The Roofing Inflation Index

Why the usual explanation does not survive the data

The standard account of roofing cost inflation is a labor story. Skilled trades are scarce, the workforce is aging, crews are hard to keep, and so the price of a roof climbs. It is a plausible story, and it can be tested.

The federal statistical system publishes both halves of that story separately, and has done for decades.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics runs a producer price index for the industry that makes asphalt shingles, and a monthly payroll survey that reports average hourly earnings for roofing contractors specifically.

Put the two on the same axis and the labor story does not hold up.

HyreRoof analysis: over the twenty-five years to 2025, roofing labor costs rose at 2.99% a year compounded, against 2.53% a year for consumer prices generally. Roofing wages beat inflation, but only just: the kind of margin you would expect from any occupation that is not in decline.

Asphalt roofing materials rose at 5.20% a year, more than double the inflation rate, for a quarter of a century. That is the anomaly, and it is on the materials side.

What the raw series show

Rebasing is not cosmetic here; it is the only way to put a 1982-based index, a June-1984-based index and a dollar figure on the same picture without lying about all three. Each line is that series divided by its own value in 2000.

Three things are visible immediately. The materials line and the earnings line move together until about 2005, then separate.

The separation is not gradual: materials jump 12.3% in 2005, 9.7% in 2006, 26.5% in 2008 and a further 23.4% in 2009: the two largest annual moves in the whole series.

They happened during the 2008–2009 housing downturn, when residential construction was falling.

The second separation begins in 2021: +11.4%, then +17.7% in 2022. That one at least coincides with an economy-wide inflation episode, and the CPI-U line moves too, though much less.

The third thing is easiest to miss and is the most useful. Since 2023 the materials line has flattened almost completely, up 4.7% across two and a half years, while the earnings line has kept climbing at 12.3% over the same window. For the first time in the series, labor is outrunning materials.

The same series in constant dollars

Nominal indexes flatter everything, because everything rises. The honest comparison deflates by a general price index, and the arithmetic should be visible rather than asserted.

The deflator. CPI-U all items, US city average, not seasonally adjusted, series CUUR0000SA0, base 1982-84 = 100. Its 2000 annual average is 172.2 and its 2025 annual average is 321.9, so the price level rose by a factor of 321.9 ÷ 172.2 = 1.8693, or 86.9%.

Materials, real. WPU1361 rose from 100.0 to 354.8, a factor of 3.5480. Divide by the deflator: 3.5480 ÷ 1.8693 = 1.8980. Asphalt roofing materials cost 89.8% more in constant dollars in 2025 than in 2000: a real compound rate of 2.60% a year.

Labor, real. Hourly earnings rose from $15.68 to $32.76, a factor of 2.0893. Divide by the same deflator: 2.0893 ÷ 1.8693 = 1.1177. Roofing hourly earnings bought 11.8% more in 2025 than in 2000: a real compound rate of 0.45% a year, or about a nickel on the dollar per decade.

HyreRoof analysis: in real money, the material half of a roof has almost doubled in twenty-five years and the labor half has gained roughly a tenth.

If your mental model of roofing inflation is “you cannot get crews any more”, the federal payroll data does not support it.

Whatever is happening to roofing crews, it is not showing up as real wage growth.

What contractors actually charged

There is one federal series that measures the price of installed roofing work rather than of an input to it: PCU23816X23816X, the producer price index for roofing contractors. It carries a large qualifier: it covers nonresidential building work, not houses, and it only begins in December 2007, which is its index base.

Over the seventeen years from the 2008 annual average to the 2025 annual average, that index rose 107.4%, a compound 4.38% a year. Over exactly the same window, asphalt roofing materials rose 100.8%, roofing hourly earnings rose 75.6% and consumer prices rose 49.5%.

HyreRoof analysis: the price roofing contractors charge has tracked their materials cost far more closely than their labor cost. That is what you would expect if materials were the binding constraint on pricing. It is not what you would expect from a market where wage pressure was doing the work.

Read this series carefully, though. A commercial re-roof is a different product from a residential one: different membranes, different crews, different insulation, different scale. It is evidence about the roofing trade, not a substitute for a residential figure that does not exist.

A roof is not one input, so weight them

Neither series alone answers the question a homeowner is actually asking. The direct cost of an installed roof is a mixture, so the honest construction is a weighted index, and because the weight is an assumption rather than a measurement, it should be run at several values rather than presented as one number.

The formula. For material weight w, the HyreRoof Roofing Input Cost Index in year t, base 2000 = 100, is:

Index(t) = 100 × [ w × WPU1361(t)/WPU1361(2000) + (1 − w) × AHE(t)/AHE(2000) ]

This is a direct-cost basket only. It deliberately contains nothing for overhead, disposal, insurance, permits, warranty or margin, because no public series measures those for residential roofing. It is a floor on input inflation, not an estimate of a quoted price.

HyreRoof calculation, 2025 against 2000. At a 40% material weight the basket stands at 267.3 nominal and 143.0 in constant 2000 dollars. At 50% it is 281.9 and 150.8.

At 60% it is 296.5 and 158.6. Across that whole range, the direct input cost of an asphalt roof rose 43% to 59% faster than general consumer inflation over twenty-five years.

How much of that is materials? Of the 181.9 index points the 50%-weight basket gained, materials contributed 127.4 and labor 54.5, so 70.1% of the increase is materials.

At a 40% weight it is 60.9%; at a 60% weight it is 77.8%.

Whatever reasonable split you assume between the two, materials are the majority of the story, and at the 50 and 60 percent weights the large majority.

Why asphalt is filed with the fuels

The biggest single-year moves in the roofing materials index are 2008 (+26.5%) and 2009 (+23.4%). Residential construction was in freefall in both years. A materials index that rises by a quarter, twice, while its main end market collapses is not being driven by roofing demand.

The BLS commodity classification hints at why. Asphalt itself is filed under group 05, fuels and related products and power: item 8102, “Asphalt”.

The finished roofing products made from it are filed somewhere else entirely, under group 13, nonmetallic mineral products, item 61.

The raw material for your shingles sits in the same statistical family as diesel and jet fuel; the shingle sits with cement and glass.

HyreRoof analysis: asphalt is a refinery product, so the main input to a shingle can follow fuel markets more closely than it follows how many roofs are being replaced. We have not quantified that link, so read it as a lead worth watching, not a finding.

The recent flattening fits that reading. Since 2023 the materials index has risen 4.7% while consumer prices rose 8.7%: a real fall of 3.6%. Over the same period real hourly earnings in roofing rose 3.3%. For the first time in the series, the earnings line is rising faster.

The workforce behind the wage line

Hourly earnings are only half of what a roofer earns and none of what the trade looks like. Two more series from the same payroll survey fill it in.

Weekly earnings. Average weekly hours in roofing were 35.15 in 2000 and 36.46 in 2025.

Multiplying by hourly earnings gives $551.15 a week in 2000 and $1,194.43 in 2025, a nominal rise of 116.7%, slightly more than the hourly figure, because the working week lengthened a little.

Against 86.9% consumer inflation, that is a real gain of about 16% across twenty-five years.

Headcount. Employment at roofing contractors ran at 185,100 in 2000, peaked at 204,500 in 2006, fell to 164,600 by 2012, 19.5% below the peak, then recovered to 254,800 in 2025, the highest in the series. The first half of 2026 averages 245,900, below the 2025 average.

HyreRoof analysis: a trade that shed a fifth of its workforce and then grew it by 55% from the trough, while real hourly pay moved by roughly a tenth across the whole period, does not look like a labor market clearing through price.

It looks like one clearing through headcount. That is consistent with the wage line on the charts above, and our roofer shortage index measures the workforce against the housing stock directly.