Local Cost Guides
What a project actually costs in your metro — not a national average with a city name pasted on top. We split each job into labor and materials and adjust the labor half using real wage data for that trade in that metro.
Roof replacement
Full tear-off and replacement on a typical 2,000 sq ft home, asphalt shingles through mid-range materials, installed.
95 metros · 60% labor
HVAC / AC replacement
Full system replacement — condenser, air handler and coil — for a typical single-family home, installed on existing ductwork.
100 metros · 35% labor
Kitchen remodel
Mid-range remodel of a typical kitchen — new cabinets, countertops, sink and fixtures — without moving walls or relocating plumbing.
100 metros · 35% labor
Flooring installation
1,000 sq ft of hardwood flooring supplied and installed, including underlayment and trim. Scale the figures linearly for a different area.
58 metros · 50% labor
Why these numbers actually differ by city
Most “cost in [city]” pages are a national average with the city name swapped in. That is useless to read and, correctly, gets filtered by search engines.
Ours vary because the labor half is scaled by the mean wage for that specific trade in that specific metro, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Materials are held at the national level, because shingles and HVAC equipment are nationally traded and we have no metro-level materials index we can defend — inventing one would look more sophisticated and be less true.
Where BLS suppresses wage data for a metro, we publish no page for it rather than fill the gap with a guess. That is why some metros appear under roofing but not flooring. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), metropolitan area estimates, May 2025.