Roofing Contractor Pricing Calculator for BC

Most roofers price by the square. The trouble is that a square on a 4/12 bungalow and a square on a cut-up 10/12 two-storey are not the same job. A price per square only works if it comes from what your crew, your truck and your season actually cost, then gets adjusted for pitch, layers and detail work. Here's how to build that number from the ground up, and check it against the sales your business needs each month.

Why roofing prices are easy to get wrong

Roofing is short-season, weather-dependent and heavy on materials. Rain days, snow and smoke days take whole weeks out of the calendar, but your truck payment and your insurance don't stop. Materials are bought before you get paid, often for several jobs at once. Tear-off, bins and dump fees are easy to forget on a quote. And because WorkSafeBC rates for roofing are among the higher ones in construction, a crew hour costs a roofer more than the same wage costs most other trades.

Step 1: Add up your monthly overhead

For a small roofing company, the usual costs are:

• Truck and dump trailer: payments, fuel, repairs and ICBC

• Tools and equipment: nail guns, compressors, ladders and ladder hoists, tarps, and their repairs and replacement

• Fall protection: harnesses, lanyards, roof anchors and guardrail systems, plus the time to set them up. WorkSafeBC requires fall protection where a worker could fall 3 m (10 ft) or more, and sometimes lower.

• Liability insurance and WorkSafeBC coverage. Steep slope roofing (classification unit 721051) has a 2026 base rate of $4.32 per $100 of assessable payroll, compared with an average of $1.55 across all BC industries. Check your own unit with WorkSafeBC.

• A business licence for each municipality you work in (check with each city), and storage for materials and the trailer

• Phone, quoting, office and bookkeeping

Step 2: Count your crew's full cost, not just their wage

A roofer at $34 an hour costs you more than $34. Add vacation pay, the employer share of CPP and EI, and WorkSafeBC at the roofing rate. In the example below that adds about 17% on top of wages (an estimate). Paid hours lost to rain-outs, travel and safety setup are real costs too.

Step 3: Set the pay you actually need, for the whole year

Decide what you need to earn in a year before personal tax. Roofing income arrives in the dry months but your bills arrive all year, so the pay you set has to carry you through winter. If you're a sole proprietor, your income tax and both halves of CPP come out of that number.

Step 4: Count your real billable hours

A roofing crew might be paid for about 1,600 hours a year once the season, weather and holidays are taken out, and bill for less than that. Loading, driving, safety setup, cleanup and rain-outs all eat into it. The owner loses even more hours to quoting, ordering materials and chasing payments.

Step 5: Work out the rate, then turn it into a price per square

Crew rate = (yearly overhead + your pay + crew cost) ÷ total billable crew hours. Add a profit margin on top. Then work out how many crew hours a square really takes on a normal job, tear-off included, and multiply. That's your labour per square. Materials, PST you paid on them, disposal and bins get priced on top, and steeper pitch, extra layers, valleys, skylights and chimneys get extra time.

Example: an owner and a two-person crew in the Okanagan

This is an example only, with round 2026 numbers. Your own costs will be different.

• Your pay: $90,000 a year ($7,500 a month)

• One roofer at $34 an hour and one labourer at $25 an hour, each paid about 1,600 hours: about $110,500 a year once vacation pay, employer CPP and EI and WorkSafeBC are added (an estimate)

• Overhead: truck and dump trailer, fuel and repairs $2,400, insurance, licences and WorkSafeBC $1,100, storage $500, phone, quoting and office $600, tools, fall protection gear and other $800. That is $5,400 a month, or $64,800 a year.

• Total to cover: about $265,200 a year

• Billable hours: about 1,360 each for the crew and 1,000 for the owner on the tools, or 3,720 crew hours

• Break-even: about $71 per crew hour

• With a 10% to 15% profit margin: about $78 to $82 per crew hour

• If a square takes your crew about 2 crew hours with tear-off, labour alone is about $142 a square at break-even. A 25-square re-roof is about 50 crew hours, or $3,570 in labour and overhead, before materials, disposal and profit. Add materials at an example $180 a square ($4,500) and $600 for bins and dump fees, and that roof costs you about $8,700 before you make a dollar.

Now look at it from the sales side. Say about 35% of each sale is left after materials, disposal and your crew's wages. Your overhead and your own pay come to $12,900 a month, so this company needs about $36,900 in sales a month to break even, averaged over the whole year. With an average job of $14,000, that's about three roofs a month. A $42,000 month leaves about $1,800 after your pay. If material prices go up and you don't change your quotes, and that 35% slips to 30%, the same $42,000 month loses about $300.

The season makes it tighter. If you only roof for 8 months, the same yearly costs mean about $55,300 in sales for each month you're working, not $36,900.

Try it with your own numbers in the calculator below. It is loaded with this example. Change any number to match your company and it shows the monthly sales you need, the number of jobs that takes, and what happens if your margin slips by 5 points.