How much does it cost to install gutters?

• NAICS 238170 is titled 'Siding contractors', and its own index lists, verbatim, 'Downspout, gutter, and gutter guard installation' and 'Gutter and downspout contractors'. The government files the two trades in one class. We originally told you there was no NAICS code for gutter contractors at all, which was false, and it was the fifth such claim we have got wrong.
• Economic Census (2022): employer firms did $4.20 billion of gutter, gutter guard and downspout work. That is not 'what Americans spent': the Economic Census counts only firms with employees, and a great many gutter outfits are one van and no payroll.
• 64% of that work went through the siding class and 33% through roofing contractors. Gutter work is 24.8% of the SIDING CLASS's receipts against 2.0% of the ROOFING class's. Read those as facts about the classes, not about individual firms: because NAICS files gutters-only specialists into the siding class, the class average is lifted by firms that do nothing else, and a typical siding contractor does less gutter work than 24.8%.
• What survives all that, and is the useful part: gutters are a CORE business for the siding class and a SIDELINE for roofers. The roofer quoting you for gutters is quoting for something that is 2% of what his industry does.
• Siding contractors bill $113.97 a field hour and roofers bill $136.72. Weighted by how much gutter work each actually performs, gutter labour bills $121.70 a field hour, against the $30.89 the firm pays the person up the ladder. A measured 3.94x markup, which is why labour and not aluminium is most of your bill.
• Economic Census: a gutter job's dollar splits roughly 40% materials and 60% labour, overhead and profit, once you drop the subcontract line that a gutter job never uses. On a 200 ft aluminium job that means the metal is about $640 of a $1,614 bill, and everything else is people, ladders, insurance and profit.
• Gutter guards are the industry's favourite upsell, and the branded micro-mesh systems sold door to door run $10 to $30 a foot fitted. On a 200 ft house that is $2,000 to $6,000, which can cost several times the gutters underneath them. Ask for the two priced separately, and be wary of anyone who will not.
• We could not find a free source publishing an installed gutter price per foot, and here is every place we looked: DOE's measures database (both workbooks, 93 sheets, no gutter line item anywhere); the Economic Census Kind of Business file (gutter receipts, but no quantities, so no route from $4.20bn to a price per foot); the Census Products-by-Industry tables for 2022, which publish dollars with no quantity column and so yield no unit price; and the federal producer price indexes, which give the change in price and never the level. If one exists, we have not found it and we would like to.

What is sourced, and what is ours. The rate is sourced and it is the spine of the page: the Economic Census measures what siding and roofing contractors bill per field hour, and its Kind of Business file measures how much gutter work each of them actually does, so we can weight the two and get a rate for gutter labour specifically rather than borrowing someone else's. The industry size and the trade shares are sourced from the same place. Ours is the material price per foot, and it carries most of the uncertainty. Two smaller things are ours as well and say so where they appear: the crew hours and the guard price. But the material rate is what moves the answer. We hunted before saying so, because a refusal is a claim and we have got four of them wrong. We checked DOE and NREL's measures database, both workbooks, all 93 sheets: its unit-cost tables cover siding, roof, duct and pipe insulation, and there is no gutter line item. We checked the Economic Census Kind of Business file, which gives gutter receipts but no quantities, so there is no way to get from $4.20bn to a price per foot. We checked the Economic Census manufacturing files, which publish no product-line quantities for 2022. And the federal price indexes are indexes: they can tell you gutters got dearer, never what gutters cost. If a free source publishes an installed gutter price, we have not found it, and we would like to. But we did not guess it either, and the honest version of this is better than the one we first wrote. The Economic Census measures how a job's dollar splits. Blended for the trades that hang gutters and renormalised over the two lines we actually model, it is 40.2% materials and 59.8% labour, overhead and profit. Given your crew hours and the measured billed rate, that split does not merely check the material price. It determines it. It pins it at $3.22 a foot, and $3.20 is that number rounded. We first called this a validation. It was not, and you should know why. It was circular: we fitted the price to hit the share and then announced that the share agreed, which is a parameter agreeing with its own definition. And it was backwards: the share is invariant to scaling the material price and the crew hours together, so doubling both leaves the gauge reading exactly the same while the total doubles. It catches the two drifting APART. It is blind to both being wrong in the same direction, which is precisely what we claimed it would catch. It is a ratio test, not a level test. Two things will move that gauge legitimately, so do not read them as failures. Copper takes the material share to about 84%, because copper is copper. And gutter guards take it past 70%, because a guard is almost pure material. Both are real changes of scope, not broken arithmetic. The gauge is a sanity test for an ordinary aluminium job and nothing more. And one thing we deliberately do not do. Every other home page here is anchored on what households told the American Housing Survey they paid. Not this one, because the survey never asks about gutters. We read the question wording: the nearest one asks about "any other part of the exterior of your home, such as chimney or stairs". A gutter job might land in that bucket, but so does a chimney rebuild, and its median is dominated by them. Borrowing it would be a lie with a citation attached.

Sources: US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223KOB (Kind of Business), code 8170: gutter, gutter guard and downspout installation contractor · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the billed rates and the composition of a job's dollar) · US Census Bureau, AHS 2023 Items Booklet (the question wording showing the survey never asks about gutters) · BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)