Asphalt Shingle Roof Cost: Eleven Editions of One Benchmark, and Nine Regions
The most useful number in roofing is not a price per square foot from a lead-generation site. It is a single defined roof that the Cost vs. Value Report has priced every year for over a decade, in every region, with the scope printed beside it. This page shows that number's history and its geography, turns it into a per-square figure, and uses public wage data to show roughly how much of it can be labor.
Figures from the Cost vs. Value Report.
The roof behind the number
Search for the cost of an asphalt roof and you get prices per square foot with no roof attached to them. A price without a roof cannot be checked. The Cost vs. Value Report attaches the roof: one project, defined line by line, priced every year and in every region. This page is about that one roof.
The Cost vs. Value Report's roof is a rectangular hip roof of 3,000 square feet, which roofers count as 30 squares at 100 square feet each. The old shingles come off down to the wood sheathing and go in the dumpster. The new roof is asphalt shingle of at least 235 lb per square with at least a 25-year warranty, over felt or synthetic underlayment, with galvanized drip edge, aluminum flashing, custom flashing at two skylights, and a vented ridge with a matching cap.
The Cost vs. Value Report puts the national average for that job at $31,871 in its 2025 edition. Divided by the squares in the scope, that is $1,062 per square, and the per-square form is the one to carry into a conversation with a roofer, because that is the unit bids are built in.
Read the scope twice before using the number. It is an entry-level shingle, not a heavy architectural one. It has no valleys or dormers and only two things poking through it. It reuses nothing. A bid for a different roof will differ from it for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's honesty.
Eleven editions, one roof
Because the Cost vs. Value Report has priced the same roof every year, its history is a record rather than a guess. In the Cost vs. Value Report's 2015 edition the national figure was $19,528. In 2025 it is $31,871, a rise of 63% over the eleven editions in the chart.
The climb was not even. The figure moved gently through the later years of the last decade, jumped in the 2021 and 2022 editions, and then fell from $31,535 to $29,136 before resuming. The 2023 dip is worth remembering the next time someone says roofing prices only go up: the benchmark is the figure the Cost vs. Value Report printed for one scope each year, and in one year it printed less.
What the chart cannot do is explain itself. It does not separate shingle prices from wages, fuel, insurance or the mix of markets behind the average, and it says nothing about your county in the month you are reading this. It is a national average of a single roof, and its value is that it is the same roof every time. A roofer who tells you that prices have risen since your neighbor reroofed is, on this evidence, right; how much they have risen for your roof is a question the chart does not answer.
Nine regions, same roof
The national figure is the average of nine very different places. The Cost vs. Value Report prices the same roof in each US Census division, and in the 2025 edition the range runs from $25,939 in the East South Central states to $37,201 in the Middle Atlantic, a spread of 1.43× between the cheapest and the most expensive division.
| Region (US Census division) | Benchmark job cost, 2025 | Per square |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. national average | $31,871 | $1,062 per square |
| New England | $35,701 | $1,190 per square |
| Middle Atlantic | $37,201 | $1,240 per square |
| East North Central | $29,253 | $975 per square |
| West North Central | $30,693 | $1,023 per square |
| South Atlantic | $32,253 | $1,075 per square |
| East South Central | $25,939 | $865 per square |
| West South Central | $27,116 | $904 per square |
| Mountain | $28,475 | $949 per square |
| Pacific | $36,391 | $1,213 per square |
The per-square column is each division's figure divided by the 30 squares in the scope. Read the squares off your bid, or work the area out from your footprint and pitch on paper, and multiply by your division's rate. That is the whole method, and it is the same arithmetic the roofer used with different inputs. Where the two results disagree, the inputs are the place to look: the squares, the pitch, the number of layers coming off, and the shingle being quoted.
How much of it is labor? A public-wage sanity check
Nobody publishes what share of a roofing benchmark is labor, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes what roofers earn, and that is enough for a rough check. Its mean hourly wage for roofers is $27.95 and the median is $26.65.
Take a four-person crew working two eight-hour days, which is a reasonable picture of a straightforward tear-off and reroof at this size. At the Bureau of Labor Statistics mean wage, the crew's wages come to $1,789. That is our own arithmetic and our own assumption about crew size and days; a steeper roof, a second layer, or a crew of three would move it.
Hold that figure against the Cost vs. Value Report's national benchmark of $31,871. Wages, on this assumption, are a small fraction of the total. The remainder is not padding. It is the shingles, underlayment, flashing and fasteners; the dumpster and the disposal fee; the payroll taxes, workers' compensation and liability insurance that sit on top of every wage dollar in a trade where people work at height; the trucks, the estimator, the permit; and the margin the business runs on.
The exercise does not show that roofers are overpaid or underpaid. It shows that a bid that is far below the benchmark has to be saving that money somewhere, and the places it can be saved are the ones you cannot see from the ground: the underlayment, the flashing, the insurance and the nails.
The resale share, for those who are selling
Beside the cost, the Cost vs. Value Report estimates what the job adds to the price of the house. For the asphalt roof in 2025 that estimate is $21,501, or 67.5% of the job cost.
Two readings of that share are common and both are wrong. The first is that a new roof loses a third of its cost, which treats an estimate of buyer opinion as a loss on a ledger. The second is that a new roof pays for itself, which it does not on this figure. The share is the Cost vs. Value Report's estimate of what a buyer would credit for a new roof, and its use is narrow: if you are selling soon, it tells you that the roof is one of the exterior jobs a buyer notices, and roughly by how much.
If you are not selling, the share does not belong in the decision. A roof that leaks needs replacing whatever an estimate says a buyer would pay for it.
What is ours and what is theirs
Nearly every number on this page is copied from a published source, and the one that is not is labeled where it appears.
The national figure, the regional figures, the resale estimate and the history are the Cost vs. Value Report's, as printed, read on the date given in the sources below. The wages are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' published figures for roofers. A square being 100 square feet is a trade convention.
The crew-wage figure is ours. It assumes four people, two days, eight hours, and the mean wage, and each of those is a choice. We think the picture is fair for a plain roof of this size and we do not claim more for it than that. We also assume that dividing the benchmark by its squares gives a rate that can be compared with a bid for a different-sized roof; that is how the trade prices, and it is still an assumption.
This page does not know your roof's pitch, how many layers are on it, what the sheathing looks like under them, or what your local market charges in the month you are reading. Those four things move a real bid more than anything above, and only someone who has been on a ladder at your eave can speak to them.
Six things to check on a shingle bid
A shingle bid that can be checked names six things. One that cannot be checked leaves most of them out.
The number of squares. Ask how it was measured. A roof measured from the ground plan without a pitch factor is undercounted.
The shingle, by product name and weight. The Cost vs. Value Report's benchmark is a shingle of at least 235 lb with a 25-year warranty; a heavier architectural shingle costs more and is a different roof.
What comes off. One layer or two, and whether the price includes disposal. A second layer is more labor and more dumpster.
What goes under. The underlayment by type, whether an ice barrier is included and how far up it runs, and the drip edge. Bids that skip these are cheaper for a reason.
The sheathing allowance. A price per sheet for whatever the tear-off finds, agreed before it is found.
The two warranties. The manufacturer's, on the shingle, and the installer's, on the work. This page cannot tell you what share of failures trace to installation rather than to the product, and the second document is the one that covers the installation half — which is why you want both.
Related on this site
Other pages on this site that take a quote apart the same way:
Sources and method
- Cost benchmark — Zonda, Cost vs. Value Report 2025 (38th annual edition), published through the Journal of Light Construction. National average job cost for the scope summarized above; the nine US Census division figures from the same edition are used to scale it. Figures read from the publisher on 31 August 2026. jlconline.com/cost-vs-value
- Roofer wages — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, SOC 47-2181, 2025 annual, national, all industries. State-level figures are published in the same dataset. bls.gov/oes
- Square — 100 sq ft, the standard unit of measure in the roofing and siding trades.
- Assumptions — labor-hours, crew size, labor burden, overhead and profit, waste and lap allowances are set by Home Repair Ledger and are adjustable in the calculator. They are not measurements and are not sourced.
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