How much does siding cost?

Priced from RSMeans unit costs for your actual wall area, then set against what US households really told the Census they paid. The survey number is lower than a whole-house re-side costs, and the reason why is the most useful thing on this page.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

Siding material

RSMeans unit costs, in 2025 dollars, for a square foot of wall: the siding, the labor to fit it, and the contractor's overhead and profit.

These come from DOE and NREL's measures database. They are what the siding WORK costs, so they do not include tearing the old siding off, the housewrap behind it, the trim or the permit. Those are the line below.

Of that, the share which is material (%)

Set by the material above. Vinyl is about half material and half labor. Cedar is 82% material, because the wood is expensive and hanging it is not. This only splits the bar chart, it does not change the total.

How big is your house (floor area)

Used for the reality check: the Census median for households of that size who actually hired a contractor. It is a banded statistic, so we show it flat rather than pretending to know where inside the band you sit.

Your actual floor area (sq ft)

This is what actually drives the estimate, through the wall area. Set by the band above, and worth correcting to your real number.

How many stories

Two is not our guess: it is the median for the households in this survey who hired a siding contractor, and the weighted mean is 1.94.

Stories matter more than people expect. A two-story house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-story house of the same floor area, because it sits on half the footprint but goes up twice as far.

Windows and doors, as a share of the wall (%)

Our assumption. It sets how much wall actually gets covered, so unlike the others it does move the estimate: fewer openings means more siding.

Tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit (dollars per sq ft)

WE SAID THIS HAD NO SOURCE.

WE WERE WRONG. DOE's measures database carries a removal-labor column pricing siding tear-off at $1.52 a square foot in 2025 dollars, and we never opened it. That is for REMOVAL ALONE, while our $0.70 is meant to cover removal, housewrap, trim and permit together, so if DOE is right our default understates your job by more than half: a whole-house vinyl re-side would come to about $12,585 rather than $9,916. We hesitate over it because it is the identical $1.40 for vinyl, wood, brick veneer and stucco, and stripping vinyl is not stripping brick, so it reads like a placeholder rather than a measurement. We do not know which is right. Type 0.70 for our calibration, or 2.00 for DOE's removal figure plus a wrap-and-trim margin, and compare. Raise it further if there is rot, or two layers to come off.

A quote you have been given (dollars, optional)

Leave at zero to skip. Enter a quote and we will show what it works out to per square foot of your wall, so you can set it against the unit costs above.

Estimated cost

$9,752

Typical range $8,754 – $11,830

The siding itself$3,991
Fitting it: labor, overhead and profit$4,324
Tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit$1,437
Total$9,752

See next steps →

The "average siding cost" you have read is not a whole-house re-side, and that is why it always feels low. Price a whole-house job properly and you get about $9,915 for a typical 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft house: vinyl is $4.05 per square foot of wall installed, that house has around 2,053 sq ft of wall, and stripping the old siding and wrapping the sheathing adds roughly $0.70 a foot. Now ask the Census what households in exactly that size of house actually paid a contractor, and the median is $8,155, with a quarter of them paying under $3,806.

The median is lower than a whole-house re-side costs, and that is not an error. The survey records no scope: "added or replaced siding" covers patching one wall, doing a single elevation, and re-siding an entire house, all in the same row. A quarter of those jobs came in under $3,806, which does not buy enough vinyl to wrap a house. So a genuine whole-house re-side sits nearer the 60th percentile of that distribution than the middle of it, and any page handing you the median as "the cost to side a house" is quietly comparing your job against a pile of patch repairs. What this buys you is the ability to argue with a quote. A siding firm bills $113.97 per field hour and pays its construction workers an average of $30.34, a measured 3.76x markup, the fourth-highest of the thirteen trades we have measured, on a below-average wage. None of that is fraud: it is the truck, the staging, the insurance and the profit. But you now know which numbers to ask about.

§ 02 The return

All in, per sq ft of your wall$4.75

What households your size actually paid (Census)$8,155

Wall we reckon you have2,053 sq ft

Of the labor, what the crew is actually paid$1,153

The estimate is built from RSMeans unit costs applied to our estimate of your wall area. The survey figure beside it is what US households of that size told the Census they actually paid, in 2025 dollars, shown flat because it is a banded statistic. The survey records no scope, so its category spans one wall to a whole house, which is why its quartiles are so far apart.

Where the money goes

The siding itself$3,991

Fitting it: labor, overhead and profit$4,324

Tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit$1,437

By the numbers

RSMeans (via DOE and NREL): installed, with the contractor's overhead and profit, a square foot of wall costs $3.80 in engineered wood, $4.05 in vinyl, $4.22 in fiber cement, $8.53 in polypropylene shake, and $9.37 in cedar or redwood.
More
Vinyl and fiber cement are within 4% of each other, which surprises most people: the reason to pick one over the other is how long it lasts and how it looks, not the price of hanging it.
Census (American Housing Survey, 2023): half of US households who hired a contractor to re-side paid under $7,503, and it scales with the house: $4,676 under 1,500 sq ft, $7,126 at 1,500 to 1,999, $8,155 at 2,000 to 2,499, and $10,659 above 2,500.
The survey median is NOT a whole-house re-side, and this is the most useful thing here.
More
Apply the RSMeans vinyl rate to the wall a 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft house actually has, add tear-off and housewrap, and a whole-house job comes to about $9,915. The Census median for that size of house is $8,155. The median household paid LESS than a whole-house re-side costs, because the survey lumps patching one wall in with doing the entire house. A real whole-house job sits nearer the 60th percentile than the middle.
Census: half of all contractor siding jobs land between $3,289 and $16,310.
More
A fivefold range, and it is not noise, it is the missing scope. A quarter of jobs came in under $3,289, which does not buy enough vinyl to wrap a house. The mean is $12,668, some 69% above the median, dragged up by the big jobs. That mean is the 'average siding cost' most pages quote.
Economic Census (2022): a siding contractor bills $113.97 per field hour in 2025 dollars and pays its construction workers an average of $30.34.
More
A measured 3.76x markup, the fourth-highest of the thirteen trades we have measured (flooring is 4.45x, roofing 4.28x, residential remodellers 3.95x), on a field wage that is fourth-lowest.
Wall area grows with the SQUARE ROOT of floor area, not in step with it.
More
Double the floor area and you add only about 41% more wall. Stories catch people out in the other direction: a two-story house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-story house of the same floor area, because it stands on half the footprint and goes up twice as far. Two houses of 2,250 sq ft can differ by 600 sq ft of siding purely on shape.
1 more
- Census: households who did their own siding reported a median of just $1,239, against $7,503 for a contractor.
  More
  That is not a six-to-one saving on the same job, because it is not the same job. Do-it-yourself siding is overwhelmingly a patch or a single wall, which is exactly the work nobody calls a contractor for.

What is sourced, and what is ours. Two things are sourced and they are the whole page. The cost of the work is RSMeans unit costs, taken from DOE and NREL's measures database: what it costs to hang a square foot of vinyl, fiber cement, engineered wood or cedar, including the contractor's overhead and profit, restated in 2025 dollars.

The cost households actually paid is the Census American Housing Survey, cut by the floor area of the home. The billed rate behind it all is measured too: the Economic Census publishes what siding firms take in and the field hours they work. And a correction we owe you. This page originally led with the claim that the two sources agreed to within half a percent, which would have been a remarkable thing. It was not true. Our own extraction of the survey required a completion year, which silently dropped every job still underway, and Census counts those. Fixing it moved the median for this size of house from $9,866 to $8,155 and the agreement evaporated. What replaced it is a better page than the wrong one was: the two numbers do not agree, they are not measuring the same thing, and the gap between them tells you something no average ever could. Ours is the geometry, and one allowance. We turn your floor area into wall area by treating the footprint as square, putting 9 ft walls on it and removing 15% for openings. That is deliberately conservative: a real house is a rectangle, and a rectangle has more perimeter than a square of the same area, so if anything we understate your wall. And the $0.70 per square foot for tear-off, housewrap, trim and the permit is our calibration: it is the number that reconciles the unit costs with what households reported paying. We used to call it "the only number on this page with no source behind it". That was false. DOE's database has a removal-labor column pricing siding tear-off at $1.52 a square foot, and we never opened it. If that is right, our $0.70 (which is supposed to cover removal AND wrap AND trim AND permit) understates your job by more than half. We hesitate only because it is the identical figure for vinyl, wood, brick veneer and stucco, and stripping vinyl is not stripping brick, so it reads like a placeholder. We do not know which is right, so the box holds both and you can see the difference for yourself. Something we got wrong, and fixed. The first version of this page refused to publish any price per material, and made a virtue of it: we had checked one sheet of the DOE database, found a scrape of retail listings whose median entry covers 11 to 17 square feet (accent panels and sample boards), derived an absurd $7.19/sqft for vinyl, and concluded that no free source could price siding. A sheet in the same file, called "Siding", had the number all along. Our own rules say that "no free source exists" is a claim which has to be verified like any other, and that when your derivation disagrees with the source, it is your derivation that is broken. We failed both, on the page whose selling point was that we do not. The refusal is gone and the numbers are here.

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 National PUF (JOBTYPE 17, what households actually paid)
www2.census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey (programme and documentation)
census.gov
DOE / NREL, National Residential Efficiency Measures Database (the RSMeans siding unit costs)
data.openei.org
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the microdata the billed rate is derived from, NAICS 238170)
www2.census.gov
BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

A NAICS CODE IS A BUCKET, NOT A JOB, AND THE RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE BUCKET'S.

NAICS 238170 is titled 'Siding contractors', and only 57.5% of that class's receipts are siding contractor, including fascia and soffit. The largest single slice, 57.5%, is siding contractor, including fascia and soffit. So the billed rate here is the CLASS's rate, measured from real firms doing real work, and it is the measured figure we have for this job. It is not a rate for specialists in this job specifically, and we have four times called a class rate something it was not. We would rather show you the composition than let you assume it away.

THE BILLED RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE CLASS'S, AND A QUARTER OF THAT CLASS IS NOT SIDING.

NAICS 238170 is titled 'Siding contractors', but its own index also files gutter and downspout contractors into it, and the Economic Census measures the consequence: gutter work is 24.8% of that class's receipts. So $113.97 a field hour is the rate for a class whose hours are about a quarter gutter hours, not a pure siding rate. We know this because we built the gutter page on exactly that finding, and then never came back and said it here. It does not move the number much (gutter and siding are done by the same crews with the same trucks), but you should know what the denominator is.

The estimate is built from RSMeans unit costs for siding, taken from DOE and NREL's residential efficiency measures database and restated in 2025 dollars with the BEA price index for residential improvements.

Each rate is the median line item for that material, and it includes the contractor's overhead and profit. It is the cost of the siding WORK: the material, and the labor to hang it.

Accessory line items are excluded from those medians on purpose.

The source mixes siding with things that are not siding: a color add-on at $0.23 a square foot, fanfold insulation underlayment at $0.95, soffit. Leaving them in drags the median down and prices something you are not buying.

Medians do not add. The median all-in rate for vinyl ($4.05) is not the median material ($1.88) plus the median labor ($2.00), which come to $3.88. We take the all-in median as the truth and split it for the chart using the ratio of the component medians. The split is indicative; the total is the sourced figure.

The $0.70 per square foot for tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit is OUR CALIBRATION: the number that reconciles the RSMeans unit costs with what households told the Census they paid.

We previously called it 'the only number on this page with no source behind it'. That was FALSE, and it was the fourth negative-existence claim we have got wrong. DOE's measures database has a removal-labor column pricing siding tear-off at $1.40 a square foot in 2023 dollars, $1.52 in 2025, and we never opened it.

We publish that figure and we hesitate over it, and you deserve both halves of that.

It is the SAME $1.40 for vinyl, wood, fiber cement, aluminum, brick veneer and stucco. Stripping vinyl and stripping brick veneer are not the same job, and the database's own analysis tab records that no regression was run for these classes, so one constant across all six reads like a placeholder rather than a measurement. But it prices REMOVAL ALONE at more than double what our $0.70 allows for removal, housewrap, trim and permit combined. If DOE is right, a whole-house vinyl re-side on 2,053 sq ft of wall costs about $12,585 rather than $9,916. We do not know which is right. Type 0.70 into the box for our calibration, or 2.00 for DOE's removal figure plus a wrap-and-trim margin, and see both answers.

Wall area is OUR MODEL. We treat the footprint as square, so the perimeter is four times the square root of (floor area divided by stories), give each story a 9 ft wall, and take 15% out for windows and doors. Wall area therefore grows with the square root of floor area and of stories. The square-footprint assumption is conservative in your favor: a real house is a rectangle, and a 2:1 rectangle has about 6% more perimeter than a square of the same area, so we are likely to understate your wall slightly.

Two stories is the default because it is the median for households in this survey who hired a siding contractor, with a weighted mean of 1.94. It is not our guess.

The Census figure beside the estimate is a BANDED statistic and we show it flat.

We do not scale it by your exact floor area. The survey has no such precision, and an earlier version of this page that did scale it produced a boundary where a 2,501 sq ft house came out $904 cheaper than a 2,499 sq ft one. The band median is what the survey knows; anything finer would be us inventing it.

The survey records ONE COST PER JOB AND NO SCOPE.

Re-siding a single wall and re-siding an entire house are both 'added or replaced siding'. That is why its quartiles run from $3,289 to $16,310, and why a quarter of jobs come in under $3,289, which is not enough vinyl to wrap a house. Treat the median as the middle of a very wide distribution, not as a quote.

The three largest AHS size bands are pooled into '2,500+'.

Taken separately they run backwards: 2,500-2,999 ($15,223) lands above 3,000-3,999 ($10,659). Those cells hold about 50 households each with relative standard errors of 22% and 27%, so the gap is about 1.05 combined standard errors, which is to say nothing at all. Pooling lifts the cell to 126 households and an RSE of 5.7%. We pooled because the raw bands cannot support the distinction, not to tidy the chart.

The 'under 1,500 sq ft' band is the least precise figure here, with a relative standard error of 37.6%.

The median for that band is $4,676 with a standard error of $1,760, which is a very wide interval: wide enough that it comfortably contains the cost of re-siding a whole house of that size. We used to print 40.8% here. That is a real figure from the same survey, but it belongs to a different job type in a different size band, so it was simply the wrong number in the wrong sentence. We also used to say the low median proved those jobs were mostly partial rather than whole-house re-sides. It proves nothing of the sort: the interval is too wide to support it, a small single-storey house in this band can be re-sided completely for less than that median anyway, and the survey cannot tell a partial job from a whole one. So we do not know what those jobs were, and we have stopped saying we do.

There is NO regional adjustment, deliberately.

The survey's regional medians (Northeast $11,154, Midwest $9,915, South $5,591, West $6,321) are real, but they invert the pattern we measure in every other trade, where the West is dearest. We think they reflect which kind of siding job is common in each region rather than what a contractor charges per hour. Since we cannot demonstrate that, we will not multiply your estimate by it.

The billed rate of $113.97 per field hour and the $30.34 wage are both in 2025 dollars, and both derive from the 2022 Economic Census: take the value of construction work NAICS 238170 firms do, strip out what they spend on materials and subcontractors (you are buying those separately here), and divide by their construction worker hours.

It is a trade-wide average, not a quote for your job.

Frequently asked questions

How much does vinyl siding cost per square foot installed?

$4.05 per square foot of wall, in 2025 dollars, including the contractor's overhead and profit. That is the median RSMeans line item for vinyl siding, from DOE and NREL's measures database, and it covers the siding and the labor to hang it. It does not cover tearing the old siding off, the housewrap behind it, the trim or the permit, which we reckon adds roughly $0.70 a square foot. On a typical 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft house with about 2,053 sq ft of wall, that comes to about $9,915 all in for the whole house. Worth knowing: the Census median for that size of house is $8,155, which is LOWER, because the survey counts patching one wall as a siding job too. A whole-house re-side is an above-median job.

How much does it cost to side a house?

Half of US households who hired a contractor paid under $7,503, according to the Census, and it scales with the house: $4,676 under 1,500 sq ft, up to $10,659 above 2,500. But read that carefully, because it is not the cost of re-siding a house. Half of all jobs land between $3,289 and $16,310, and the survey does not distinguish patching one wall from doing the whole thing: a quarter of jobs came in under $3,289, which does not buy enough vinyl to wrap a house. For a figure for YOUR house, use the calculator, which prices your actual wall area at RSMeans unit costs instead of handing you a national average that is mostly small jobs.

Is fiber cement more expensive than vinyl?

Barely, and much less than people assume. Fiber cement is $4.22 per square foot installed against vinyl's $4.05, a difference of about 4%. What differs is the mix: fiber cement is cheaper as a material ($1.78 against $1.88) and dearer to fit ($2.44 against $2.00), because it is heavy, it has to be cut with the right blade, and the cutting dust is a silica hazard. So the reason to choose between them is longevity and how they look, not the price of the job. The genuinely expensive choices are cedar and redwood at $9.37, and polypropylene shake at $8.53, both more than double vinyl.

Why is the labor so expensive?

Because you are not paying the installer's wage, you are paying the company's rate. The 2022 Economic Census lets you measure both: a siding firm bills $113.97 per field hour in 2025 dollars and pays its construction workers an average of $30.34. That is a 3.76x markup, the fourth-highest of the thirteen trades we have measured, and it sits on a below-average field wage. The gap is the truck, the staging, the liability insurance, the workers' compensation, the hours spent driving rather than billing, the office and the profit. Worth knowing before you decide a quote is greedy.

Does a bigger house cost proportionally more to side?

No, and this is the most useful thing on the page. Siding covers walls, not floors, and wall area grows with the square root of floor area: double the floor area and you add only about 41% more wall. Stories work the other way and catch people out. A two-story house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-story house of the same floor area, because it sits on half the footprint and goes up twice as far. Two houses of the same 2,250 sq ft can differ by 600 sq ft of siding purely on shape, which is why we ask for your stories rather than guessing.

How do I check a quote I have been given?

Put it in the box and we will show you what it works out to per square foot of your wall. Then compare it against the unit costs: about $4.80 a square foot all in for vinyl, including tear-off and wrap. A quote at $9 a square foot is not automatically wrong, because scope is everything in this job and there may be rot, two layers of old siding, or a lot of awkward trim. But it is a reason to ask exactly what is being replaced, what is going on behind the cladding, and whether the trim and the soffit are in the price.

Should I side the house myself?

The survey shows a do-it-yourself median of $1,239 against $7,503 for a contractor, but that is not a six-to-one saving on the same job, because it is not the same job. Do-it-yourself siding is overwhelmingly a patch or a single wall, which is exactly the work nobody calls a contractor for. A full re-side means working at height and getting the water management right behind the cladding. Getting the flashing and the housewrap wrong does not show up as a bad-looking wall, it shows up as rot you cannot see for ten years.

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