Why Does Siding Cost $15,000 on One House and $60,000 on Another?

Thomas Williams, All American Renovations – Elite member of James Hardie™ ALLIANCE · Metro Atlanta and Middle Georgia

We publish our siding range, and the honest problem with publishing a range is that it can feel useless. A homeowner reads $15,000 to $60,000 and thinks: that’s not an answer, that’s a shrug. Where does my house land, and who decides?

So here’s the part I’d rather you knew before we ever talk.

Most of that swing isn’t your house. It’s your decisions.

I can take one 2,000 square foot, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch — one house, one street, no rot, no access problem, nothing unusual about it at all — and hand you a number anywhere from about $15,000 to right around $60,000, and every one of those numbers is honest. Nothing changed but what got checked on the proposal.

That’s the thing nobody explains, and it’s the reason two bids on the same house can be thousands apart without either contractor doing anything wrong.

What Actually Moves The Number The Most?

There are four levers that move a siding price by five figures. Everything else on this page moves it by hundreds, or by a couple of thousand.

Take these four in order and you can put yourself inside the range in about two minutes.

ColorPlus or primed-and-painted — this is the big one

Every number in our published range starts as primed James Hardie, field-painted after install. ColorPlus is the factory-prefinished product, and on a full siding, soffit and fascia replacement it adds roughly $20,000 to $30,000.

Not a percentage. Not a small upgrade. It is, by itself, bigger than most of the other decisions on this page combined.

I had a customer at the start of 2025 — three-bed, two-bath ranch, siding, soffit, fascia and gutters. Primed and painted: $25,000 to $30,000. The identical house in ColorPlus: right around $50,000.

Neither of those was the wrong answer. They were answers to different questions, and the question is how long you’re staying. The full cost breakdown works that decision through with real numbers, and I’d rather you read it than take my summary of it.

Whether you touch soffit and fascia at all

This is the one people don’t see coming, because they called about siding and this isn’t siding.

And the first question isn’t which product. It’s whether you’re doing it at all — because the bottom of our published range, $15,000 to $20,000, is siding only. Nothing above it.

Four real answers, and the spread between them is enormous:

What you do	Roughly
Nothing — leave what’s there	$0
Repair the existing wood as needed	~$1,500
Vinyl soffit, aluminum fascia	$3,000 – $5,000
James Hardie soffit and fascia	$8,000 – $15,000

That’s a fifteen-thousand-dollar spread on one decision, and it’s a decision most homeowners have never thought about in their lives.

I’m not going to tell you to skip it. If the wood up there is sound, leaving it is a real option and plenty of people take it. If it’s rotting, you’re going to be back up there anyway and you’ll pay for the access twice.

How big the house is, and how many stories

A typical ranch is the floor. A larger home or a two-story with little brick or stone runs $20,000 to $30,000 for siding alone, before soffit, fascia, gutters or anything else.

Here’s what surprises people: square footage of the house is not what we’re pricing. We’re pricing the square footage of the walls, and those are different numbers. A sprawling ranch can have more wall than a stacked two-story of the same size.

Profile

Horizontal lap is the most cost-effective product Hardie makes. Board and batten — vertical panels with batten strips every sixteen inches — is the next step up. Shake is the most expensive of the standard products. Get into the Artisan and architectural lines and you’re in a different conversation entirely.

And profile isn’t all-or-nothing. Shake in the gables only. Board and batten on the front elevation. Every one of those is real money, every one is optional, and on our proposals they’re tick boxes — you check them on and off and watch the number move.

Those four levers are where the range comes from. Nothing below them competes.

Walk To The Street And Count Your Corners

Here’s the thing you can check yourself, today, without a ladder and without calling anybody.

Stand at the end of your driveway and count your outside corners. Then count your windows and doors.

Two houses with identical square footage can be very different numbers, and this is usually why. A plain rectangle ranch has four outside corners. A house with bump-outs, an offset garage, a bay window and a couple of gabled projections can easily have twelve or fourteen.

When we pull HOVER measurements off your house — the 3D model we build from photos you take on your phone — it gives us three figures: square footage with waste, without waste, and with openings. We average them to get a board count.

The gap between those numbers is your house’s complexity. A simple house barely has one. A cut-up house has a big one, and it shows up in the board count before anybody has picked a color.

So: four corners and eight windows, and you’re near the bottom of whatever range applies to your size. Fourteen corners and twenty openings, and you’re not — and now you know why before a single contractor shows up.

While you’re out there, there’s a second thing worth checking — whether your house already has two layers of siding on it. It takes ten seconds at a window and it changes the number. Why we won’t put new siding over old siding covers that rather than repeating it here.

What About The Things I Can’t Choose?

Fair question, and it’s the part that makes people nervous. Here’s the whole list, honestly.

What’s coming off. Tear-off on vinyl runs about $1,750. Wood or LP runs $2,500 to $3,000 — it’s heavier, it breaks up, and it takes longer.

What’s behind it. Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the homes we re-side around here — built late 1980s into the early 2000s — don’t have OSB sheathing. They have black insulated foam board. Hardie doesn’t require OSB and I still recommend it, because siding sinks into foam as it squeezes and you end up with a wavy wall you paid twenty thousand dollars for.

On a recent 332-board job, replacing all 69 sheets of OSB was about $3,237. That’s the worst case, and you see it before we start. If only fifteen sheets need replacing, you get charged for fifteen. We back the rest out.

Rot. Truly unforeseen conditions that catch everybody off guard typically run $2,500 to $5,000. The significant ones run $8,000 to $15,000 — and I’ll say plainly that there are indicators that let us anticipate most of the significant ones before we open the wall, which is why we’d rather look at the house than guess at it.

Access. As long as we can get pump jacks and ladders within about five feet of the house, you’re fine — a normal two-story on a basement is no problem. Where it gets expensive is a two-story on a basement sitting on an elevated foundation eight or ten feet off the ground. I’ve worked houses that were effectively four stories up, fifty feet in the air, needing lifts and extra pump jacks and safety equipment. Same with a driveway too steep to run material up — if we’re parking at the road and carrying it, that’s real labor and it belongs on the page.

Your HOA, if you have one, can take a color or a profile off the table entirely. That’s its own post too.

Permits. Where one is required, it gets priced against the 2024 International Residential Code with Georgia Amendments, in effect since January 2026 — not against whatever was in force when your house was built. That is also why a code upgrade can appear on a re-side that nobody expected.

And The Small Ones, Since I Said I’d Give You All Of Them

These won’t decide anything, but they’re real and they’re why two careful bids land a few thousand apart:

• Window trim, or no window trim — going without takes roughly $1,500 to $2,000 off
• Double corners instead of single corners — averages $500 to $600 on a job
• Housewrap — a generic wrap, or James Hardie’s own weather barrier. A few years ago my James Hardie rep told me I was probably the only contractor he knew selling theirs, so we made it an option rather than a default

When a homeowner tells me another siding contractor came in $3,000 to $5,000 under us, this list is almost always where it went. It is almost never markup. It’s scope, and it’s usually invisible unless somebody itemizes it.

The Uncomfortable Part

Two things.

First: the same house is not the same number two years later. That early-2025 ranch that was around $50,000 in ColorPlus is closer to $55,000 to $60,000 today. That’s material and labor, it’s not a sales tactic, and I’m not going to turn it into one — if you need to wait, wait. Short-term waiting rarely does real major harm to a house. Five to ten years of waiting is a different conversation.

Second, and this is the one I’d want to hear if I were you: none of this tells you whether the price in front of you is a good price. A number can be high because the scope is right, or high because somebody’s guessing. It can be low because the scope is thin, or low for reasons I genuinely can’t explain — I’ve seen proposals that included everything we include and still came in significantly under us, and I don’t have a good answer for it.

What this page does is let you ask better questions about a number instead of just reacting to it.

What I’d Tell You If You Called Me

Before you talk to anybody, get these four answers in your own head:

1. How long are you staying in this house? That one answer decides the biggest lever on the page.
2. Are you doing soffit and fascia at all, and at which tier? Second-biggest.
3. Have you counted your corners? That tells you which end of your size bracket you’re in.
4. Do you know what’s behind your siding? If it’s foam board — and it probably is — budget the sheathing.

Get those four, and a contractor’s number stops being a mystery and starts being something you can check.

Then make everybody itemize. If a bid can’t show you the difference between window trim and no window trim, it can’t show you anything — and an estimate and a proposal are not the same document.