(214) 807-0414Request an assessmentCost guide
Nobody in this trade can tell you what your roof costs without measuring it, and anyone who does is quoting a market average and hoping. What can be explained before a measurement is the machinery behind the total: which variables move the number a long way, which move it very little, and which are usually invisible in the figure you are shown.
In short
A roof is priced in squares of surface, not the footprint of the house. Pitch, storeys and the number of planes add surface and labour that a floor-area figure never shows — which is why two houses of the same size can price a long way apart.
01
Price is not a property of your house alone. After a widespread hail event across the Metroplex, demand for crews and for material rises at the same moment, and the same scope written in a quiet month and a busy one are not the same number. Timing is a variable owners are rarely told about.
02
The surface material is one line among many. Underlayment, drip edge, valley treatment, flashings at walls and chimneys, pipe boots, ventilation, decking repair, disposal and permitting where it applies all sit behind the total — and every one of them can be specified up, or quietly down.
03
Contractors do not buy shingles at wildly different prices. When one total sits far below the others, the usual explanation is less work: reused flashings, reused boots, no drip edge, no ventilation correction, thinner underlayment, no allowance for the deck. Ask what was removed before assuming it was bought better.
Questions
Aerial reports give reliable area, pitch and facet counts, which is most of the quantity. What they cannot give is condition — the state of the deck, the flashings and the details — and condition is where two honest estimates diverge.
Material cost, crew availability and disposal cost all move. An estimate is priced against a market on a date, which is why a responsible proposal carries a validity period rather than standing open indefinitely.
Often neither. Reports differ on how much waste is added, whether starter, ridge and hip material is counted into the total, and whether a low-slope section was measured apart from the main planes. A gap of a square or so on a cut-up roof is ordinary. A large gap is worth resolving, and the way to resolve it is to ask both of them for the measurement behind the number rather than to assume the smaller one is honest.
It is a reasonable thing to say and it changes what comes back. Given a number, most estimators will write a scope that fits it, which is useful only if you can also see what came out in order to make it fit. Ask for the scope the roof actually needs first, and the version that fits the budget second, with the differences named. A budget offered before a measurement tends to return as a total rather than as a plan.
Because most of what you are paying for happens before anyone touches the roof. Getting a crew and equipment to the property, setting up access safely, and disposing of what comes off take much the same effort whether the work runs an hour or most of a day. That fixed portion is why a small repair looks out of proportion to its size, and why grouping several small items into one visit is usually the sensible way to handle them.
Assessment request
Short, routing-only questions. Nothing here asks you to diagnose the roof yourself.