A roofing company grows past its owner by hiring, because each employee brings in about the same revenue at every size up to 99 people: between about $317,000 and $413,000 a year in each size group, by my math from 2022 Census figures. Office help costs less than another roofer: at roofing contractors in May 2025, the median office clerk earned $45,790 and the median administrative assistant $44,250, against $55,860 for a roofer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
If I’m reading the 2022 Economic Census right, side work is a small slice of the trade, with siding and gutters together under 5% of the $69.9 billion US roofing contractors took in. New Tech Machinery’s gutter machines start at $9,800 before a trailer or coil, and the one number I have from our own clients on work outside roofing is a $15,000 loss.
Zentora is a marketing company, and we haven’t measured whether stepping off the roof or adding a service paid off for anyone, so the rest of this is public data and what owners report. The figures and rules are American, and where a state sets the rule I’ve used Texas, where I work. If every inspection still runs through you, more calls, ours included, only add to the pile.
Most roofing companies have fewer than five employees
The Census counted 24,044 US roofing companies with employees in 2022. Of those, 65% had fewer than 5 employees and 91% fewer than 20, and only 18 had 500 or more. Of Texas’s 2,313, 73% had fewer than 5. Staff are counted in March, before the busy season, and shops with no payroll aren’t counted at all. BLS counts one roofer in five as self-employed, so the small end is bigger still.
Average revenue climbs fast with headcount: about $621,000 a year for companies under 5 employees, $2.16 million for 5 to 9, $4.27 million for 10 to 19 and $12.5 million for 20 to 99. Those are my averages and only a rough guide, so don’t hold your own company to them.
An owner on r/sweatystartup, after an $815,000 first year, set $2 million as the goal for year two, along with handing off as much of the work as possible. A Tennessee owner who had left a sales rep job was past that point about a year and a half in, on track for $3 million to $4 million with six salespeople and project managers. “I don’t have as much work to do myself anymore which kind of freaks me out,” he wrote on r/smallbusiness in 2025.
Fewer than half the construction businesses opened in 2014-15 lasted ten years
Of construction businesses that opened in the year to March 2015, 57.5% were still open five years later and 42.6% after ten, and the survivors more than doubled their average staff, from 4.0 to 8.9. BLS publishes these only for construction as a whole, counted by location.
A Texas roofing owner with 22 years in the industry wrote on r/Entrepreneur in 2022 that he was burned out enough for closing the company to sound like a relief.
A company can also shrink after the person who built it stops. A 27-year-old taking over his grandfather’s roofing company wrote on r/smallbusiness in June 2026 that health problems had forced his grandfather to retire around 2016. Sales once ran $760,000 to $1 million a year, he wrote, and last year came to about $230,000.
Roofers die at work at nearly four times the rate of construction supervisors
In 2024, 104 roofers died on the job, a rate of 48.7 per 100,000 full-time workers against 3.3 for all workers. In BLS’s chart of selected occupations, only logging (110.4) and fishing and hunting (88.8) ran higher. First-line supervisors of construction trades died at a rate of 12.8 and construction managers at 1.2, and all of those figures include the self-employed.
“Roofing is beating me down. The money is great but the heat and labour is killing me,” an Ontario owner-operator who does roofing, siding and gutters wrote on r/Construction in December 2024.
An owner near $1 million in sales, who had stepped back to project management, wrote on r/Entrepreneur in 2022 that he wanted to stop feeling like a slave to his own company.
An office hire costs less than another roofer
At roofing contractors in May 2025, all four office jobs below paid a lower median than a roofer’s $55,860:
- Office: administrative assistant $44,250, office clerk $45,790, customer service rep $46,960, bookkeeping clerk $55,300
- On the roof: roofer’s helper $44,440, roofer $55,860
- Selling and estimating: sales rep on payroll $71,310, cost estimator $77,480
- Running jobs and the company: first-line supervisor $71,500, project management specialist $77,230, construction manager $96,540, general and operations manager $102,330
These national medians count commissions and production bonuses, and leave out benefits and anyone self-employed or paid on a 1099. BLS doesn’t publish roofing-company pay by metro area.
A Denver owner on track for about $12.5 million in his fourth year wrote on r/Entrepreneur in 2023 that he was weighing virtual assistants in the Philippines at $6 to $8 an hour, to take routine tasks off staff earning $20 to $40 an hour during the off-season. He didn’t post how it went. Getting yourself out of daily sales is a hire of its own, and How to Hire and Train Roofing Sales Reps Who Find Their Own Leads covers it.
Your first W-2 hire starts a three-day clock
Putting someone on payroll comes with paperwork, some of it on a deadline:
- Form I-9. USCIS says you have to complete Section 2 “within 3 business days of the date of hire,” or by the first day of paid work if the job lasts less than 3 days.
- Form W-4. The IRS wants a signed one from every new employee.
- Social Security number. The IRS says you need it for the employee’s W-2.
- New-hire report. In the Small Business Administration’s hiring example, the employer reports new employees “to their state directory within 20 days of the employee hire date,” as its state requires. Some states set shorter deadlines, so check yours.
Texas lets most private employers go without workers’ comp, but an employer without it has to tell the state and report any injury that costs more than a day of work, plus every work-related illness and death. A contract can still require coverage, including work for a general contractor or a government agency, so check your state’s rule and your contracts first.
If you’d rather keep office staff and project managers on 1099s, as the Tennessee owner did, the IRS decides whether someone is a contractor or an employee from three kinds of evidence: behavioral control, financial control and the type of relationship. As of October 2026 the Labor Department still lists its 2024 independent contractor rule as final, and it proposed a new rule on February 26, 2026, so check where that stands before you set anyone up on a 1099. Roofing Contracts and 1099 Rules: What a New Owner Needs in Writing goes further into the test.
Fall protection, OSHA’s most-cited rule, is one of the systems you hand off
OSHA cited fall protection more than any other standard in its 2025 fiscal year, across all industries, with construction ladders third and fall protection training seventh. Once you’re off the roof, whoever runs each job has to hold crews to those rules, so how your company handles fall protection and ladders has to be written down for him to follow and teach.
The rest of the job has to be handed off the same way. “I don’t trust anyone else to work under my company name incase they’re work isn’t the standard i would like it to be,” an owner turning over about $120,000 a year wrote on r/smallbusiness in 2023. The Ontario owner wrote in March 2025 that setting procedures and systems, and building a team, weren’t his strengths. The Tennessee owner was training project managers and writing down standard procedures as he hired, and in the same post wrote that he was starting to feel he didn’t know what he was doing.
A roofing and deck contractor wrote on r/Construction in 2023 that he needed a CRM to get past $1 million, and Roofing CRM Software: What It Costs and When You Need One covers what one costs.
Siding and gutters brought in under 5% of roofing contractors’ revenue in 2022
In the 2022 Economic Census, US roofing contractors took in $69.9 billion. Roofing work was $64.1 billion of it (91.7%), siding with fascia and soffit $1.97 billion (2.8%), gutters $1.38 billion (2.0%) and waterproofing 0.6%. If I’m reading the table right, that’s side work done by companies the Census files as roofers, and as industry totals the figures can’t tell you whether the roofers who added gutters made money on them.
A solo retail roofer two years in wrote on r/Construction in May 2026 that he needed something to do when roofing was slow, and put a new gutter machine with an enclosed trailer and tools at $20,000 to $25,000. New Tech Machinery lists the bare machine from $9,800 for 5-inch gutters and $12,300 for a 5- and 6-inch combo. The Ontario owner was offered a used combo with a trailer for about $6,500 Canadian.
The $15,000 loss was a one-off job outside roofing that a roofing client of ours took on. It went out roughly $1,000 at a time over a year, and the company went back to focusing on roofs.
If the new work touches wiring, check your state’s licensing rules first. Texas says “Anyone who performs electrical work in the state of Texas must be licensed,” and its FAQ doesn’t say whether taking solar panels off for a reroof and putting them back counts, so ask the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation before you sell it.
A new service goes on the Google profile you already have
Google’s rules say “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business.” A department gets its own profile only if it’s a distinct, public-facing business with a different name, typically with its own customer entrance and categories, so a new name alone isn’t enough. Gutter work run from the same office goes on the profile you have as a service, and Google tells you to “Choose the fewest number of categories it takes to describe your overall core business.”
If Google’s suggested list doesn’t have the service, you can add a custom one. Google automatically rejects custom services that break its rules and says to keep prices and phone numbers out of their names, and only some categories get the services feature.
An owner on Reddit asked whether he could run new garage builds under a DBA. In Texas, an LLC or corporation running a line under another name files Form 503, the Assumed Name Certificate, with the Secretary of State, for $25. It lasts up to 10 years and lists each county where you’ll use the name. I haven’t checked the rules for sole proprietors and partnerships, so if that’s you, or you’re outside Texas, look them up where you are.
If you’re weighing a gutter or siding line, run Zentora’s free Google Maps heatmap on a search for that work, like “gutter installation”. Pick your Google profile and the search, and in a few minutes you’ll see where you rank at 49 points around your office.