How much does window replacement cost?

• THE CENSUS PUBLISHES A PRICE PER WINDOW, AND WE HAD TOLD YOU IT DID NOT. Its products file gives the factory-gate value of a clad wood double-hung window: $682 leaving the plant (a clad casement is $710). No conversion, no modeling, no assumption: that is the number. Our model prices the frame at $812, which sits about 19% above factory gate, and that gap is the distributor and the installer's markup on the unit. It corroborates the figure we had modeled, and we would never have found it, because we had convinced ourselves the file did not exist.
• But note what it is NOT. It is a WOOD window, and it is not installed. Vinyl windows are the bulk of the US market, they are made under a different code, and there is no federal unit price for them. The gap between $682 at the factory and what you pay fitted is the whole business of this page.
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  We said vinyl's cells were 'suppressed'. That is the wrong word and it is a mistake we have now made on more than one page, so here is the precise version. The Census flags a missing cell D when it HAS the number and is withholding it, and X when the number was NEVER COLLECTED. Those mean opposite things. The plastics line that vinyl windows fall into is flagged X on its quantity: nobody ever counted the units, so there is nothing being withheld and nothing to appeal to. It is also a FUSED line, 'plastics doors, partitions, moldings, windows', so even its dollars do not isolate a window. Metal windows are the genuine suppression: 32 product lines and not one derivable price.
• AND A COLLISION WE ARE NOT GOING TO HIDE. The Census publishes a third wood-window price, $1,265.52 for a non-clad double-hung, and that is MORE than the $1,035 our model charges you for a wood window INSTALLED.
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  Both cannot be right. Either DOE's wood sample, which is only 12 products, is builder-grade clad units of the kind the Census prices at $682, or our wood rate is too low. We think it is the first, because DOE's median wood unit ($618) sits right on top of the Census's CLAD figure and nowhere near its non-clad one. But we do not know, and a page that only ever shows you the federal number when it agrees with the model is not showing you a federal number, it is decorating a model with one. If you are quoted well above $1,035 for a wood window, this is the reason to take the quote seriously rather than dismiss it.
• Census (American Housing Survey, 2023): half of all contractor-hired door-or-window jobs cost less than $4,957, and three quarters less than $10,873.
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  Households doing it themselves paid a median of $870. These are what people actually paid, not a contractor's average. Note the survey fuses doors and windows into one category and records no scope, so it cannot tell you how many windows that bought.
• DOE: the median vinyl replacement window runs about $497 for the unit plus about $308 of install labor, from product-level pricing NREL collected from retailers and RSMeans. That is what lets you price your own job above.
• ENERGY STAR: replacing single-pane clear windows across a whole 2,376 sq ft home saves $493 to $568 a year depending on climate zone. Replacing double-pane clear windows saves only $253 to $373. Against a five-figure job, that is a payback measured in decades.
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  • EPA: low-e storm windows fitted over existing single-pane glass capture much of the same benefit for a fraction of the cost. If your goal is genuinely the energy bill, price those first.

What is sourced here, and what is ours. The cost of your specific job is our model: we build it from DOE's product-level pricing plus DOE's own modeled install labor, and DOE states its database "is not intended to provide specific cost estimates for a specific project." But what Americans actually paid is not a model at all - the Census American Housing Survey asks households the cost of a completed job, and the figures above come straight from it. We previously said no free source published window costs.