For a typical house, expect roughly 4 to 9 dollars per square foot installed for exposed fastener panels and 10 to 18 for standing seam steel. On a 2,000 square foot roof that is about 8,000 to 18,000 dollars at the low end and 20,000 to 36,000 for standing seam.
Get Metal Roof Cost Guide connects you with licensed local companies. We are not a roofing contractor and do not perform the work ourselves.
Roof area is not floor area. A roof is larger because it is sloped, and steeper roofs are larger still. Multiply the footprint by a pitch factor.
| Roof pitch | Multiply footprint by |
|---|---|
| 4:12 | about 1.05 |
| 6:12 | about 1.12 |
| 8:12 | about 1.20 |
| 12:12 | about 1.41 |
A 1,600 square foot footprint on a 6:12 roof is roughly 1,800 square feet of roof, plus overhangs. Add ten percent for waste and trim.
A per square foot figure covers the field of the roof. Several line items sit outside it and are the usual reason a quote comes back higher than the arithmetic suggested.
the full installation guide sets out how these appear on a real quote.
Because an estimate assumes a simple rectangle and a sound deck, and a real roof rarely is either. Valleys, dormers and penetrations add labor that no per square foot figure captures, and the deck underneath is unknown until the old roof is off.
Use the estimate to sanity check the quotes you receive rather than to negotiate with. If a quote is far outside it, the useful question is what it includes that your arithmetic did not. what sits inside a roofing quote covers what the finished job involves.
Take the ground footprint and multiply by a pitch factor, roughly 1.05 at 4:12 and 1.20 at 8:12, then add for overhangs and about ten percent for waste.
Calculators price the field of a simple roof. They cannot see your valleys, dormers, penetrations or deck condition, and those are where real quotes diverge.
A rough estimate helps you read quotes, but every serious company will measure it themselves. Treat your own number as a sanity check, not a specification.
Yes, twice over. There is more surface area for the same footprint, and the work is slower and needs more fall protection.
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