Tear off, dry in, shingle, flash. Hard money, earned outdoors, from your first week.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$55,440
First year helper
$37,460
Top tenth: foreman or owner
$81,720
The national median is $55,440 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $37,460. Commercial flat roofing in a union city sits at the top of that range. Residential shingle crews in a low cost state sit near the bottom, and lose days to rain and cold.
About $17 to $21 an hour
Helper on a residential crew, carrying and stripping before you install
Nobody pays tuition to become a roofer. You get hired, you carry bundles for a season, and you learn the rest on a roof. Raises come fast if you show up every day, because a lot of people do not.
$81,720 and up
Top tenth: commercial foremen, metal specialists and crew owners
Two things push roofers past the median: commercial flat roof systems, which pay more than shingles, and storm work, where crews travel to a hail or hurricane region and run seven days a week for months.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
A registered apprenticeship is paid work, so there is no tuition at either end. The low end is a starter set of hand tools and a bag at around $300 with the employer supplying boots and fall protection. The high end is a fuller kit including a nail gun at $900, plus your own boots, harness and safety gear at up to $500. The employer run entry training program from the roofing contractors association is normally paid for by the company. A community college construction certificate exists but nobody needs one for this trade. The real cost of roofing is on your body, not your bank account.
If you ever want a community college construction certificate instead, file the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) first. It usually makes an in-state certificate close to free. You do not need one for this trade.
Hourly with overtime
Time and a half past 40 hours in most states, and summer weeks run long.
Piece rate
A lot of shingle crews pay per square, which is 100 square feet of finished roof. It rewards speed and punishes anybody slow.
Storm and insurance work
After a hail or hurricane season, crews travel and the money is the best it ever gets. So are the hours.
Running your own crew
Two trucks and four people. You quote jobs, buy material before the customer pays, and carry the insurance.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no school for this. You get on a crew, or into a registered apprenticeship, and you learn on the roof.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Finish it if you can. Geometry, shop and a summer of labor work tell you in eight weeks whether you can stand the heat.
Get hired as a helper
0 to 6 months
Tear-off, carrying bundles, cleaning the site. Show up on time for one season and you are ahead of most people.
Learn to install
1 to 3 years
Underlayment, starter course, shingles, valleys, flashing, vents. Then the harder work: metal, tile and flat roof systems.
Registered apprenticeship, if there is one nearby
3 years
The standard shape is paid work all year plus at least 144 hours of classroom time a year. Unions and larger contractors run them.
Lead or foreman
Year 3 onward
Measuring and ordering material, running a crew, dealing with the homeowner and the inspector.
Geometry
Roof pitch, rafter length, waste factors. You calculate area on every single job.
Shop or construction technology
Tools, ladders and how a building actually goes together.
Physical education
This is not a joke. Carrying 70 pound bundles up a ladder in July is the job.
Spanish
On a large share of American roofing crews it is the language on the roof.
You can work as a roofer for somebody else in any state without a license. The moment you want to sign a contract with a homeowner yourself, that changes. California has a roofing-specific contractor classification, and Florida issues a certified roofing contractor license, both of which mean documented experience, a trade exam, a business and law exam and a bond. Other states regulate contractors more loosely or leave it to the city. What travels with you as an employee is a training record instead, such as the craft credentials from NCCER (the National Center for Construction Education and Research), logged under a personal number any contractor can look up.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Commercial flat roofing
Single-ply membrane, modified bitumen and torch-applied systems. Bigger jobs, steadier work, more money than shingles.
Metal roofing
Standing seam panels are the premium residential product and there are never enough crews who can do them well.
Torch safety certification
The roofing contractors association runs a torch safety program that many commercial jobs require before you can light anything.
Estimating
Measuring a roof from the ground or from aerial imagery and pricing it correctly. This is how roofers stop climbing.
Fall protection trainer
A short course that lets you run safety on a site. Worth extra on any crew.
A driver's license and a truck
Crews meet at the shop at 6am and the job might be an hour away.
A 10 hour construction safety card
Required before you set foot on many commercial and public sites.
No fear of heights
You find this out fast. Some people never get used to a 10 in 12 pitch, and that is fine, it just means flat roofs.
Photos of every roof you finish
This trade hires on what you can show and who will vouch for you.
Roofing has one of the lowest costs of entry of any contracting business: a truck, a ladder, a compressor and two people. That is exactly why so many roofing companies fail. The roofing is the easy part. The hard part is quoting accurately, carrying liability insurance and workers compensation, buying material before the customer pays, and surviving the winter months when nobody calls. The roofers who make it usually spent five years on somebody else's crew learning how long a job really takes.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Meet at the shop at 6, load the truck, on the roof by 7 to beat the heat. Tear-off first: the old roof comes off into a dumpster and it is filthy work. Then dry-in, so the house is protected before any chance of rain. Shingles all afternoon, bent over, moving sideways on a slope. Magnet sweep of the yard at the end because a nail in a customer's tire ruins a good job. In summer you are done by 2 because the shingles get too soft to walk on. In winter you may not work at all.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Roofing appears on almost every list of the most dangerous jobs in America, and the reason is always the same: falls from edges, ladders and through weak decking. Harness rules exist because of real numbers, not paperwork.
The whole trade prices work in squares, and one square is 100 square feet of finished roof. A typical American house is roughly 20 to 30 squares, which is why an experienced crew can strip and reshingle one in a single day.
The National Roofing Contractors Association runs ProCertification for installers, a torch safety program for hot work, and TRAC (Training for Roof Application Careers) for brand new hires. None of it is required by law, and good contractors ask for it anyway.
After a major hail or hurricane season, roofing crews travel across state lines for months of insurance work. It is the highest-paying stretch in the trade and the reason some roofers make in six months what others make in a year.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.