Guides
How Roofing Contractors Build Shingle Re-Roof Quotes
A roofing contractor pricing method for shingle re-roofs: compare three selling units, build four cost buckets, follow an eight-step buildup and reconcile jobs.
What to take away
- Pick the unit before the number. Per square, per crew day and per scope each push a different behavior, and the wrong one hides the work that costs you money.
- A shingle re-roof price has four bucketsmaterial system, labor, disposal and access, risk. Leave access out and the steep roof subsidizes the walkable one.
- Weather is a cost, not a surprise. A price built on five working days only works in the season that gives you five.
- A carrier's line items set the scope, not your margin. On insurance-funded work your profit comes from cycle time and documentation.
- Ten reconciled of your own roofs beat any published production rate. Until you have them, call every price provisional.
This guide shows a roofing contractor how to build a shingle re-roof quote from job-specific inputs. It explains the method and structure, not local price or profit benchmarks, which depend on your market, crew and disposal costs.
The unit problem
A shingle re-roof can be sold three ways, and the unit you choose decides what the customer argues about.
Three ways to sell a re-roof
Per square
- Basis
- Trade measure
- Easy to compare
- Yes
- Hides difficulty
- Everything hard
- Risk of loss
- High
- Who wants it
- Trade
Per crew day
- Basis
- Your constraint
- Easy to compare
- Harder
- Hides difficulty
- Little
- Risk of loss
- Low
- Who wants it
- Firm
Per scope
- Basis
- Written boundary
- Easy to compare
- Harder
- Hides difficulty
- Bets on days
- Risk of loss
- Medium
- Who wants it
- Homeowner
Per square is the trade's own measure and the easiest to compare. It is also the unit that hides everything hard about a roof, because 20 squares on a walkable ranch and 20 squares on a cut-up two-storey with three valleys are not the same job.
Per crew day matches your actual constraint. You own so many crew days a season, and a roof consumes some number of them. It is harder to sell and much harder to lose money on.
Per scope, a defined job with a written boundary, is what most homeowners want to buy. It is safe only once you know the other two, because a scope price is a bet on crew days.
Most firms sell per scope and think per crew day. That is the right arrangement. The trap is quoting per square because it is easy to say out loud, then discovering the access on the morning of the tear-off.
The four buckets
Material system. The system includes shingle bundles, ridge cap, starter course, and underlayment. It also includes ice-and-water membrane at eaves and valleys, drip edge, step and counter flashing, and pipe boots. It further includes ridge vent, nails and tar. Add the waste factor a cut-up roof produces. Waste follows geometry, not area.
Four cost buckets
- Material systemshingles, membrane, flashing, vents, waste
- Laborburdened hours, tear-off, decking, field shingle
- Disposal and accesstonnage, route, slope, height, carry
- Riskhidden deck, other trades, customer expectation
Labor. Fully burdened hours: tear-off, decking repair, membrane, field shingle.
- ridge
- flashing
- cleanup
- the second trip nobody planned Burdened means the true cost of an hour of that person's time to your firm, which is more than the wage.
Disposal and access. Tear-off is billed by weight at the transfer station, and the route has its own price. Access covers slope, height, stories, obstructions and the carry from truck to ladder. This is the bucket first estimates forget.
Risk. What is under the shingles. Whether another trade controls the schedule. Whether the customer's expectation matches the scope. A named risk allowance is not padding; it is the price of an unknown you have written down.
If your buildup does not show all four separately, you cannot tell which one was wrong when a job loses money.
Building the price upward
- Take off quantitiesarea by slope, linear feet of eave, rake, ridge, hip and valley, and a penetration count.
- Price the material system from a current supplier quote, with a waste factor set by the roof's geometry.
- Estimate crew days for this roof, this crew, this access, from your own completed jobs.
- Multiply crew days by your burdened crew day cost.
- Add disposal, priced by the route and tonnage you will actually use.
- Add an access adjustment where slope, height or carry slows the work.
- Add a named risk allowance and write the reason next to it.
- Apply markup, then check the margin it produces. Markup is measured on cost and margin on price, and confusing the two is the most common arithmetic error in this trade: a markup of one quarter over cost is a margin of one fifth of the selling price.
Four price structures
Where it works
- Unit price per square
- Comparable roofs, one familiar shingle system, straightforward access
- Fixed price with a written allowance
- Re-roofs where the deck is the only real unknown
- Time and materials
- Leak diagnosis, emergency tarping, genuinely unknown extent
- Scope priced against a carrier's estimate
- Claim-funded restoration
Where it fails
- Unit price per square
- Cut-up roofs, steep slopes, anything where area is a poor proxy for work
- Fixed price with a written allowance
- Buildings with several unknowns at once
- Time and materials
- Customers with no ceiling and no way to compare
- Scope priced against a carrier's estimate
- Where the estimate omits work you will actually perform
The fourth row deserves the most thought. When an insurer's platform sets the line items, you do not set the rate. Your margin comes from cycle time, photo documentation and scope discipline.
Four price structures
Structure
- Per square
- Comparable roofs
- Fixed with allowance
- Deck only unknown
- Time and materials
- Leak diagnosis
- Carrier estimate
- Claim restoration
Works where
- Per square
- Cut-up, steep
- Fixed with allowance
- Several unknowns
- Time and materials
- No ceiling
- Carrier estimate
- Omitted work
Fails where
- Per square
- Fixed with allowance
- Time and materials
- Carrier estimate
That means a carrier-estimate job is won or lost on how fast you close the file and how well you defend the items the adjuster left out, not on what you charge per square.
Weather belongs in the price
A roofing week is not five working days, it is five possible working days. A crew stood down is paid time with no revenue against it, and a job split by a weather break pays setup twice.
Pricing weather honestly
Do you carry your area's historical weather loss rate?
build it into crew day cost
hold a stated contingency and reconcile per job
Two honest ways to handle it. Build your area's historical loss rate into the crew day cost, so every quote carries it. Or hold a stated contingency and reconcile it per job.
What is not honest is pricing as though weather never happens and then calling the shortfall a bad month. In a short season that shortfall is the whole year's margin.
What you may not put in an advertised price
An advertised total for work whose extent you have not seen is a claim you cannot support. So is a comparison against another firm's shingle system, and so is any performance promise that belongs to the manufacturer rather than to you.
The FTC advertising guidance for small business sets out that support has to exist before a claim is made. Advertise the inspection price, the method, the documentation and your own workmanship terms. All four are yours and all four are supportable.
Where shingle re-roof margin leaks
- Waste factor set once and never revisited, so cut-up roofs subsidize simple ones.
- Access never charged, so the steep valley job and the walkable bungalow carry the same price.
- Disposal estimated by volume when the transfer station bills by weight.
- Flashing detail discovered on site, performed, and never turned into a change order.
- A second mobilization because a bundle count was short, costing a setup nobody priced.
- Discounting at the door to close, on a price that was already correct.
- Callbacks in the first season, which consume the crew day the next job needed.
Each is measurable per job. None needs a published benchmark to find.
Seven margin leaks
- Waste factor never revisited
- Access never charged
- Disposal by volume, billed by weight
- Flashing found on site, no change order
- Second mobilization from short bundle count
- Door discount on a correct price
- First-season callbacks eat the next crew day
The labor input you can research
Labor is your largest controllable cost and it is set by the local market. The BLS occupational employment and wage tables publish wage estimates by occupation and metropolitan area. Look up roofing and construction occupations where you operate rather than accepting a national figure.
Use it as an input to your burdened cost, not as a target for what you pay. What the roles are, and what each person must be able to do before you price their time, is set out in the roofing contractor services and packages guide.
Reconciling ten roofs
The system rests on one habit: after every job, compare what you quoted against what it consumed. Crew days, materials with waste, disposal tonnage, and any rework.
Ten reconciled roofs will tell you more about your cost of a crew day than any published figure, and they will tell you about your firm, on your access, with your crew. Until you have them, treat every price as provisional and say so internally, so nobody defends a number that was always an estimate.
Keep the records that make reconciliation possible to the standard in the IRS guidance on the records a business should keep, and set up the surrounding structure with the SBA business guide.
The equipment days your buildup assumes come out of the roofing contractor equipment and setup guide. The permit and inspection time your crew day estimate has to include is described in the roofing contractor licensing and compliance guide. Whether your market supports the price you arrive at is the question behind the roofing contractor startup and market guide.
Common questions
How do I answer a much cheaper quote?
Find out what it contains. Usually it excludes disposal, decking, ice-and-water membrane or the permit. Show the customer the two scopes side by side rather than arguing about the totals.
Should I charge for estimates?
Charging for a genuine inspection with a written report attracts serious customers and protects your schedule. A quick walkaround quote is a sales cost. Decide which one you are actually offering.
Is a deposit part of pricing?
It is part of cash flow, not price. Whether you may take one, and on what terms, can be regulated where you work, so ask before you build a policy on it.
What if my price is always the highest?
Check the scope before you check the number. Firms that include what others exclude look expensive on a total and cheap on a comparison, and the fix is a document rather than a discount.
