Excel file. No email, no signup. Yours to edit.
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Read Me | The assumptions, spelled out, and how to change them. |
| Measurements | One row per roof plane. Enter length, width and pitch; get footprint, pitch multiplier, sloped area and squares. Plus eaves, rakes, ridge, hips and valleys. |
| Estimate | Material takeoff calculated from those measurements, labour by the square, disposal and permits, then overhead, profit and tax. |
Most free roofing estimate templates are a blank table. You still have to work out the sloped area, the squares, the bundle count and the drip edge yourself — which is the entire job. This one does that part.
A roof's footprint is not its area. The multiplier is:
multiplier = √(1 + (pitch ÷ 12)²)
A 42 × 28 ft footprint at 6/12 is 1,176 sq ft on the ground and 1,315 sq ft of roof — 13.15 squares. Estimating off the footprint would cost you 1.4 squares of material on a small, simple house. Bidding off footprint is the most common way roofers lose money before they climb the ladder.
The sheet reports your price per square and your gross margin. If the price per square comes out wildly different from your usual number, something above it is wrong and you have caught it before you sent the bid. And the margin line will show you 17.4% on a standard ten-and-ten job, which is the real answer, not the 20% most people assume.
Multiply the footprint area by the pitch multiplier, then divide by 100. The multiplier is the square root of 1 plus (pitch divided by 12) squared. A 6/12 roof has a multiplier of 1.118, so it has 11.8% more surface area than the ground it covers. This template does that conversion for every roof plane automatically.
Three bundles per square for standard architectural shingles. The template multiplies your squares including waste by three and rounds up, and the three-bundles-per-square figure is an editable cell in case your product differs.
10 to 12% for a simple gable roof on flat ground. 15% or more once you have valleys, hips, dormers or a cut-up roof, because every cut is offcut. The template defaults to 12% and lets you change it in one cell.
The long-standing benchmark is 10% overhead then 10% profit, applied in that order. That produces a gross margin of about 17.4%, not 20% — a distinction that catches a lot of contractors out. The template applies them sequentially and shows you the resulting margin.
Yes. No email address, no signup, no watermark. Download the file and change anything in it.