Asphalt shingle roof replacement in 2026: cost per square, line by line

The roof being priced

Every roofing number starts from area, and the area on your tax card is the wrong one. The house here has a 50 ft by 40 ft footprint, 2,000 sq ft. The roof hangs 12 in past the walls on every side, so its shadow on the ground is 52 ft by 42 ft, or 2,184 sq ft.

Pitch adds the rest. A 6/12 roof rises 6 in for every 12 in of run, and the sloped surface is longer than its shadow by the square root of (1 + 0.5²), a factor of 1.1180. Multiply 2,184 by 1.1180 and the real surface is 2,441.8 sq ft. Roofers sell and price by the square, 100 sq ft, so this is 24.42 squares of roof.

Shingles get cut at rakes, ridges and around anything that pokes through. The roofing calculator on this site starts a gable at 10% waste and adds a point for each penetration; three plumbing vents make it 13%. The order area is 2,759.2 sq ft.

Then read the wrapper. Owens Corning's Oakridge spec sheet says 3 bundles and 64 shingles make a square, and that square covers 98.4 sq ft. Divide 2,759.2 by 32.8 sq ft per bundle and you need 85 bundles. Assume 100 sq ft per square and you order 83.

The linear items don't track area at all. This roof has 104 ft of eave, 93.9 ft of rake (each sloped edge is 21 ft of run times 1.1180) and 52 ft of ridge.

Two of those lines come straight from the code. IRC R905.1.2 requires an ice barrier, where the local ice history calls for one, from the eave edge to at least 24 in inside the exterior wall line. With a 12 in overhang that is 3 ft measured flat, and 40.2 in measured up a 6/12 slope. One 36 in roll doesn't reach, so the eaves take two courses. That is the reason for four rolls where many estimates carry two.

The vent count comes from IRC R806.2. An attic needs 1/150 of its floor area in net free vent area, or 1/300 when 40% to 50% of it sits high on the roof and the rest low. At 1/300 this 2,000 sq ft attic needs 960 sq in, half of it at the ridge. The VentSure roll is rated at 12.5 sq in per foot, so 38.4 ft of vent, two 20 ft rolls. The soffits have to supply the other half, and if they are painted shut, the ridge vent does little.

R905.2.6 sets the nail floor at four per strip shingle. Owens Corning's 130 mph wind warranty on Oakridge asks for six nails and its own starter along eaves and rakes, which is why the starter count covers the rakes too. Six nails is 10,596 field nails, still two boxes.

Line-by-line cost of the typical job

Material prices below are Menards online prices on 2026-09-19, the only big-box site that loaded that day. A roofer buying by the truckload pays less than the shelf price, so treat them as a ceiling for the material share.

Labor is the hard number, because nobody publishes roofer productivity for free. So I started from how roofing contractors actually spend their revenue. The 2022 Economic Census counts $67.9 billion of work by roofing contractors. For every $1.00 they spent on materials, they spent $0.645 on field labor: construction-worker payroll, those workers' share of benefits, and work subcontracted out. Everything else, from office staff and trucks to insurance and profit, is 60.3% on top of those direct costs, a markup of 1.603.

Applied to this roof's material bill of $5,428 (before decking), field labor is $3,502. The BLS puts the national mean roofer wage at $27.95 an hour in May 2025. Construction employers pay $51.96 in total compensation for every $36.13 of wages, a factor of 1.438, so a roofer hour costs the company $40.20. That makes 87.1 labor hours, or 3.57 hours per square for tear-off and install. I add half an hour per sheet of decking, an allowance of mine with no published source behind it.

Disposal uses the City of Fargo's roll-off rates: $120 a haul plus $57 a ton at the landfill. NIST puts laminated shingles at about 280 lb per square, so 24.42 squares is 3.42 tons. Connecticut's environmental agency, citing the asphalt roofing trade group, gives 175 to 233 lb for shingles alone. I used the heavier figure because a torn-off roof also carries its old felt and nails. A private hauler in your town will price differently; ask for the weight allowance and the per-ton overage in writing.

The permit is New Richmond's flat $150 reroof fee for 2026. Many cities price permits off job value instead, so look up yours before you trust anyone's permit line.

As a cross-check, the 2025 Cost vs. Value report prices a 30-square asphalt reroof on a hip roof with two skylights at $31,871, or $1,062 a square. That report prices the job through a remodeling firm, and hips and skylights cost more, so it sits well above this estimate. I use it only as a comparison.

Low, typical and high scenarios

Same house, same pitch. What changes is the shingle, the climate and what the crew finds under the old roof.

The high case adds 24.4 labor hours for the second layer (an hour per square, my allowance), doubles the landfill tonnage to $509.71 and adds 17 sheets of OSB with their labor. If you are signing a contract, keep the $2,800 gap between typical and high in reserve until the old roof is off.

What the same roof costs in other states

Material prices move less from state to state than labor does. Holding materials, disposal and permit constant and swapping in each state's mean roofer wage from BLS OEWS (May 2025), the typical job moves like this:

The spread from Arkansas to Illinois is $3,131 on the same roof, and the markup carries every labor dollar up by 1.603. Southern states also rarely need the ice barrier, which takes another $763 off after markup. After a hailstorm, demand swamps local crews and none of these averages hold for a few months.

Shingle prices are still climbing

The BLS producer price index for prepared asphalt roofing and siding products (WPU1361) stood at 374.1 in August 2026, a preliminary figure. That is 3.9% above August 2025 and 50.8% above January 2020. It also jumped 7.6% between April and August 2026. A quote written in the spring may not survive a fall start date, so ask how long the price holds and whether the contract lets the roofer pass through a supplier increase.

Shingles are 70% of the material bill on this roof, so a 5% shingle increase is $191 in materials and about $306 on the final price after markup.

Architectural, 3-tab or metal: cost per year of service

With ice barrier and decking held equal, a 3-tab roof on this house costs $13,794 and architectural costs $15,133. The difference is $1,339.

How long each lasts is where the sales pitch gets slippery. The Supreme 3-tab is sold with a 25-year warranty. The Oakridge carries a "Limited Lifetime" warranty, and GAF's own data sheet for its Timberline HDZ defines lifetime as the time the original owner owns the house. That defines how long the warranty runs. It says nothing about how long the roof lasts. The independent figure most often cited, the NAHB life-expectancy study, gives asphalt shingle roofs about 20 years without splitting them by type, and NIST's life-cycle model uses the same 20-year cycle.

At 20 years, 3-tab works out to $690 a year and architectural to $757. Architectural breaks even if it lasts 1.94 years longer than the 3-tab would. It also brings wind ratings that matter to insurers; the HDZ sheet lists ASTM D3161 Class F and D7158 Class H. For a two-year edge in life and a stronger wind rating, buy the architectural.

Metal is a different bet. Cost vs. Value priced a 30-square metal roof at $51,865 against $31,871 for asphalt, a ratio of 1.627. Applied to this house, metal would run about $24,627. A coil supplier like Sheffield Metals warrants its paint film for up to 40 years, so take 40 as the optimistic life.

Counted in plain dollars per year, metal wins: $616 against $757. Money has a cost, though. At 7%, the prime rate on 2026-09-17, the equivalent annual cost of the architectural roof over 20 years is $1,428, and metal over 40 years is $1,847. At that rate a metal quote has to come in under $19,044 on this house to beat shingles, and at a 0% cost of money the ceiling is $30,266. The 7% is a nominal rate, and if roof prices keep rising the true hurdle is lower, so metal lands in between. Cost vs. Value also found asphalt recouped 68% of its cost at resale and metal 50%. If a sale is likely before the shingles would wear out, that gap tilts the choice back to shingles.

Paying for it: HELOC, personal loan or card

Say you finance the full $15,133 over 60 months. The Federal Reserve's G.19 release puts the average 24-month personal loan at commercial banks at 11.86% in the second quarter of 2026, and the average credit card rate at 20.94%. HELOCs float over the prime rate, which was 7.00% on 2026-09-17. SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union, as one published example, quotes a margin of -0.50 to +3.00 points over prime, a range of 6.50% to 10.00%.

The HELOC saves $841 to $2,368 over the personal loan here. It is also variable and secured by the house, and it can take weeks to open, which matters when water is coming through the ceiling. If you have a HELOC open already, draw on it. If you don't and the roof is failing now, a fixed personal loan that closes in days is a reasonable price for speed. Keep the roof off a credit card; the extra $4,400 in interest over the personal loan would pay for the ice barrier more than nine times. Run your own balance and rate in the HELOC calculator.

Insurance, wind ratings and FORTIFIED

The biggest insurance lever with a published number behind it is the FORTIFIED Roof standard from IBHS, the insurance industry's research institute. It asks for a sealed roof deck, ring-shank nails in a tighter pattern, a wider drip edge, a fully adhered starter strip, and shingles rated ASTM D3161 Class F or D7158 Class H. Most of that is extra labor and materials on top of the job priced here, and it needs a certified evaluator to sign off.

In Alabama the math is written down. Strengthen Alabama Homes pays up to $10,000 toward a FORTIFIED Roof on an owner-occupied single-family home, with no income limit, and Smart Home America says the upgrade can cut the wind portion of the premium by up to 35% on the coast and 20% inland. Mobile County applications open October 6, 2026, first come, first served. Outside Alabama, ask your insurer in writing what a FORTIFIED designation, a Class F wind rating or an impact-rated shingle does to your premium, and get the answer before you choose the shingle.

If a storm damaged the roof, call the insurer before you sign a roofing contract, and never sign one that assigns your claim to the roofer without reading exactly what you are giving up.

Where roof budgets blow up

Rotten decking is the classic. Nobody can see it until the shingles are off, so the contract should carry a price per sheet. On this roof one sheet of 7/16 OSB with half an hour of labor comes to $53.82 after markup. Twenty sheets is $1,076.

A second layer is the other one. Stripping it adds about 24.4 labor hours and another 3.42 tons at the landfill, $1,886 after markup. It also takes the recover option off the table: R908.3.1.1 bans a new layer over a roof that already has two.

Pitch costs more than most people expect. Run the same house at 10/12 and the pitch factor rises to 1.3017, the real surface to 2,842.9 sq ft, the order to 98 bundles, and the job to $17,370 before any steep-slope charge. That is $2,236 more than the 6/12 roof, all from geometry. Steep roofs also need more crew time and more safety gear, and roofers price that as a surcharge; ask for it as its own line.

The quantity itself can come up short. A 1.6% coverage gap per square, a starter strip that skips the rakes, or an ice barrier drawn one course wide will surface as a change order later.

How to read a roofing quote

Put the quote next to the tables above and check these lines, one at a time.

Squares. Ask for the measured roof area and the waste percentage separately. On this house, 24.4 squares of roof and 27.6 squares ordered are both honest numbers; a single "30 squares" with no breakdown hides both.

Brand and product line for the shingle, the underlayment, the starter, the cap and the ice barrier. "Architectural shingles" alone lets the crew install whatever is on the truck, and it can void the system warranty that needs matching accessories.

Ice barrier width in inches or courses, if your area requires it, and whether it runs up valleys.

Ventilation. The quote should say ridge vent length, and someone should have looked at the soffits.

Tear-off layers and a per-sheet decking price. If decking is "as needed" with no price, you have signed a blank check.

Disposal, permit and who pulls the permit. If the roofer suggests skipping it, that roofer is also skipping the inspection that protects you.

Payment schedule. A deposit to order materials is normal. Paying most of the price before the tear-off is not.

To test your own house, put the footprint, pitch and overhang into the roofing calculator. It runs the same geometry used here, so its squares and bundles will match this page. To check a quote's squares by hand, see how to measure a roof for shingles; if one leak is the only problem, how to repair a roof leak prices the fix, and how to install a metal roof works through steel panels on a garage.