What Chicago Homeowners Actually Paid for a New Roof

Cost by roof size (asphalt shingles)

Bigger roofs cost more in total but less per square foot: jobs under 1,000 sq ft ran a median $13.74/sq ft versus $5.62/sq ft at 3,500+ sq ft, because setup, dumpster and minimum labor charges are spread over more area.

Cost by roof type

Flat-roof types (built-up and roll roofing) make up a large share of this data — partly because low-slope roofs always need a permit in Chicago while many pitched-roof swaps do not. Types with fewer than 10 permits are left out.

Is it getting more expensive?

Not so far. The median shingle job was $17,897 in 2025 and $16,769 in 2026 (through November 2026). Year-to-date figures will move as winter permits come in.

Cost by Chicago neighborhood

Asphalt shingle jobs by community area, highest median first. Only areas with at least 15 permits are shown — small samples swing a lot, so treat single neighborhoods as a rough guide.

How this compares with online estimates

The Chicago figures on our Illinois roof cost page come from published contractor price guides: $3.40–$8.10 per sq ft (mid $5.70). The permit median of $9.31 sits above that mid. Part of the gap is definitional — permit costs cover the whole job (tear-off, decking repairs, flashing, garage roofs, permit fees) and roof area on a permit is not always measured the same way — but it is a useful reminder that price guides tend to quote clean, simple jobs. The other part is selection: simple pitched-roof swaps in Chicago often skip the permit entirely, so the jobs that do get permitted lean toward bigger scopes.

How we built this

• Source: City of Chicago — Building Permits (Chicago Data Portal). Filter: work_description starts with 'SCOPE: ROOF REPLACEMENT' (Express Permit Program roof replacements).
• Cost field: reported_cost (job cost declared by the contractor on the permit application). It is what the contractor declared at filing, not an audited final invoice.
• Kept 2,391 of 2,623 permits; dropped 232 with a declared cost under $1,000 or over $300,000 (placeholders and large commercial jobs).
• Per-square-foot figures use only permits with a roof area of at least 300 sq ft — smaller values are usually roofing “squares” (100 sq ft each) typed into the square-foot field — and drop results outside $1.00–$40.00/sq ft.
• Selection effect: Chicago does not require a permit to re-roof a pitched residential roof (per the City of Chicago), so shingle jobs here are the ones where a permit was pulled anyway — often because decking, structural or low-slope sections were involved. They may run larger than a typical simple shingle swap. Flat-roof figures do not have this issue, since those jobs always need a permit.
• Medians and quartiles, not averages: a handful of very large jobs would otherwise skew every number upward.
• Addresses, contractor names and license numbers are not included in our download.

Download the data

Every permit behind these tables, one row each: permit number, issue date, community area, roof covering, roof area, declared cost, cost per sq ft and whether it was used in the stats.

Free to use with attribution. Suggested citation: “CostLoft analysis of City of Chicago building permit data, November 2026” with a link to this page.