Cost Guides

Every price on this hub, in one table

The short answer: the ten guides below cover materials that range from $0.30 per square foot (sod) to $2,500 per square (natural slate roofing). The column that matters most is the middle one — sold by — because that is the unit your supplier will quote, and it is almost never the unit you measured your project in.

Ranges are 2026 continental-US material prices before delivery, tax, and labor. Each guide breaks its range down by grade, brand tier, and region, and works through at least one full project budget.

Room-size answers

Straight gallon counts for the room sizes people ask about most, with the arithmetic shown and a pre-filled calculator link.

Tips & techniques

The guides above answer "what will this cost" and "how much do I need." These answer the harder question: why the job went wrong, and what to do differently. Each one is written around a specific failure mode we see people hit after the material is already bought.

The unit of sale is where most budgets break

You measure a project in square feet or cubic feet. Almost nobody sells material in either one. Every guide on this page opens by naming the unit its material is actually quoted in, because that conversion is the single most common place a DIY budget goes wrong — usually in the direction of a second trip to the store.

The awkward cases are worth memorising. Roofing is sold by the "square," which is 100 square feet — so a 2,000 sq ft roof is roughly 22 squares once waste is included, and a $150-per-square shingle is $1.50 per square foot, not $150 for the roof. Gravel is quoted per cubic yard in some markets and per ton in others, and the two are not interchangeable without knowing the density: crushed stone runs about 1.5 tons per cubic yard, so $35 per yard is roughly $23 per ton. Ask for both numbers and buy in whichever unit is cheaper. Sod comes on pallets whose size depends on where you live — 500 sq ft is standard in the Midwest and Northeast, 450 sq ft is common in the South, and the Pacific Northwest uses 504 — which means "three pallets" is a different amount of grass in Ohio than in Georgia.

Paint is the one where the unit looks obvious and still catches people. A gallon covers about 350 square feet in one coat on primed, smooth drywall, which is the figure our paint calculator uses as its default. Two coats halves it. So two gallons is roughly one small bedroom's walls done properly — not a whole room including the ceiling, which is the assumption behind a lot of one-gallon purchases.

The price on the shelf is not the price you pay

Bulk materials carry fees that never appear in a per-yard quote, and on a small job those fees can be larger than the material itself.

• Delivery. Sand-and-gravel and mulch yards charge roughly $50–$200 for a residential drop, with mileage surcharges past about 10 miles. Picking up your own gravel saves 30–50% of the delivered cost — if you have the truck for it, and if you have honestly checked its payload.
• Short-load fees. Ready-mix plants set a minimum order, typically 3–5 cubic yards, and charge $50–$150 if you come in under it. A 10×10 patio at 4 inches is only about 1.2 cubic yards, so on that job the short-load fee is real money.
• Access. Bulk drywall delivery needs room for a boom truck and roughly 12 feet of clearance to feed sheets through a second-storey window. Roofing is the same story in reverse — paying for a boom lift to the roof buys back a day of carrying bundles up a ladder.
• Sales tax. Every guide quotes pre-tax prices. Add your local rate before you decide a quote fits the budget.

Bulk versus bagged: the same question, four materials

Nearly every bulk material is also sold in bags at a much higher price per unit volume, and the crossover is worth knowing before you order. The break-evens are not close to each other, because they turn on the delivery fee and the bag premium rather than on anything about the material.

Concrete crosses over early because mixing bags is slow, physical work and the truck arrives ready. Mulch crosses over late because bagged mulch is easy to store, easy to move a wheelbarrow-load at a time, and a $50–$150 delivery fee has to be spread over the whole order before bulk pulls ahead. Below three cubic yards, bags usually win outright once delivery is counted — unless you can collect it yourself.

Order more than you measured — but how much more

Waste allowances are not padding; they cover the cuts you cannot avoid, plus the pieces you break. The right figure depends on the layout, not the material.

Two habits are worth more than any percentage. Buy at least one or two extra boxes of tile or flooring beyond whatever the waste calculation gives you: dye lots change between production runs, and the repair you make in five years will not match if you have to buy fresh. And do the opposite with sod — order one extra pallet only if the budget is comfortable, because sod cannot be held more than about 24 hours before it starts to die on the pallet.

Materials are 30–50% of the job

If you are hiring the work out, the material prices in these guides are the smaller half of the invoice. On a typical residential job, materials run 30–50% of the total and labour is the rest, which is why a guide that only quotes materials can look wildly optimistic next to a contractor's number. Each guide summarises labour at typical national ranges, but that is the figure that varies most by region — get three local quotes rather than trusting any national average, ours included.

The direction of that split also tells you where DIY pays. On materials-heavy, labour-light jobs — mulch, gravel, sod, interior paint — doing it yourself saves a modest fraction. On labour-heavy jobs like tile, roofing, and finished concrete, the labour you displace is most of the cost, which is exactly why those jobs are also the ones where a bad DIY result is expensive to undo.

How we keep these current

We re-survey 6+ regional suppliers (Home Depot, Lowe's, regional ready-mix yards, paint store retail, sand-and-gravel yards) each quarter. Prices reflect 2026 costs in the continental US; international pricing can run ±30%. Every guide carries the date it was last checked at the top, and the numbers in the tables are the ones our calculators use as defaults — when a price moves, both change together.

Coming next

Trim paint, stain, brick, deck boards, gutter, sand. If there's a specific material you'd like prices for, email us.