What this job costs in 48 US metro areas

Materials cost roughly the same everywhere. Labour does not. The wage column is US government data; the labour column is that wage run through our published multiplier; the total applies it to the job above. On the same work Chicago-Naperville-Elgin comes out 29% higher than Oklahoma City at the top of the range and 22% higher at the bottom — the two differ because materials, permits and disposal do not move with the wage.

Wages: BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 47-2181 — public domain. Metros where BLS suppressed the figure are left out rather than estimated. Totals are FieldPricing calculations from the parts and hours on this page — they are not quotes and no contractor has agreed to them.

What did you actually pay?

Everything above this line is arithmetic on public data. It is honest, and it is not the same thing as a real invoice. If you have had this work done, the number on your invoice is worth more to the next reader than anything we can calculate.

What did you pay in total? Just the number is fine. $1,850, or "about 2 grand". Where? City and state. We publish this; it is the whole point.

When? Month and year is enough. What did it cover? Materials included? Permit? Removal of the old work? Anything unusual? This is the part that makes your number useful to somebody else. Email — optional Only used if we need to ask you one question before publishing. Never shown, never sold, never mailed to.

Website

Send it in

No account, no login, no newsletter. A person reads every submission before it appears, so it will not show up instantly. If we cannot make sense of one, we leave it out rather than guess — and if you would rather just email it, that works too.

What actually moves the price

How many squares you actually have

Roof area is not floor area. A 1,700 sq ft single-storey house with a 6:12 pitch has roughly 2,000-2,200 sq ft of roof once you account for the slope and the overhangs. Ask for the measurement in squares, and ask whether waste is included — most crews order 10 percent over.

Tear-off versus recover

Going over the existing layer skips the tear-off labour and the dumpster, which on this roof is most of $1,000 plus 20 hours. It is also frequently a mistake: you cannot inspect the deck, the new shingles sit on an uneven surface, and code allows it only if there is exactly one existing layer. Two layers and you must strip.

What the deck looks like underneath

Nobody can price this before the tear-off. A quote with no line for decking is not a cheaper quote — it is a quote with a change order waiting inside it. Ask what the per-sheet rate is before work starts, not after.

Ice barrier, if you are north of the frost line

Roughly $392 on this roof for two rolls of membrane along the eaves. It is not an upsell. IRC R905.1.2 requires it wherever there is a history of ice forming at the eaves, and the required coverage grows on steep roofs.

Ventilation

Ridge vent is $90 on this roof and the code requires net free ventilating area of 1/150 of the attic, or 1/300 if 40 to 50 percent of the vent area sits within three feet of the ridge and the rest is down at the eaves. A roof with no intake at the soffit does not ventilate no matter how much ridge vent is on it, and that shortens the life of the shingles you just paid for.

The dumpster nobody mentions until the invoice

$306-$1,362 here, and it moves with the weight, not the number of days. Slate and tile run 800-1,000 lb per square against 400-430 for architectural asphalt, which is why a tile tear-off costs so much more to haul than to remove.

Code requirements that cost money

These are the things an inspector will look for, and each one is a line on the invoice that a homeowner often reads as padding. Mostly it is not.

• IRC R905.1.2 — ice barrier — The membrane must run from the lowest roof edge to a point not less than 24 inches inside the exterior wall line. On roofs of 8:12 or steeper it must also extend at least 36 inches measured along the slope. That is why the eave detail costs more on a steep roof than a shallow one. Source.
• Two layers is the limit — A re-cover is prohibited where the existing roof already has two or more applications of any roof covering. If you are on your second layer, the third is not legal and the tear-off is not optional. Source.
• IRC R806.2 — attic ventilation — Net free ventilating area of 1/150 of the vented space, reduced to 1/300 where a vapour retarder is present in cold climate zones, or where 40-50 percent of the venting sits within 3 feet of the ridge and the rest at the eaves. Source.

Code citations here are to state and municipal reproductions of the International Residential Code, because the ICC's own text sits behind a paywall and we will not quote what we cannot link. Your jurisdiction adopts its own version of the model code — check locally before relying on any of this.

What we could not verify

We publish this list because a cost page that never admits a gap is not telling you the truth.

• Home Depot and Lowe's shelf prices. Both render price in JavaScript, so a plain fetch returns no dollar figure. Every shingle price above is from an independent distributor that publishes price in the HTML. Big-box shelf prices may differ.
• Man-hours per square from any manufacturer, trade magazine or association. None publishes it. Our 29 low, 46 typical and 66 high are published crew sizes multiplied by published durations, and we show that arithmetic rather than pretend it is sourced.
• A steep-pitch multiplier isolated from everything else. The multipliers in the table above are real and sourced, but every source bundles pitch together with dormers, valleys and deck replacement, so none of them says what pitch alone costs.
• Nails, sealant, pipe boots and step flashing. Real costs on every job, individually small, and we did not price them, so they are missing from the materials total. Budget something for them.
• What Seattle charges in the cases where a reroof permit <em>is</em> required &mdash; a repair over 500 sq ft, or anything commercial. The exemption above is confirmed; the fee behind it sits in a separate document we did not retrieve.

How we got these numbers

• Wages — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 47-2181 (Roofers), pulled through the BLS public API. US federal data, public domain.
• Billed rate — wage × 1.3 labour burden × 1.70–2.454 overhead and profit, so 2.21×–3.19× the wage. Our assumption, published in full on the methodology page so you can disagree with it.
• Equipment and parts — retailer and supply-house listings, each linked above, checked 2026-08-13.
• Labour hours — RoofVista roof replacement timeline (4-6 crew, 2,000 sq ft gable, 1 day) · Global Exterior Experts (crew of 5-6, under 2,000 sq ft, 8-12 hours) · Elevated Roofing crew guide 2026 (4-6 workers on a 25-square roof) · GAF - how long does it take to replace a roof.
• Permit fees — Morgan Hill CA re-roof permit fee schedule.
• Disposal — Dumpsters.com roll-off pricing, 2026 order data.

We do not use RSMeans or Craftsman cost data. Their licences forbid building a database from them, so every number here traces to a public source or a public listing you can open yourself.

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