Exterior work sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from equipment replacement. There is no catalogue item doing most of the work. A roof is a crew on a surface for several days, and the price follows from how long that takes and what it costs to keep them there.
On our numbers roughly 55% of a roof replacement is on-site labour, 50% of siding and 40% of windows. That share is what decides how much your postcode matters.
Where the map starts to matter
Construction labour is not a national market. At the top, San Jose, CA at $45.42 an hour, +44.6% against the national mean. At the bottom, Gadsden, AL at $20.60 an hour, -34.4% against the national mean. That is a spread of well over two to one for the same trade.
Apply the labour share and the effect on a job becomes concrete: on a roof, which is a bit over half labour, a metro paying 30% above the national wage lands at roughly 15% above the national cost, not 30%. The materials are bought at close to national prices wherever you live, and they dilute the local premium. Every city page on this site shows that arithmetic explicitly rather than folding it into a single number.
Material choice is the largest single lever
Nothing else on a roofing quote moves the total as far as the material line. Architectural shingle is the default assumption in most quotes. Metal runs substantially above it. Tile and slate are a different order again, and they bring a structural question with them — some roofs need reinforcing before they can carry the weight.
Material prices are also the part of the job that moves month to month. Prepared asphalt roofing and siding products have risen +3.6% in the twelve months to July 2026. Vinyl and other plastic building products have risen +5.0% in the twelve months to July 2026. Wood window units have risen +4.4% in the twelve months to July 2026. Lumber, which underlies decking and any structural repair found once the old roof comes off, has risen +10.1% in the twelve months to July 2026.
Complexity is the factor nobody quotes for
Two roofs of the same area can take very different amounts of time. Valleys, dormers, skylights and a steep pitch all slow a crew down, and steep work brings safety equipment with it. A simple single-storey hip roof and a cut-up two-storey roof of identical square footage are not the same job, and a quote that does not mention pitch or complexity has probably not been measured properly.
What the tear-off hides
The layer count matters — removing two layers costs more than removing one, and disposal is priced by weight. But the real risk is what is underneath. Rotten decking is found after the old roof is off, which is exactly when you have the least leverage to negotiate.
Get this in writing before work starts. Ask for the per-sheet price of replacement decking as a line item in the original quote. It costs nothing to agree in advance and it removes the one conversation that reliably goes badly.
Windows are the exception
Window replacement behaves more like equipment than like roofing. The units are manufactured, the labour is an hour or two per opening, and the price scales cleanly with the number of openings. The one thing that changes the job is whether you are inserting into the existing frame or replacing the frame entirely — full-frame work is required when the existing frame has rotted, and it is a materially different scope.
We do not yet publish a sourced baseline for roofing, siding or windows. The material indexes above are real and current; the installed cost figures are not something any free public dataset gives us, and we would rather show the trend than invent the total.