What Should a Roofing Pro Charge Per Hour?

Ask ten roofers what they charge per hour and you will get ten different answers, and most of them are guesses. The truth is that a good roofing hourly rate is not a number you pull from the air or copy from the guy across town. It is a number you build backwards, starting from the income you actually want to take home and adding every cost it takes to keep your trucks on the road.

This post walks through that math the way one contractor would explain it to another: honest, specific, and based on ranges instead of promises. Your numbers will differ from your neighbor's, and that is exactly the point.

Why Copying a Competitor's Rate Loses Money

When you match the rate of the roofer down the road, you are assuming your businesses are identical. They almost never are. That company may have paid-off trucks, a spouse handling the books for free, or a warehouse they own outright. You might be leasing equipment, carrying higher insurance, or running newer vehicles with payments.

Their rate works for their cost structure. When you adopt it, you inherit a price built for someone else's business while paying your own bills. That gap is where profit quietly disappears. Worse, if they underpriced to win work and are slowly going broke, you just copied a losing strategy and called it market research.

Start With the Income You Actually Want

Setting a rate starts with a question most owners skip: how much do you want to earn in a year? Not revenue, not what runs through the account, but the money you want in your pocket after everything is paid. Pick a real number. For a working owner-operator in US roofing, a target in the range of 70,000 to 120,000 dollars is common, though that varies widely by region and size.

Write that number down. Everything else in this process feeds off it. If you do not define the target, your rate will drift down to whatever keeps you busy, and busy is not the same as profitable.

The Billable vs Unbillable Hours Gap

Here is the trap. There are roughly 2,080 work hours in a full-time year, but you cannot bill all of them. A large share goes to tasks nobody pays you for directly: driving, estimating, chasing permits, invoicing, buying materials, and answering the phone.

For many roofing crews, only about 55 to 70 percent of paid hours end up billable. The rest is the cost of running a business. If you divide your income target by all 2,080 hours, you set your rate too low, because you will never bill 2,080 hours.

• Driving between jobs and to suppliers
• Writing quotes and doing site measurements
• Rework, warranty callbacks, and cleanup
• Admin: invoicing, scheduling, follow-up calls
• Weather days and downtime

Assume a conservative billable share, then build your rate on those hours only. Being optimistic here is how businesses undercharge for years without realizing it.

Overhead: The Costs That Hide in Your Rate

Overhead is every cost you pay whether or not you are on a roof today. It does not go away on slow weeks, so it has to live inside your hourly rate. Miss it, and you are funding your own business out of your paycheck.

• Insurance: general liability and workers comp
• Vehicle payments, fuel, and maintenance
• Tools, equipment, and replacement
• Phone, software, and office costs
• Licensing, bonds, and permits
• Marketing and lead costs
• Any wages for office or helper staff

Add these up for a full year. For a small roofing operation, annual overhead often lands somewhere in the 30,000 to 80,000 dollar range depending on trucks, staff, and insurance. Total yours honestly, because an underestimate here guarantees an underpriced rate.

A Worked Example You Can Copy

Let's run real numbers for a solo owner-operator who also runs one crew member. Adjust each figure to match your own books.

1. Target take-home income: 90,000 dollars.
2. Annual overhead: 50,000 dollars.
3. Total you need to collect in a year: 140,000 dollars.
4. Paid hours in a year: 2,080.
5. Billable share at 60 percent: about 1,250 billable hours.
6. Divide 140,000 by 1,250 billable hours.

That gives roughly 112 dollars per hour of billed labor just to hit the owner's goals, before any profit margin on top. If you only billed against all 2,080 hours instead, you would have landed near 67 dollars per hour and quietly lost tens of thousands over the year.

Now you can see why a competitor charging 85 dollars an hour might be in trouble, and why matching them would put you there too.

Turning Your Rate Into Real Quotes

Most roofing work is quoted by the job or by the square, not billed hourly to the customer. Your hourly rate is still the engine underneath that quote. You estimate the labor hours a job takes, multiply by your true rate, add materials with markup, and you have a price that protects you.

Track your actual hours against your estimates over time. If jobs consistently take longer than you quoted, your rate math was right but your hour estimates were off. Both halves have to be accurate to make money.

Revisit the Number, Then Revisit It Again

Your rate is not permanent. Insurance climbs, fuel moves, and your income goals grow. Recalculate at least once a year, and any time a major cost changes. The contractors who stay profitable treat their rate as a living number, not a sign they hang once and forget.

Set it from your own costs, protect your margin, and stop pricing off the competition. That is how a roofing business pays its owner what the work is worth.