Siding Cost Siding Companies

What New Siding Costs at a Glance

Siding is priced per square - a 10 by 10 foot area, 100 square feet of wall. A typical single-family home has 15 to 25 squares once you subtract windows and doors. Installed prices by material:

• Vinyl: roughly $350 to $800 per square
• Insulated vinyl: roughly $550 to $1,000 per square
• Fiber cement: roughly $600 to $1,400 per square
• Engineered wood: roughly $550 to $1,200 per square
• Metal (steel or aluminum): roughly $700 to $1,500 per square

Those figures include labor, standard trim, and basic house wrap. Tear-off, fascia work, and rot repair are separate line items - and they are where most surprises live.

Price Per Square, Material by Material

Vinyl and insulated vinyl

Vinyl stays the volume king because material is cheap and installation is fast. Foam-backed insulated panels add roughly $150 to $250 per square but stiffen the wall, add modest R-value, and mute the hollow sound that makes some buyers hesitate. What a vinyl price actually buys - profiles, gauges, and the install details that decide how it ages - is covered in the vinyl installation guide.

Fiber cement

The board itself is not wildly expensive - the labor is. Fiber cement weighs around 300 pounds per square, demands larger crews, dust-controlled cutting, and slower fastening, so its labor line runs well above vinyl's. What the 50-year board demands in return explains where those hours go.

Engineered wood and metal

Engineered wood strand board sits between the two on price and installs faster than cement board. Steel handles hail country; aluminum still serves coastal markets. Both price closer to fiber cement than vinyl once trim is counted.

The Tear-Off Question

Removing and disposing of old siding typically adds $1,000 to $3,000 for an average house - dumpster, labor, and tip fees. Overlaying new siding over old can save most of that, but it is only legitimate on flat, dry, single-layer walls, and it forfeits the chance to inspect the sheathing. The overlay rules live in the wrap guide; the money math belongs here: if a bid saves you $2,000 by skipping tear-off, ask what it plans to do about the wall it cannot see.

Trim, Soffit, and Fascia: The Quiet Third

Corner posts, J-channel, window wraps, soffit panels, and fascia covers routinely account for 25 to 35 percent of a full re-side. A house with many windows, gables, and rooflines carries more linear feet of trim per square of siding - which is why cut-up houses price high even when they are not large. Soffit and fascia replacement alone commonly runs $6 to $20 per linear foot installed.

Complexity Multipliers

Two houses with identical square footage can price 40 percent apart:

• Second and third stories add staging, ladder time, and safety rigging
• Steep lots and tight side yards slow every material movement
• Gables, dormers, and bay windows multiply cuts and trim
• Dense window and door counts turn walls into carpentry projects

Regional Labor: What Crews Charge Near You

Labor is the biggest single input, so siding prices track local trade wages. The same colonial can quote thousands apart between a coastal metro and a rural county. The labor benchmark above shows the national median for siding crews - pick your state in the sidebar for local figures and companies working near you.

The Hidden-Cost Ledger: What Open Walls Reveal

Budget a contingency of 10 to 15 percent. When old siding comes off, rotted sheathing, carpenter ant damage, and missing wrap surface on a meaningful share of older homes. A fair contract prices sheathing replacement per sheet up front so the mid-job change order is arithmetic, not a negotiation.

A Worked Example: the 1,900 Square Foot Two-Story

Call it 20 squares after openings. In mid-range vinyl at $550 per square: about $11,000, plus $1,800 tear-off, plus $2,500 of trim, soffit, and fascia work - roughly $15,300. The same house in factory-finished fiber cement at $950 per square lands near $19,000 before the same tear-off and trim, which is how the $14,200 and $23,400 bids from the opening both turn out to be honest. Material and trim scope, not padding, made the gap.

Paying Less Without Buying a Bad Install

Schedule in the off-season, side the whole house at once rather than wall by wall, and keep your existing color family to avoid full trim replacement. What you should never trade away is the invisible layer: cheap bids cut the wrap and the flashing, because those are the lines you cannot see after day three. Compare bids line by line with three free estimates, sanity-check the long-term money on the vinyl versus fiber cement ledger, and start from top-rated siding companies whose pricing you can hold to the numbers on this page.