Does a metal roof pay over asphalt shingles?

What this does not count

The comparison counts roof cost, cooling savings and any insurance discount. It leaves out noise, looks, a lifetime warranty, leaks, hail denting, and any extra a buyer pays for metal beyond the share you entered. Hail and wind resistance are not priced. Ask the installer and your insurer for the roof's impact rating and for any discount in writing.

How this estimates

Time zero is today and both options buy a roof now. A roof costs the number of squares times the price per square plus any tear-off. It is bought again each time it wears out, every 25 years for shingles and every 50 for metal at the default lives. A later purchase is the price today grown by the yearly price growth, then discounted back to today's money by the discount rate for each year it waits.

When you stop owning the house, the unused part of the last roof counts as a credit. If you keep the house to the end of the years compared, the credit is the unused years at the price paid. If you sell, a buyer repays only the share you entered of that value, and the share shrinks in a straight line as the roof ages. That straight-line aging is this page's own assumption: Cost vs. Value reports recovery for a brand new roof only. A roof that would be replaced in the very year you sell is left for the buyer and gets no credit.

Metal also saves your cooling bill times the saving percent, plus any insurance discount, every year. That saving grows with price growth and is discounted too. The metal advantage is the net cost of shingles minus the net cost of metal, so a plus sign means metal costs less.

The break-even sale year is the first year of ownership in which selling leaves metal ahead. The advantage can jump up in a year a shingle roof is replaced, so it can dip and recover. That is why the page also shows the year metal stays ahead from. The extra cost of metal is paid back when its savings plus the shingle roofs it avoids add up, in today's money, to the extra up front cost.

The cost per year spreads each roof price over its life like a loan payment, using a real rate of (1 + discount rate) divided by (1 + price growth), minus 1. If price growth is higher than the discount rate that rate is set to 0%. The flat price test reruns everything with price growth set to 0%. The discount rate stays as you entered it. Every figure rounds to whole dollars, and lives and years round to whole years.

Sources and date checked

Starting numbers were checked on 2026-10-17. The prices and the share a buyer repays come from the Zonda and JLC Cost vs. Value report, 2025 edition. The report page would not open from our build computer, so those figures were read from a published summary of it. Confirm them against the report. Roof lives come from roofing trade figures. The cooling saving comes from one Florida study of white roofs that we read only in search excerpts, so the default is set well below it. No insurance discount has a neutral source, so it starts at $0. Growth, discount rate and years you stay are round typical values, not researched facts. The table below lists every source and link.

Not advice. This is a planning estimate at the inputs shown, not roofing, tax, insurance or financial advice. Get written quotes for both roofs and a written insurance quote before you decide. Your results will differ.