What Do New Gutters Cost in Middle Georgia and Metro Atlanta?

By Thomas Williams, All American Renovations

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Most full-house gutter jobs run $2,500 to $4,500.

Smaller jobs come in under $2,000. Big houses with a lot of roofline go past $6,000.

I’m not guessing at that. Before I wrote this I went and pulled the gutter-only jobs out of our system — the real ones, the ones customers actually signed. This year they ran from $1,714 to $6,877, and the middle sits right around $3,500.

That’s the answer. Here’s everything behind it, including the part that makes small jobs feel expensive.

The per-foot number, since that’s what everybody asks

Gutters get priced by the foot, and people want the foot number. Fair enough.

Right now we’re at $5.00 a foot for labor and $3.26 a foot for the gutter itself. Call it $8.25 a foot, installed.

That’s for 6-inch seamless aluminum, formed on site from coil. There’s no “we’ll order it and see what comes” — the machine is on the truck and your gutter gets made in your driveway to the exact length of your house.

We don’t install 5-inch gutters. Here’s why that matters to your price.

Six inch is the only size we hang.

A lot of houses around here have 5-inch on them right now, and a good number of the jobs we do are replacing 5-inch with 6-inch — not because the old gutter wore out, but because the house needed a bigger gutter in the first place and never had one.

So why don’t we offer the cheaper size?

Because it’s pennies. The difference in what a 5-inch gutter costs and what a 6-inch gutter costs is so small it doesn’t change your project.

And a 6-inch gutter holds more water than a 5-inch one. That matters more than people realize, and here’s the way to think about it.

Your gutter isn’t a pipe. It’s a holding tank. Water comes off the roof faster than a downspout can swallow it, so the gutter’s real job in a hard rain is to hold what’s waiting its turn. A bigger gutter holds more while the downspout works through it. A smaller one fills up, and once it’s full the rest goes over the edge and down your wall.

Now, a separate thing people get told wrong all the time.

You’ll hear that 5-inch gutters get 2×3 downspouts and 6-inch gutters get 3×4. That’s not a rule. You can put a 3×4 downspout on a 5-inch gutter. Downspout size is its own decision, not something that comes attached to the gutter you picked.

And it’s a decision worth making on purpose, because the difference is big: 2 by 3 is six square inches. 3 by 4 is twelve. Double, and you can check it with a tape measure. The sheet metal industry’s rule of thumb is roughly one square inch of downspout for every hundred square feet of roof draining into it — so a 2×3 covers about 600 square feet and a 3×4 about 1,200.

And there’s a third number nobody asks about: how many. The spec we build to puts a downspout every 40 feet of gutter run. Count the ones on your quote against the length of your roofline. If a hundred and sixty feet of gutter is draining through two downspouts, that’s worth a conversation.

So there are three levers, and they’re independent. How much the gutter holds, how fast each downspout empties it, and how many downspouts there are. Undersize any one of them and you get the same result in a hard rain: water over the front edge.

So how much more does a 6-inch actually hold? Here’s how I got that answer, because it’s worth showing.

You’ll see “6-inch gutters hold 50% more water” repeated on nearly every gutter company’s website in the country. I went looking for where that number comes from and couldn’t find a source for it anywhere. The figures different people publish don’t even agree with each other.

So I went to the manufacturer. We run Spectra coil, and Spectra’s own product specification says a 6-inch gutter “allows 40% more water flow than 5-inch.”

Forty percent, from the company that makes it. Not fifty from a blog post. If somebody quotes you the fifty, ask them where they got it.

That’s the whole decision on size. When the cheaper option saves a homeowner almost nothing and moves 40% less water, there’s no honest reason to keep selling it. So we stopped.

If somebody quotes you 5-inch, ask them what the 6-inch price is. I’d be surprised if the gap is what you expect.

But the per-foot number will mislead you if it’s the only thing you look at, and here’s why.

Why small gutter jobs cost more per foot

There’s a $900 setup charge on a gutter job.

That’s not a minimum, and it’s not instead of the per-foot price. It’s on top of it. Twenty feet of gutter and one downspout is $900, plus the material, plus the labor for those twenty feet.

I know how that sounds. So let me tell you what it actually is.

A gutter job means a truck, a gutter machine, a crew, a trailer, and a trip. Those cost the same whether we run twenty feet or two hundred. Somebody has to load out, drive, set up, do the work, clean up, and drive back. The house doesn’t get smaller and neither does the day.

So on a twenty-foot job, the per-foot math looks terrible. On a two-hundred-foot job, that same $900 spreads across the whole house and disappears into the number.

That’s the honest reason small jobs price the way they do. It isn’t that we don’t want the work — we’ll do it. It’s that a short run costs nearly as much to show up for as a long one, and I’d rather explain that up front than have you think we picked a number out of the air.

What else lands on the proposal

Removing your old gutters and downspouts. About $2.86 a foot, and note that it’s usually more feet than your new gutter — because downspouts come off too and they count.

Touchup paint, a small line, for where the old brackets and screws leave marks.

Mitre charges — $10 each — on inside and outside corners where covers have to be field cut. Only applies if you’re doing leaf protection.

Soffit and fascia repair, if there’s rot behind your old gutters. When it’s needed it usually runs $1,500 to $2,500.

That one can’t be priced exactly until the gutters come off, because nobody can see behind them — but I’d rather give you the range up front than have you hear a number for the first time on a Tuesday morning with a crew standing in your yard. If your current gutters have been overflowing for years, plan on it.

Leaf protection, and what it actually adds

This is where the range gets wide, and it’s the thing customers most want quoted both ways. We’ll do that — ask for it with and without, and you’ll see both numbers on the same page.

Labor splits by what kind of product it is:

• Screens and mesh — $4.00 a foot to install
• Full covers — $5.00 a foot, because they’re a different install

Then the material sits on top, and that’s where the real spread lives. From least to most expensive, here’s the ladder we actually sell:

LeafBlok — a stainless steel mesh screen. The entry point.

Armour Lock — a powder coated screen that drops into new or existing gutters.

Stainless steel mesh — a heavier screen, roughly double the material cost of the two above.

Gutterlock Elite — a solid aluminum cover. A different category from a screen, and the price reflects it.

Gutterlock Extreme Flow Diamond — solid aluminum, the top of the Gutterlock line.

Everclean — our 6-inch cover with a lifetime no-clog, no-leak guarantee.

A screen and a full cover are not the same product doing the same job at different prices. They’re different answers to different problems, and which one is right depends on what’s above your house — pine straw behaves nothing like oak leaves, and oak leaves behave nothing like maple seeds. That’s a whole post on its own and I’m writing it, including the part of the warranty language people don’t read.

Go look at how your gutters are actually attached

Here’s something you can check from the ground in about ten seconds, and it tells you more about your gutters than the price anybody quoted for them.

Walk out and look at the front face of your gutter.

If you see nail heads every couple of feet, driven straight through the face — those are spikes and ferrules. It’s the old way. Spectra’s own documentation is blunt about it: spikes are hammered into the fascia and over time they always pull out of the wood, taking the gutter with them. Once that gap opens, water and debris coming off your roof go behind the gutter and land directly on the structure of your house.

If you don’t see any fasteners at all, you’ve got hidden hangers — a bracket inside the gutter, screwed into the fascia. That’s what should be there.

Spacing matters too. The sheet metal standard calls for hangers every 36 inches. Spectra recommends 24. We run them at 24.

Nothing on your proposal will tell you this. You have to go look — and if you’ve got spikes, that’s worth knowing before you spend money on anything else.

“I already have gutters and I just want covers on them”

We get this constantly, and it’s often the right call.

If your existing gutters are in good condition, we don’t need to tear them off. What we do is repitch them — reset the slope so the water actually runs to the downspouts — and then install the leaf protection on top.

That’s priced per foot, and I’m not going to print a number here, because I went and looked at what we’ve actually been charging and it isn’t consistent enough for me to hand you a figure I can stand behind. We’ll price it after we look at your gutters.

I could have made a number up for this post. I’d rather tell you I’m checking it.

“Do you clean them too?”

Yes, and it’s priced separately — one-story and two-story are different numbers, because a second story means different equipment and a different kind of day.

A lot of people assume cleaning comes free with cover work. It doesn’t automatically, but it will be on the proposal if you need it, as its own line you can see.

What the warranty actually is

Our gutter labor warranty is 15 years.

On the Everclean system, the no-clog, no-leak labor warranty is for as long as you own the home.

Those are two different things and I’d rather you hear the distinction from me than find it in paperwork. Fifteen years covers our workmanship on the gutter itself. The lifelong one is tied specifically to the Everclean system doing what it’s supposed to do.

What I’d tell you if you called me

• Ask for the price with and without leaf protection. It’s the biggest single swing in the number, and any gutter company can give you both.
• Ask what the per-foot price is and whether there’s a setup or trip charge on top. If somebody gives you a per-foot number and nothing else, the small-job math will surprise you later.
• Ask whether removal of the old gutters is in the number, and how many feet they’re counting.
• Ask what happens if there’s rot behind the old gutters. There often is, and you want to know the answer before the ladder goes up.
• Ask what size downspouts are in the quote — 2×3 or 3×4 — separately from the gutter size. They’re two different decisions, and a 3×4 will go on a 5-inch gutter if you want it. Almost nobody asks this one.
• Count the downspouts against your roofline. One every 40 feet is the spec. Two downspouts on a hundred and sixty feet of gutter is not enough.
• Ask what the labor warranty is, in years. Get it written down.
• If you’re pricing covers, ask what the warranty actually promises — not what the brochure says. Read the words.
• Ask whether the gutter is formed on site. Seamless means the machine makes it at your house — a single piece, run up to 100 feet. If it’s coming in sections, that’s a different product.
• Ask what gauge the aluminum is. Standard residential gutter coil is .027. Downspouts are .019. If somebody’s running something thinner, you want to know.
• Ask whether they use hidden hangers or spikes, and how far apart. Hidden hangers, at 24 inches.
• Ask what size they’re quoting. If it’s 5-inch, ask what 6-inch would cost. The difference is smaller than most people assume.