Siding Cost by House Size: 2026 Price Tables

Here's the number people actually search for: a 2,000 sq ft house re-sides for a mid of $14,188 in vinyl if it's a single-story ranch and $20,792 if it's a two-story — same living space, 47% apart. Across our whole grid, from a 1,000 sq ft footprint in vinyl to a 3,000 sq ft two-story in cedar, mid-range totals run $9,085 to $66,530 before tear-off. Every figure below comes out of the same engine the siding cost calculator runs, so you can reproduce any row.

Footprint, living area, and wall area are three different numbers

"2,000 sq ft house" almost always means living area — the floor space on the appraisal. Siding covers walls, and the bridge between the two is footprint: the ground-floor outline. A 2,000 sq ft ranch has a 2,000 sq ft footprint; a 2,000 sq ft two-story has a 1,000 sq ft footprint and taller walls.

Our model turns footprint into wall area in four steps, and it's worth seeing them because it's exactly the takeoff a contractor does by hand:

1. Footprint → perimeter. With only an area to work from, the engine assumes a 1.5:1 rectangle — a 1,350 sq ft footprint becomes 30 × 45 ft, a 150 ft perimeter.
2. Perimeter → wall. Multiply by grade-to-eave height: 9 ft for one story, 19 ft for two, 28 ft for three.
3. Add gables, subtract openings. Two gable triangles at a 6/12 pitch, then subtract 75% of the area of 12 windows, 2 doors, and a garage door — trim and cut waste eat the rest of the "saving."
4. Add waste. 12.5% at average complexity, which is what you order.

Footprint	Assumed rectangle	Perimeter	Net wall, one story	Net wall, two story
1,000 sq ft	25.8 × 38.7 ft	129 ft	1,128 sq ft	2,419 sq ft
1,250 sq ft	28.9 × 43.3 ft	144 ft	1,307 sq ft	2,750 sq ft
1,500 sq ft	31.6 × 47.4 ft	158 ft	1,473 sq ft	3,054 sq ft
2,000 sq ft	36.5 × 54.8 ft	183 ft	1,776 sq ft	3,602 sq ft
2,500 sq ft	40.8 × 61.2 ft	204 ft	2,054 sq ft	4,095 sq ft
3,000 sq ft	44.7 × 67.1 ft	224 ft	2,312 sq ft	4,548 sq ft

Notice the perimeter column. Triple the footprint and the perimeter grows by only 73% — area scales with the square of the dimensions, the wall around it doesn't. That's why a big house is never three times the siding bill of a small one. If your house isn't a rectangle, measure the real perimeter and skip step one; how to measure siding squares walks it wall by wall.

Single-story: cost by footprint and material

Mid-range engine totals at national labor, no tear-off, average complexity, gable roof:

Footprint	Vinyl	Fiber cement	Engineered wood	Wood
1,000 sq ft	$9,085	$11,624	$12,894	$15,432
1,250 sq ft	$10,494	$13,435	$14,905	$17,846
1,500 sq ft	$11,798	$15,112	$16,769	$20,082
2,000 sq ft	$14,188	$18,185	$20,183	$24,179
2,500 sq ft	$16,372	$20,992	$23,302	$27,923
3,000 sq ft	$18,409	$23,611	$26,212	$31,415

Two-story: cost by footprint and material

Same footprints, 19 ft walls, and the 1.08× two-story access multiplier our model applies for staging and slower work on the upper course:

Footprint	Living area	Vinyl	Fiber cement	Engineered wood	Wood
1,000 sq ft	~2,000 sq ft	$20,792	$26,671	$29,611	$35,489
1,250 sq ft	~2,500 sq ft	$23,609	$30,293	$33,635	$40,318
1,500 sq ft	~3,000 sq ft	$26,190	$33,611	$37,321	$44,742
2,000 sq ft	~4,000 sq ft	$30,851	$39,604	$43,980	$52,733
2,500 sq ft	~5,000 sq ft	$35,042	$44,992	$49,968	$59,918
3,000 sq ft	~6,000 sq ft	$38,899	$49,951	$55,478	$66,530

Material choice is the second-biggest lever after size, and it's proportional: cedar runs roughly 1.7× vinyl at every row. The per-material detail sits in vinyl siding cost, fiber cement siding cost, and engineered wood siding cost.

Building up saves money on roofs, not on walls

The received wisdom is that a two-story house is cheaper per square foot than a ranch. That's true of the foundation and the roof — both get cut roughly in half. It is not true of the siding, and the gap is large:

Living area	As a ranch	As a two-story	Difference
2,000 sq ft	$14,188	$20,792	+$6,604 (47%)
2,500 sq ft	$16,372	$23,609	+$7,237 (44%)
3,000 sq ft	$18,409	$26,190	+$7,781 (42%)

The arithmetic is unglamorous. Halving the footprint shrinks the perimeter by only about 29% (square root, again), while the wall height goes from 9 ft to 19 ft — a 111% increase. On a 2,000 sq ft home that leaves the two-story with 2,419 sq ft of net wall against the ranch's 1,776 — 36% more — and then the 1.08× access multiplier lands on top. Multiply the two and you're at the 47% you see in the table.

The practical read: if you own a two-story and you've been comparing your quote to a neighbor's ranch, your quote is not padded. And if you're deciding which house to buy with a re-side already on the horizon, the colonial's siding bill is a real, recurring five-figure difference from the rambler's.

What else actually moves the number

Take our reference two-story — 1,350 sq ft footprint, 150 ft perimeter, vinyl, mid $24,666 — and change one variable at a time:

Change	New mid	Delta
20 windows instead of 12	$23,977	−$689 (−2.8%)
6 windows instead of 12	$25,182	+$517 (+2.1%)
No garage door	$25,068	+$402 (+1.6%)
Hip roof (no gables)	$22,752	−$1,914 (−7.8%)
Complex roof (3 gables)	$25,623	+$957 (+3.9%)
Simple elevations	$22,607	−$2,059 (−8.3%)
Complex elevations	$30,903	+$6,237 (+25.3%)
1.5 stories (14 ft walls)	$17,440	−$7,225 (−29.3%)
3 stories (28 ft walls)	$43,511	+$18,845 (+76.4%)
Add tear-off	$28,547	+$3,881 (+15.7%)

Two lessons a homeowner can act on. First, stop counting windows — the swing from 12 to 20 is under 3%, less than the rounding between two honest bids, and no estimator is going to renegotiate over it. Second, elevation complexity is the expensive variable you can't see on a floor plan. Bump-outs, dormers, bays, and a wall full of outside corners push our model to a 17.5% waste factor and a 1.2× multiplier at once — $6,237 on this house. When a bid comes in high, that's usually the honest reason, not the material.

Tear-off scales with the wall

Removing the old cladding is priced on net wall area at $0.75–$2.00 per square foot ($1.25 typical), so it grows with size and is identical in every material:

Footprint (two-story)	Tear-off added, mid
1,000 sq ft	+$3,266
1,500 sq ft	+$4,123
2,000 sq ft	+$4,863
2,500 sq ft	+$5,528
3,000 sq ft	+$6,140

Skipping tear-off is legal in many jurisdictions when the existing wall is sound and flat, and it's the single largest line a homeowner can legitimately delete. It's also how rot stays hidden. Our estimates exclude sheathing replacement and structural repair found behind old siding entirely — that's the classic change order, and no per-square-foot rate contains it.

Using this on your own house

Skip the footprint estimate if you can. Walk the house with a tape or a measuring wheel, add up the actual perimeter, and multiply by grade-to-eave height — that one measurement beats every assumption in the table above. Two edge cases worth knowing: partial jobs under 500 sq ft of wall pick up a 15% mobilization premium in our model (the small project premium — a crew still shows up, stages, and pulls a permit for one elevation), and a house with a walkout basement carries a fifth wall the footprint math never sees.

Everything above is national-average labor. Where you live moves the same house by roughly ±35%, priced state by state on the siding cost by state report, and the model itself is documented on our methodology page. For the material-by-material overview, start at how much does siding cost.

Get your number

Your total depends on your real perimeter, wall height, stories, roof style, opening count, complexity, tear-off, and state — every one of them a field in the calculator. Enter your house and get the low/mid/high with the squares and takeoff shown.

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