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How much does siding cost?

Priced from RSMeans unit costs, then checked against what US households actually told the Census they paid. On a typical house the two land within 0.5% of each other, which is the closest thing to proof either number is right.

Two sources that have never met, half a percent apart. Price a typical job from RSMeans unit costs and you get $9,915: vinyl siding installed, overhead and profit included, is $4.13 per square foot of wall, a 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft house has about 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: $9,866. Nothing connects those two numbers. One is a professional estimating standard, the other is a federal survey of what people spent. They agree to within 0.5%, and that agreement is worth more than either figure on its own. What it buys you is the ability to argue with a quote. A siding firm bills $112.27 per field hour and pays the person on the ladder $29.88, a measured 3.76x markup, which is the fourth-highest of the thirteen trades we have measured and sits on a below-average wage. None of that is fraud, it is the truck, the staging, the insurance and the profit. But when a quote comes in at double this, you now know which of those two numbers to ask about.

§ 01 Your numbers

RSMeans unit costs, in 2025 dollars, for a square foot of wall: the siding, the labour 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.
Set by the material above. Vinyl is about half material and half labour. 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.
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.
This is what actually drives the estimate, through the wall area. Set by the band above, and worth correcting to your real number.
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. Storeys matter more than people expect. A two-storey house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-storey house of the same floor area, because it sits on half the footprint but goes up twice as far.
Our assumption. It sets how much wall actually gets covered, so unlike the others it does move the estimate: fewer openings means more siding.
Our assumption, and the one number on this page with no source behind it. The RSMeans rate prices hanging new siding, not stripping the old siding off, wrapping the sheathing, replacing the trim or pulling the permit. We default to $0.70 because that is what closes the gap between the unit costs and what households told the Census they actually paid. Raise it if there is rot, or two layers to come off.
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
$9,916

Typical range $8,899 – $12,036

  • The siding itself$4,070
  • Fitting it: labour, overhead and profit$4,409
  • Tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit$1,437
  • Total$9,916
See next steps →

§ 02 The return

All in, per sq ft of your wall$4.83
What households your size actually paid (Census)$9,866
Wall we reckon you have2,053 sq ft
Of the labour, what the crew is actually paid$1,165

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$4,070
Fitting it: labour, overhead and profit$4,409
Tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit$1,437

Recommended next steps

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A serious job, and you are inside the range where half of US households land. Three quotes, all on the same written scope, and ask each what they will do if they find rot once the old cladding is off, because at least one of them will.

By the numbers

  • RSMeans (via DOE and NREL): installed, with the contractor's overhead and profit, a square foot of wall costs $3.87 in engineered wood, $4.13 in vinyl, $4.30 in fiber cement, $8.69 in polypropylene shake, and $9.55 in cedar or redwood. 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 $7,674, and it scales with the house: $4,385 under 1,500 sq ft, $7,126 at 1,500 to 1,999, $9,866 at 2,000 to 2,499, and $10,906 above 2,500.
  • The two agree. Take the RSMeans vinyl rate, apply it to the wall a 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft house actually has, add tear-off and housewrap, and you get $9,915. The Census says households that size paid a median of $9,866. A professional estimating standard and a federal survey of household spending, 0.5% apart, with nothing in common but the truth they are both trying to measure.
  • Census: half of all contractor siding jobs land between $3,398 and $16,444. That is nearly a fivefold range, and it is not noise: the survey lumps re-siding one wall in with re-siding a whole house. The mean is $13,092, some 71% 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 $112.27 per field hour in 2025 dollars and pays the person on the ladder $29.88. 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. Double the floor area and you add only about 41% more wall. Storeys catch people out in the other direction: a two-storey house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-storey 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.
  • Census: households who did their own siding reported a median of just $1,239, against $7,674 for a contractor. 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. 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 an assumption with no source behind it. We are explicit about that because it is the number doing the reconciling. 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.

Sources: US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 National PUF (JOBTYPE 17, what households actually paid) · US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey (programme and documentation) · DOE / NREL, National Residential Efficiency Measures Database (the RSMeans siding unit costs) · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the microdata the billed rate is derived from, NAICS 238170) · BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)

How this estimate is calculated

  • 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 labour to hang it.
  • Accessory line items are excluded from those medians on purpose. The source mixes siding with things that are not siding: a colour 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 ($4.13) is not the median material ($1.92) plus the median labour ($2.04), which come to $3.96. 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 tear-off, housewrap, trim and permit allowance of $0.70 per square foot is OUR ASSUMPTION and the only number on this page with no source behind it. We chose it because it is what reconciles the RSMeans unit costs with what households actually told the Census they paid. That makes it a calibrated assumption rather than a measured quantity, and you should raise it if there is rot to repair or two layers of old siding to strip.
  • 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 storeys), give each storey 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 storeys. The square-footprint assumption is conservative in your favour: 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 storeys 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 $3,398 to $16,444. 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 40.8%. It is also the band where the survey median falls BELOW what it would cost to re-side the whole house, which tells you most of those jobs were partial rather than whole-house re-sides.
  • There is NO regional adjustment, deliberately. The survey's regional medians (Northeast $12,394, Midwest $11,961, South $5,591, West $6,578) 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 $112.27 per field hour and the $29.88 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?
$4.13 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 labour 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. As a check: the Census says households in exactly that size of house actually paid a median of $9,866.
How much does it cost to side a house?
Half of US households who hired a contractor paid under $7,674, according to the Census, and it scales with the house: $4,385 under 1,500 sq ft, up to $10,906 above 2,500. The spread is enormous, with half of all jobs between $3,398 and $16,444, because the survey does not distinguish re-siding one wall from re-siding a whole house. If you want a figure for YOUR house, use the calculator, which prices your actual wall area at RSMeans unit costs rather than handing you a national average.
Is fiber cement more expensive than vinyl?
Barely, and much less than people assume. Fiber cement is $4.30 per square foot installed against vinyl's $4.13, a difference of about 4%. What differs is the mix: fiber cement is cheaper as a material ($1.81 against $1.92) and dearer to fit ($2.49 against $2.04), 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 $9.55, and polypropylene shake at $8.69, both more than double vinyl.
Why is the labour 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 $112.27 per field hour in 2025 dollars and pays the person on the ladder $29.88. 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. Storeys work the other way and catch people out. A two-storey house has about 41% MORE wall than a single-storey 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 storeys 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 $7,674 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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