Costs
Construction cost per square foot
Installed cost per square foot for 15 reference jobs — every figure calculated by the same engine as that trade's own calculator, on a job printed beside it.
Written and edited by Pablo Ruiz Quintero
Last reviewed 2026-09-16 · Nothing you type leaves your browser
Every figure below is calculated, not quoted
Each row runs the same engine that powers that trade’s calculator, on the reference job named beside it. Change the state and the labour half moves; the material half barely does, because a box of tile costs much the same everywhere.
Used only to pick a regional labour rate. It stays in your browser.
Installed cost per square foot
| Trade | Material | Labour | Per ft² | The job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pressure treated deck railing and stairs are in the figure and they are a large share of a small deck | $3,677 | $4,817 | $44.24 | 16 × 12 ft deck 3 ft up, treated 5/4 decking, railing and one flight of stairs 192 ft² · $8,494 all in |
| Tile, shower walls the pan, the valve and the glass | $628 | $1,540 | $28.16 | Three walls 7 ft high, subway tile offset, backer board and waterproofing membrane 77 ft² · $2,168 all in |
| Paver patio the excavation is in the labour and the spoil still has to go somewhere | $1,920 | $4,800 | $21.00 | 20 × 16 ft patio, 4 × 8 in pavers in running bond, 4 in compacted base, edge restraint 320 ft² · $6,720 all in |
| Solid hardwood flooring | $2,836 | $2,145 | $16.60 | The same 20 × 15 ft room in solid hardwood, nailed, finished, trim included 300 ft² · $4,981 all in |
| Tile, floor substrate preparation and removing what is there | $410 | $720 | $14.13 | 10 × 8 ft bathroom floor, 12 × 24 in porcelain, straight lay, 1/8 in joints 80 ft² · $1,130 all in |
| Artificial turf the base underneath is a patio, and it is most of the work | $12,330 | $15,855 | $13.42 | The same 2,100 ft², excavated, 4 in compacted base, turf, infill and fixings 2,100 ft² · $28,185 all in |
| Carpet roll-width waste is included and it is larger than people expect | $1,526 | $699 | $7.42 | The same 20 × 15 ft room, mid-grade carpet on standard pad, off a 12 ft roll 300 ft² · $2,225 all in |
| Vinyl siding | $9,002 | $9,499 | $7.30 | Two-storey house, four walls with gables, vinyl over housewrap, old vinyl stripped 2,533 ft² · $18,500 all in |
| Laminate flooring | $974 | $1,155 | $7.10 | 20 × 15 ft open room, mid-grade laminate, underlay, trim, old carpet lifted 300 ft² · $2,129 all in |
| Asphalt driveway includes roughly $900 of mobilisation, which is why small drives price so badly | $2,007 | $2,324 | $6.01 | 60 × 12 ft driveway, 2 in compacted hot mix over 6 in of compacted base, on bare ground 720 ft² · $4,331 all in |
| Asphalt shingle roof per square foot of ROOF, which is larger than the footprint — 6:12 adds about 12% | $3,618 | $5,369 | $4.83 | 50 × 30 ft gable roof at 6:12, architectural shingles, one layer torn off 1,860 ft² · $8,987 all in |
| Interior painting per square foot of WALL, which is why it looks so much cheaper than everything else here | $242 | $1,148 | $3.81 | The same 14 × 12 ft room, two coats of mid-grade paint over painted walls, ceiling and trim 365 ft² · $1,390 all in |
| Sod ground preparation is most of the labour and all of whether it takes | $1,782 | $3,885 | $2.70 | 2,100 ft² lawn in tall fescue, old grass stripped, 2 in of topsoil, laid 2,100 ft² · $5,667 all in |
| Drywall, hung and finished priced per square foot of BOARD, not of floor — and framing is not included | $431 | $933 | $2.56 | 14 × 12 ft room with 8 ft ceilings, walls and ceiling, finished to Level 4 533 ft² · $1,364 all in |
| Mulch, spread a top-up, not a fresh 3 in — which is the honest annual job | $703 | $711 | $0.59 | 2,400 ft² of beds topped up 2 in with bulk hardwood, delivered and barrowed 2,400 ft² · $1,414 all in |
Every row is a complete job at a stated size, not a unit rate. Read the right-hand column before comparing anything to a quote: drywall is priced per square foot of board, painting per square foot of wall, roofing per square foot of roof rather than of floor — and those are three different denominators that look identical in a table.
The same trade gets cheaper per foot as the job gets bigger
Which is why a price per square foot with no size attached to it is not a price.
| Trade | Job 1 | Job 2 | Job 3 | The fixed cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asphalt driveway 1.7× across the range | $8.51 240 ft² | $6.01 720 ft² | $5.14 2,400 ft² | Mobilising a paver, a roller and a crew — the same on any size of job. |
| Mulch, delivered and spread 1.1× across the range | $0.65 240 ft² | $0.59 1,200 ft² | $0.59 2,400 ft² | A bulk delivery charge — but below about four yards the tool switches to bags and dodges it, which is why this row is flatter than asphalt. |
| Tile, floor 1.0× across the range | $14.48 40 ft² | $14.13 80 ft² | $14.01 300 ft² | Almost none — which is why this row is nearly flat, and why the comparison matters. |
On this page — 10 sections
- 01Reading the table
- 02Per square foot of what?
- 03Why the same trade costs twice as much on a small job
- 04What the figure includes, and what it never does
- 05The material-to-labour split is the useful number
- 06Whole-house cost per square foot, honestly
- 07What moves with where you live, and what does not
- 08Five ways this number gets misused
- 09How these figures are produced
- 10The words in a cost comparison
Reading the table
The short version
- Every figure here is calculated, not surveyed. Each row runs the same engine as that trade’s calculator, so the table cannot drift from the tools.
- A price per square foot with no job attached is not a price. Each row names its dimensions, material and scope.
- The denominator differs by trade. Drywall is per foot of board, painting per foot of wall, roofing per foot of roof — not of floor.
- Small jobs cost far more per foot. Asphalt moves 1.7× across a normal range of sizes; tile barely moves at all.
Most pages answering “cost per square foot” publish a range collected from somewhere. This one does something different, and the difference is the point: it runs the calculators.
Each row is a complete job — stated dimensions, stated material, stated scope — put through the same engine that powers that trade’s own calculator on this site. Two things follow. The table can never contradict the tools, because it is the tools. And the scope is auditable: you can read exactly what was included, then click through and change it to your own job.
It also means the figures are opinionated. They assume the preparation is done properly, the base is the right depth, the number of coats is the right number. Quotes that come in well underneath are usually saving in exactly those places.
Per square foot of what?
The commonest mistake with these numbers is not the number. It is comparing two of them that are divided by different things.
A 14 × 12 ft room has 168 square feet of floor and about 365 square feet of wall. Paint it and the cost per square foot looks trivially small; tile the floor and it looks large. The trades cost far more similar amounts than those two numbers suggest — the denominators are simply different, by a factor of three.
Roofing is the other one that catches people. A roof is bigger than the building under it: at a 6:12 pitch, about twelve per cent bigger, and steeper roofs considerably more. A price per square foot of roof and a price per square foot of house are not the same number, and both get published as “per square foot”.
| What people compare | What it actually is | |
|---|---|---|
| Drywall | Per square foot of room | Per square foot of board — walls and ceiling, openings deducted |
| Painting | Per square foot of floor | Per square foot of wall, which is two to three times more |
| Roofing | Per square foot of house | Per square foot of roof, which grows with pitch |
| Siding | Per square foot of wall | Net of windows and doors, plus gables you did not measure |
| Flooring | Per square foot of floor | Per square foot of floor — one of the few that is what it looks like |
Why the same trade costs twice as much on a small job
Some costs scale with the work and some do not. Material scales. Labour mostly scales. Getting a paver, a roller and a crew to your house does not — it costs the same for a twenty-foot driveway as for a hundred-foot one.
That fixed component is why a price per square foot without a size attached is close to meaningless, and the table above shows the effect directly. Asphalt runs from $8.51 a square foot on a small drive down to $5.14 on a large one — the same job in every other respect, and nothing about the asphalt has changed.
Tile is the control. It has almost no fixed cost — the tiler arrives with a bag of tools — so it stays essentially flat from a small bathroom to a large room. When a trade’s price per square foot is quoted without a size, the useful question is how much of it is fixed.
Mulch is the interesting middle case, and it barely moves at 1.1× — not because there is no fixed cost but because there is a way round it. Bulk mulch carries a delivery charge that does not scale, so below about four cubic yards the calculator switches to bags, which have no delivery at all. The fixed cost is still there; it is simply cheaper to avoid it than to pay it, and that is a decision most trades do not offer you.
1.7×
Asphalt, small against large
mobilisation does not scale
1.1×
Mulch, small against large
bags dodge the delivery charge
1.0×
Tile, small against large
almost no fixed cost
$900
To get a paver to your house
before any asphalt is laid
What the figure includes, and what it never does
Scope moves these numbers more than anything except size. Each row in the table names its own exclusions, and they are not footnotes — removal of the existing surface, ground preparation and hauling waste away are each capable of moving a price by half.
The artificial turf row is the clearest case. At $13.42 a square foot it looks like an expensive covering, and it is not a covering at all: most of that figure is excavating the ground and building a compacted stone base, which is a patio with grass on it. Price the turf alone and the number is a third of what the job costs.
Before comparing any two figures
- Is it material only, or installed?
- Is removal of what is there included, and disposal of it?
- Is the ground preparation in, or assumed done?
- What is the denominator — floor, wall, board, roof?
- What size of job produced the number?
- Are permits, design and structural work in it? On this page they never are.
- Is the material grade the one you would actually choose?
Nothing on this page includes permits, design fees, structural work, or anything behind the surface. These are finishing trades doing their own work on ground that is ready for them. The moment a job touches structure or services, a cost per square foot stops being a useful unit at all.
The material-to-labour split is the useful number
The total tells you what a job costs. The split tells you what to do about it.
Across the table, the labour share runs from about a fifth on material-heavy jobs to about four fifths on labour-heavy ones. That is the honest measure of what doing it yourself is worth — and, separately, it is the half that a regional adjustment applies to.
A high labour share is not automatically an invitation. Sometimes it is high because the work is slow and unskilled — spreading mulch, stripping old carpet — and that is genuinely a weekend’s saving. Sometimes it is high because the work is skilled and the failure mode is expensive: waterproofing a shower, bolting a deck ledger to a house, laying a base that has to stay flat for twenty years.
| Worth doing yourself | Worth paying for | |
|---|---|---|
| Why | Labour-heavy, slow, forgiving | Labour-heavy because it is skilled |
| Examples | Painting, mulch, laminate, stripping carpet | Shower waterproofing, deck ledger, asphalt, roof |
| Cost of a mistake | Cosmetic, and fixable | Water in the structure, or a rebuild |
| Equipment | Hand tools and time | Machines that cost more to hire than the saving |
| What you are buying | Nothing — it is your weekend | Someone who has done it two hundred times |
If the job crosses several trades, describing it in plain English is faster than working through six calculators. The takeoff reader turns a description into quantities, and the engines price them.
Describe the whole job insteadWhole-house cost per square foot, honestly
A meaningful share of the searches that reach a page like this one are about building a house rather than tiling a bathroom, and it would be easy to publish a number. It would also be close to meaningless, and it is worth saying why rather than pretending.
Published figures for a new single-family home in the United States span something like $150 to $500 per finished square foot. That spread is not regional noise. Two houses of identical size, on the same street, built the same year, can genuinely differ by a factor of three — because the number is dominated by things the area does not describe.
whole-house $/ft² = (hard costs + soft costs) ÷ finished square feet
- hard costs
- the building — and the finish level moves this by more than double
- soft costs
- design, permits, surveys, financing, insurance — often a fifth of the total
- finished square feet
- excluding garage, porches and unfinished basement, usually
Worked through — Which is why the figure is unstable: change the allowances for kitchen, flooring and fittings and the hard costs move by half, with no change to a single dimension. The denominator moves too, because whether a finished basement counts is a convention rather than a fact.
Three things dominate, and none of them is square footage. Finish level — the difference between builder-grade and custom everything is the single largest variable in residential construction. Site — a flat serviced lot and a sloping one with no mains are different projects before anything is built. And shape — a simple rectangle with a gable roof costs far less per foot than the same area with six corners and three roof planes, which is also why the siding and roofing calculators here ask about complexity.
A cost per square foot works for a trade doing one defined thing to a defined area. It is the wrong unit for a building, and using it as a budget is how projects end up forty per cent over.
What moves with where you live, and what does not
The table adjusts for your state, and it adjusts one half of the figure. That is a deliberate position and it is worth explaining, because most cost sites apply a single regional multiplier to everything.
A bag of thinset costs close to the same in Mississippi and in New Jersey. What differs is the hour: wages, overheads and what the local market will bear. Applying one “area factor” to a whole job overstates the regional effect on material-heavy trades and understates it on labour-heavy ones, and that error is a large part of why regional cost estimates miss.
So the labour half moves with the federal regional price parities, published state by state on the regional price index page. Material does not, with one exception: heavy things carry a freight allowance, because a ton of aggregate really does cost more the further it travels from the quarry.
0.85–1.20
The labour index range
across the fifty states
10–15%
Effect on a typical total
not double, as often claimed
~0%
Regional effect on a box of tile
before freight
Up to 90%
Freight sensitivity of aggregate
the exception that proves it
Five ways this number gets misused
01Comparing two figures with different denominators
Per square foot of wall, of floor, of board and of roof are four different numbers. A painter quoting per wall foot and one quoting per floor foot look like a threefold difference and may be the same price.
Instead — Establish what each figure is divided by before comparing anything, and convert one to the other.
02Using a large-job rate to budget a small job
Fixed costs do not scale. Mobilisation, delivery charges and plant minimums are the same on a tiny job, so the price per foot can double or worse.
Instead — Use a figure that came from a job of roughly your size, or add the fixed costs explicitly.
03Budgeting a house from a price per square foot
The figure is dominated by finish level, site and shape, none of which the area describes. The published range spans more than threefold.
Instead — Ask for a phased breakdown with the allowances written down, and treat the per-foot figure as a sanity check at most.
04Assuming the cheapest quote is the same job
On most of these trades the saving is in preparation, base depth, number of coats or grade of material — all invisible the day it finishes and all decisive five years later.
Instead — Compare the scope line by line. If one quote is much lower, find out what is not in it.
05Treating a per-foot figure as a quote
It is an average of a job that is not yours. Access, condition, shape and what is already there move real prices a long way from any table.
Instead — Use the figure to know whether a quote is plausible, then calculate your own job properly.
How these figures are produced
- 01Find the denominatorPer square foot of what — floor, wall, board, roof? Roofing and drywall are the two that catch people, because the area is larger than the room.
- 02Read the scopeRemoval, preparation, trim and hauling away are each big enough to move the figure by half, and each is in some quotes and out of others.
- 03Check the sizeFixed costs like mobilisation and delivery do not scale, so a small job costs far more per foot. Ask what size the figure came from.
- 04Split material from labourIt tells you what doing it yourself is worth, and it tells you which half a regional adjustment applies to.
- 05Apply your region to the labour onlyMaterials cost much the same nationally, with a freight allowance for the heavy ones. The hour is what changes between states.
- 06Then go and calculate your own jobEvery row here links to the calculator it came from. The reference job is a reference, not your house.
Each row calls the same function as the calculator it links to, with a reference job whose dimensions, material and scope are printed beside the figure. Nothing is typed in by hand and nothing is copied from a survey of prices, which is what makes it impossible for this page and the tools to disagree.
The material and labour data behind every engine is listed, with verification dates, on the sources page; the pricing doctrine — material and labour separately, only labour regionalised, freight handled per material — is set out on the methodology page.
Two limits worth stating. These are finishing trades on ground that is ready for them: nothing here includes permits, design, structural work or services. And the reference jobs are ordinary rather than favourable — mid-grade materials, normal room sizes, the preparation done properly — so a quote below one of these figures is a question rather than a bargain.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation runs in your browser.
The words in a cost comparison
Denominator and scope are the two that decide whether two numbers can be compared at all.
- Cost per square foot
- A total divided by an area. It is useful only when both are stated, because the same trade produces very different figures depending on the size of the job, what the denominator is, and what was included.
- Denominator
- The area being divided by, and the thing most comparisons get wrong. Drywall is per square foot of board, painting per square foot of wall, roofing per square foot of roof rather than of floor. Three different numbers that all read as “per square foot”.
- Scope
- What the figure includes. Removal of what is there, ground preparation, trim, hauling the waste away and mobilisation are each large enough to move a price by half, and each is routinely in one quote and out of another.
- Mobilisation
- Getting people and machines to the site at all. It is the same for a small job as for a large one, which is the main reason a price per square foot falls as the job grows.
- Labour index
- The regional multiplier applied to the hours in a job. It comes from federal regional price parities and it is the only thing this site adjusts by location — material costs much the same everywhere.
- Freight sensitivity
- How much a material's price moves with distance from where it is made or quarried. Aggregate and concrete are very sensitive; a box of tile or a bag of grout barely is.
- Material-to-labour split
- The share of a job that is stuff against the share that is people. It is the single most useful thing to know before deciding whether to do a job yourself, and it varies from about a fifth to about four fifths across the trades on this page.
- Reference job
- A fully specified job — dimensions, material, scope — used to produce a comparable figure. Without one, a cost per square foot is an average of jobs nobody did.
- Allowance
- A placeholder sum in a builder's quote for something not yet chosen, like flooring or fittings. Whole-house costs per square foot are mostly a statement about how generous the allowances were.
- Hard and soft costs
- Hard costs are the building. Soft costs are design, permits, surveys, financing and insurance — routinely a fifth of a new build, and routinely missing from a headline price per square foot.
- Finished square feet
- The area a whole-house price is normally divided by, excluding garages, porches and unfinished basements — which is why two houses of the same overall size can show very different figures.
- Unit rate
- A price per unit of work used inside an estimate, as distinct from a job total divided by an area. Trades work in unit rates; the per-square-foot figures people search for are derived numbers.
Common questions
- How much does it cost to install tile per square foot?
- About $14.13 per square foot installed for a straightforward floor — that is a 80 ft² bathroom in 12 × 24 in porcelain laid straight, with $410 of material and $720 of labour. A shower runs roughly double, because the waterproofing, the cuts around the valve and three planes meeting in corners take the time. Both figures on this page are calculated by the tile calculator rather than quoted from a survey.
- Why do cost per square foot figures vary so much between sources?
- Because three different things are being divided, and nobody says which. The denominator varies — floor area, wall area, board area, roof area. The scope varies — removal, preparation and hauling away are in some figures and not others. And the size varies, which matters because fixed costs like mobilisation do not scale. Two honest sources can differ by a factor of two without either being wrong.
- Is a price per square foot useful at all?
- As a sanity check, yes. As a basis for a decision, only with the job attached to it. The figures here each name the job they came from for exactly that reason — a number without one is an average of jobs nobody did.
- Why is a small job so much more expensive per square foot?
- Fixed costs. Getting a paver and a roller to a house costs the same whether the driveway is 240 or 2,400 square feet, so the asphalt figure moves from $8.51 to $5.14 across that range. Tile, which has almost no fixed cost, barely moves at all — $14.48 against $14.01. The difference between those two rows is the whole lesson.
- How much does it cost to build a house per square foot?
- The honest answer is that the question does not have one. Published figures for a new single-family home span roughly $150 to $500 per finished square foot, and the spread is not regional noise — it is the finish level, the site, and how generous the allowances were. Two houses of identical size on the same street can differ by a factor of three. Costs per square foot work for a trade doing one thing to a defined area; they fall apart at the scale of a whole building.
- Does the figure include labour?
- Every figure in the table is installed — material plus labour — and the two are shown separately so you can see what doing it yourself saves. The split runs from about a fifth labour on material-heavy jobs to about four fifths on labour-heavy ones, which is a far more useful number than the total.
- How much does labour vary by state?
- Enough to matter and less than people expect: the regional index used here spans roughly 0.85 to 1.20 around the national average. Applied to the labour half of a job, that moves a typical total by ten to fifteen per cent, not by double. Material barely moves at all except for heavy things where freight is a real share of the price.
- Why is painting so cheap per square foot compared to everything else?
- Because the denominator is wall area, and a room has a great deal more wall than floor. The reference room here comes to $3.81 per square foot of wall, which sounds trivial next to flooring — but the same room has 365 ft² of wall against 168 ft² of floor. Comparing the two numbers directly is comparing different things.
- What is not included in these figures?
- Permits, design, structural work, anything behind the surface, and access problems. Each row names its own exclusions in the table. The general rule is that these are finishing trades doing their own work on ground that is ready for them.
- How do these compare with contractor quotes?
- They should land in the same neighbourhood, and a quote that comes in far under one is worth reading closely rather than celebrating. On most of these trades the saving is in preparation, base depth or the number of coats — all invisible on the day the job finishes.
- Which of these jobs is most worth doing yourself?
- The ones where labour is the larger share and a mistake is cosmetic: painting, mulch, laminate flooring. The ones to think hard about are where labour is large because the work is genuinely skilled or where a mistake is structural — tiling a shower, a deck ledger, anything that carries water away from a building.
- How often are these numbers updated?
- They are not a snapshot; they are computed from the same material and labour data as the calculators, so they change whenever that data does. Every source has its own verification date on the sources page, and the oldest one is published on the methodology page as the real age of the site.
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About the author
Pablo Ruiz Quintero — Editor
Editor of MaterialsEstimator. Decides which documents count as a source, what every default value is, and where the line sits between what the reader parses and what the engines compute.
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