Average Roof Replacement Cost, 2026

Why published roof replacement figures differ by more than 3x

The gap is not noise or a typo repeated across the internet. It is two fundamentally different measurements published under the same phrase.

Angi surveys real homeowners about jobs they actually paid for — every roof size, every material, including small sections and repairs-adjacent jobs that pull the average down. Zonda's Cost vs. Value Report does something different: it prices one fixed, larger project specification using professional remodeling-estimation software (XactRemodel, via Verisk) across roughly 115–119 local markets, then averages the result. It is a benchmark for one specific project done well, not an average of every roof replacement that happened.

A limitation worth stating plainly: the homeowner-survey side of this comparison rests on a single provider. HomeAdvisor publishes overlapping roof-replacement figures, but HomeAdvisor and Angi have been the same company since a 2017 merger and draw on the same underlying cost-data pipeline — citing both is not two independent confirmations of the survey-side number, it is one source under two brand names. We have not found a second, independently-run homeowner-spend survey for roof replacement that we could verify to the standard the rest of this page holds itself to, so the survey-side figure above should be read as single-sourced.

What you get back at resale

Zonda's 2025 report is also the source for roof replacement's return on investment. An asphalt shingle replacement recoups about 68% of its cost at resale on average — one of the higher recoup rates the report tracks — while a metal roof recoups closer to 50%, despite costing substantially more upfront. Recoup varies sharply by local market; a roof replacement in a market with tight inventory and high buyer expectations for move-in-ready homes recoups more than the same job in a slower market.

Methodology

Why a national average disperses so widely

Both figures above are national. Neither describes what a roof costs in a particular place, and the gap between them and a local quote is mostly one input: labour. Roofing is among the most labour-intensive trades in residential construction, and roofing labour is priced locally.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts national employment of roofers (SOC 47-2181) at 135,490 as of May 2025, with a mean hourly wage of $27.95 and a mean annual wage of $58,140. The percentile spread is the number that matters here: $18.01 an hour at the 10th percentile against $39.29 at the 90th. The top of that range is more than twice the bottom, and it applies to the largest single component of an installed roof price.

Employment is also concentrated in a way that shapes availability as much as price. Florida (23,550 roofers) and California (21,190) hold roughly a third of the national total between them, ahead of Washington (5,890), Texas (5,740) and Illinois (5,300). In thin markets the binding constraint is frequently the calendar rather than the hourly rate — a small job competes for crew time against far more profitable full re-roofs, and post-storm demand can consume regional capacity for months.

It is worth noting that roofers sit below the wider trade on pay: BLS puts the annual mean wage across all construction and extraction occupations at $65,360, against $58,140 for roofing specifically.

The code rule that moves a quote without moving the roof

One structural driver is invisible in any average because it depends on geometry rather than geography. IRC Section R905.2.2 does not permit asphalt shingles on roof slopes below 2 units vertical in 12 horizontal (a 17-percent slope), and from 2:12 up to 4:12 (33 percent) it requires double underlayment.

That is a code-mandated doubling of a material layer, triggered by pitch alone. A low-slope house and a steep-slope house of identical footprint are therefore not comparable jobs, and neither is well described by a single national mean. It is the most common legitimate reason a quote arrives above an average a homeowner has read online.

The practical implication for anyone using this page: treat both national figures as calibration for whether a quote is in a plausible universe, not as a budget. The dispersion around them is real, explainable and largely local.

What no public dataset actually measures

Both sources reconciled on this page are private. Angi's figure comes from homeowner self-reports; Zonda's comes from professional estimating software applied to one standardised project specification. There is no government series that measures what Americans pay to replace a roof, and it is worth being explicit about that rather than implying a federal number exists.

The nearest candidate does not cover it. The Census Bureau's Characteristics of New Housing survey tracks square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, type of wall material and sales price for new single-family homes — but it does not publish roofing material or roof type. So there is no official statistic on what share of American homes are shingled, tiled or metal-roofed either. Any market-share figure quoted elsewhere comes from industry estimates rather than from a public series.

This matters for how the two headline numbers should be read. They are not competing measurements of the same quantity — they measure different things. Angi's spans every roof size and material its respondents happened to buy, which is why its average is low and its range wide. Zonda's prices one fixed, comparatively large specification identically across markets, which is what makes it useful for year-over-year and market-to-market comparison and useless as a typical bill.

Neither is wrong. A homeowner asking “what will mine cost” is closer to the Angi distribution; an analyst asking “how has roofing cost moved since last year” needs Zonda's fixed basket. Quoting either as the average roof replacement cost, without saying which question it answers, is the most common way this figure gets misused — including by pages that cite this one.

Cite this data

This analysis is free to reuse with attribution, under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence. If you publish any figure from this page, please credit RealCostIQ and link back — and please also credit Angi and Zonda as the underlying data sources.