The sales side of roofing gets measured constantly. Close rates, doors per day, cost per lead, commission structures — there is a benchmark for everything a rep does. The install side, which is where the money is actually earned or lost, gets almost none of it. Most companies could tell you their close rate to a decimal and could not tell you what their labor cost per square did last year.
This report is the operations-side counterpart. It draws on a survey of 247 roofing companies running insurance restoration work and tracked job-costing data from 6,300+ completed residential installs in the HailMate network during 2025, covering subcontractor pricing, install timelines, backlog and crew retention. Pricing is reported as regional medians rather than a single national figure, because a national average for roofing labor is close to useless — the spread across regions is wider than most companies' entire margin.
Read it with your last ten jobs open. Almost every number below is one you can check against your own costing in an afternoon, and the ones that are off are usually off in the same direction.
Who Actually Installs the Roof
| Install model | Share of companies | Median company revenue |
|---|---|---|
| All subcontracted crews | 61% | $3.4M |
| Hybrid (in-house + subs at peak) | 27% | $8.9M |
| All in-house crews | 12% | $5.1M |
Storm restoration runs on subcontractors, and it is not hard to see why. Demand in this business arrives in violent spikes tied to weather, and a payroll cannot spike. What is more interesting is the middle row: hybrid companies are by far the largest, roughly two and a half times the revenue of the all-sub model.
The mechanism appears to be control at the margin. A hybrid company can put its own crew on the difficult job, the warranty callback, or the customer who needs handling, and push volume work to subs when the storm hits. That optionality is what a purely subcontracted company sells away in exchange for flexibility, and it shows up in the callback and reliability rows further down.
What Crews Cost
Median subcontractor labor for tear-off and replacement of architectural shingles on a standard walkable roof, per square (100 sq ft).
| Region | 2025 median $/square | 2024 → 2025 change |
|---|---|---|
| South Central (TX, OK, LA, AR) | $265 | +6% |
| Southeast | $278 | +7% |
| Mountain West | $296 | +9% |
| Midwest | $310 | +8% |
| Great Plains | $302 | +11% |
| Mid-Atlantic | $344 | +7% |
| Northeast | $391 | +5% |
| West Coast | $398 | +6% |
| National median | $305 | +8% |
Labor rose 8% nationally in a single year, ahead of general construction cost inflation. The Great Plains led at 11%, which is exactly what the storm-surge section below would predict — that region absorbed the heaviest hail activity in 2025, as documented in The State of Hail in America 2026.
Complexity multipliers
The base rate is for a walkable, single-story, straightforward roof. Almost no storm job is that.
| Condition | Typical multiplier on base $/square |
|---|---|
| 7/12 to 9/12 pitch | 1.20× |
| 10/12 to 12/12 pitch | 1.45× |
| Over 12/12 pitch | 1.85× |
| Two-story | 1.15× |
| Three-story or difficult access | 1.35× |
| Heavy cut-up (valleys, dormers, penetrations) | 1.25× |
| Second layer tear-off | +$45/square |
| Decking replacement | +$85/square installed |
A steep, three-story, cut-up roof can cost 2.5 times the base rate to install — and if it was estimated at the base rate, that spread comes straight out of margin. This is the same steep-and-access scope that carriers routinely understate on the revenue side, which means the error compounds: underpaid on the estimate, overpaid on the labor. Getting both right is the whole argument for job-level costing over company averages, covered in roofing job costing and real margin and automated in job costing. If squares themselves are unfamiliar territory, start with what is a roofing square.
The Storm Surge Problem
Crews are mobile. When a metro takes a major hail hit, the crews arrive, and the price moves.
| Days after a major metro hail event | Median local $/square vs. baseline | Crew availability |
|---|---|---|
| 0–14 days | +9% | Tight |
| 15–60 days | +22% | Severe shortage |
| 61–120 days | +18% | Shortage |
| 121–180 days | +11% | Easing |
| 180+ days | +6% | Near normal |
Pricing peaks at +22% in the 15-to-60 day window and never fully returns to baseline within six months. The window matters: it lines up almost exactly with when the first insurance checks land and companies want to install, which means the maximum number of jobs hits the market at the maximum price.
A worked example
A company that signs 80 jobs at 28 squares each in the two months after a metro event:
| Line | Baseline | Surge (+22%) |
|---|---|---|
| Squares installed | 2,240 | 2,240 |
| Labor $/square | $305 | $372 |
| Total labor cost | $683,200 | $833,280 |
| Additional cost | — | $150,080 |
$150,000 of margin, on jobs already sold at a scope the carrier set before the surge started. The revenue was fixed by the insurance scope; the cost was not. This is the single most expensive predictable event in a storm restoration company's year, and most companies discover it in the job costing three months later.
The companies that avoided the worst of it did two things: they had crew relationships already in place before the storm, and they paid fast. In a surge, a crew choosing between two companies at similar rates picks the one that paid last time in seven days.
Contract to Install: The Backlog
| Stage | Normal median | Post-surge median |
|---|---|---|
| Contract signed → insurance scope received | 9 days | 21 days |
| Scope received → first (ACV) check | 14 days | 22 days |
| Check received → permit pulled | 4 days | 7 days |
| Permit → crew scheduled | 6 days | 19 days |
| Contract → install complete | 26 days | 58 days |
The stage totals do not sum to the bottom line because companies overlap them, and overlapping is the entire lever. Companies in the fastest quartile pulled permits and scheduled crews against the expected scope rather than waiting for the check, cutting a median of 11 days out of the sequence with no additional cost.
The reason it matters is not customer satisfaction, though that is real — it is cash. A job sitting at 58 days is a job whose materials, labor deposit and sales commission may already be committed against a final payment that is 74 days out from filing, per The Roofing Insurance Claim Outcomes Report 2026. Backlog is how profitable roofing companies run out of money. Running the sequence in one place rather than across a whiteboard and three inboxes is the premise of project management and one central platform.
Where the Money Goes
Median cost structure on a residential shingle replacement, as a share of contract value.
| Cost line | Median share | Top-quartile margin companies |
|---|---|---|
| Labor (sub or in-house) | 31% | 29% |
| Materials | 28% | 26% |
| Sales commission | 11% | 11% |
| Disposal, permits, misc. | 4% | 3% |
| Warranty / callback reserve | 2% | 2% |
| Overhead allocation | 13% | 11% |
| Gross margin | 11% | 18% |
The gap between a median company and a top-quartile one is 7 points of margin, and no single line explains it. It is two points on labor, two on materials, two on overhead and one on callbacks — small, unglamorous differences accumulated across every job. On $5M of revenue that is $350,000 a year.
The materials line is worth a separate note: companies buying on tracked, current supplier pricing rather than on last quarter's sheet ran roughly two points better, which is the case for live pricing in material ordering.
Crew Turnover and Reliability
| Measure | Median | Top quartile |
|---|---|---|
| Crews used per year (per 100 installs) | 7.4 | 3.1 |
| Share of installs by a crew used 10+ times | 41% | 78% |
| Callback rate (warranty visit within 12 months) | 8.2% | 3.4% |
| Median days from install complete → crew paid | 22 | 6 |
| Reschedules per 100 scheduled installs | 14 | 5 |
The correlation running through this table is payment speed. Companies paying crews inside a week used less than half as many crews and had callback rates under half the median. That is not a coincidence of good management — a crew that gets paid in six days keeps the calendar open for you, and a crew that works for you fifty times a year knows your standards without being told.
The callback row is where it turns into money. At a median $640 per warranty visit, a company doing 200 installs a year at an 8.2% callback rate spends about $10,500 on callbacks; at 3.4% it spends $4,350. The gap is smaller than the labor numbers above, but it is pure loss — work performed twice and paid for twice.
Crews also rank job readiness highly and it is entirely free: materials on site, dumpster placed, permit posted, homeowner notified. A crew that arrives to a job that is not ready loses a day, and a lost day costs them more than a $15/square rate difference earns them.
The Workforce Underneath
| Measure | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Median crew size | 6 |
| Share of companies reporting difficulty finding crews | 68% |
| Share reporting difficulty finding experienced crews | 84% |
| Companies who turned down work for lack of crew capacity | 37% |
| Median age of lead installers | 41 |
More than a third of companies turned down work in 2025 because they could not staff it. In an industry that spends its entire marketing budget generating demand, that is a striking allocation problem: the constraint moved to the install side and the spending did not follow.
The broader labor picture is well documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' occupational data for roofers, and safety is a real part of the cost structure — falls remain the leading cause of death in construction and OSHA's fall protection requirements apply on essentially every residential roof. Companies with formal safety programs in our sample reported both lower insurance costs and better crew retention, which is the kind of correlation that runs in both directions.
What the Best-Staffed Companies Do
- They pay in a week. The single strongest correlate of crew retention in our data, ahead of rate.
- They keep fewer crews busier. 3.1 crews per 100 installs instead of 7.4, and 78% of work with crews used 10+ times.
- They price complexity into the estimate. Steep, access and cut-up multipliers applied at estimate time, not discovered at install.
- They overlap the backlog stages. Permits and scheduling against the expected scope rather than waiting on the check.
- They pre-commit crews before the season. Relationships in place in March cost far less than crews recruited in June at +22%.
None of it is exotic. All of it is the same thing seen from five angles: treat crews as the constrained resource they actually are, rather than as a line item to squeeze. The operational scaffolding for it is in how to run an organized roofing business.
Methodology
This report combines a 2026 survey of 247 insurance restoration roofing companies with anonymized, aggregated job-costing and scheduling data from 6,300+ completed residential installs in the HailMate network during the 2025 calendar year.
Subcontractor pricing reflects tear-off and replacement of architectural asphalt shingles on walkable single-story roofs, quoted per square of installed material, and excludes materials, disposal and permits. Regional medians are grouped by Census division with the Great Plains reported separately because of its storm exposure. Metal, tile, slate and low-slope systems are excluded from the pricing tables entirely; their labor markets do not resemble shingle labor and blending them would distort every figure.
Storm-surge pricing compares local median rates in the 180 days following a metro-scale hail event against the same market's trailing twelve-month baseline, and reflects markets where a defined event occurred rather than all markets. Cost-structure shares are drawn from tracked job costing where the contractor recorded actual costs rather than estimated ones. Crew retention and callback figures are measured from tracked scheduling and warranty activity, not self-report.
Companies in this sample use a restoration-focused platform and skew toward tracked job costing, so cost visibility here is better than the industry at large; absolute margins in the broader market are likely lower. Worked examples are illustrative and use the medians stated above. Nothing here is legal, tax or safety-compliance advice.
Related Reading
- Roofing Job Costing and Real Margin — how to check every cost figure above against your own jobs.
- The State of Hail in America 2026 — the storm exposure that drives the surge pricing above.
- How to Run an Organized Roofing Business — the operating system behind the top-quartile column.
This report is for informational purposes only and is not legal, tax or safety-compliance advice.