Home repair costs, state by state

Search for a roof or water heater price and most of the first page is made of quote forms. They ask for a ZIP code, then a name, then a phone number, and the price arrives later, from a contractor who bought your request. That model is legal and sometimes useful, yet it turns a simple question (what does this cost around here?) into a sales call.

This site works the other way round. The figures come from public statistics that anyone can download: the American Housing Survey run by the Census Bureau for HUD, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the 2022 Economic Census of construction. Because the inputs are public, the calculators can run entirely in your browser and show the result the moment you pick a state. There is no form to submit, and no contractor is told that you looked.

Every two years the American Housing Survey asks owners about the home improvement jobs of the past two years: the type of work, whether someone in the household did most of it, the year, and the cost. The 2023 survey recorded 2,217 roof jobs done by professionals, 1,786 water heaters, 2,011 central air conditioning jobs and 1,117 fences. Weighted to the whole country, the median professional roof job was $10,000 in the dollars of the year it was paid.

We keep the middle half of the distribution, from the 25th to the 75th percentile, as the range, and the median as the typical price. Each answer is moved to August 2026 dollars with the CPI-U index of its own year. A survey of real jobs has one strong advantage over a price list: it already contains the tear-off, the permit, the dumpster and the margin, because the homeowner reported what the whole job cost.

Shingles, water heaters and condensers are sold through national distribution, so their price varies less between states than labor does. The 2022 Economic Census shows how a contractor's revenue splits: for roofing contractors, 37.9% went to materials, 19.8% to payroll, 5.0% to benefits and 8.9% to subcontracted work, the rest covering equipment, insurance, overhead and profit.

Our state figure starts from the price level homeowners reported in the state's Census division, then moves only the labor share with the state's wage for the trade compared with its division. That is why the spread between states is real but bounded: a roofer in Washington earns more than one in Mississippi, yet the shingles on both roofs cost about the same. The method page gives every step, with the formula and its limits.

Not every project needs a contractor. The concrete calculator turns a slab, a footing or a row of post holes into cubic yards and bags of 40, 50, 60 or 80 pounds, using the yields printed on the manufacturer's data sheet. The gravel and mulch calculators convert an area and a depth into cubic yards, tons or bags; the paint and drywall calculators measure a room net of doors and windows; the roofing calculator applies the pitch of the roof to count squares, bundles and underlayment rolls.

These tools stop at quantities on purpose. Store prices change weekly and from one aisle to the next, so each calculator lets you type the price from the shelf tag and totals it, rather than showing a national average that would be wrong in your store.

Running costs depend on the state far more than installation prices do. Residential electricity averaged 18.19¢ per kilowatt-hour in the United States from January to July 2026, according to the Energy Information Administration, but the state averages ran from 12.36¢ in North Dakota to 46.28¢ in Hawaii. The electric bill and appliance calculators use the figure of your state, the EV charging calculator sets it against gasoline, and the heat pump versus furnace comparison prices the same heat with gas, propane, oil or electricity.

For solar, the federal 30% residential credit ended on December 31, 2025, as the IRS confirms. Our solar cost, sizing and payback calculators therefore work without it, with state output figures from PVWatts and price data published by the national laboratories.

A survey median describes many houses, not yours. A steep or cut-up roof, two layers of old shingles, rotten decking, a tankless water heater in place of a tank, a long duct run or a narrow lot all move a real quote, and none of them can be seen from a statistic. Prices also lag: the survey covers jobs from 2021 to 2023, and the CPI adjustment follows general inflation rather than the price of shingles or copper in particular.

Use the ranges to know whether a written quote is in the usual zone for your state, to plan a budget, or to decide whether a job is worth doing yourself. When a quote sits far above the high end, ask the contractor what makes your job different; there is often a good answer, and sometimes there is not.