Working in roofing
Roofing jobs: what pays, what it takes, and how crews are built
How roofing crews pay by the square versus hourly, which safety cards you need to get on a site, and how storm work differs from production roofing.
Also advertised as: roofer, roofing laborer, shingle installer, commercial roofer, flat roof technician, roofing crew lead, service and repair tech.
The ladder
What the rungs in roofing actually are
Job adverts use these titles loosely. This is what each one means in practice, and what you are doing all day on it.
- 01
Laborer / loader
Tear-off, loading the roof, ground cleanup and magnet sweeps. Hard days, and the fastest way to find out whether you can work at height.
- 02
Installer
Shingles, underlayment, flashing and penetrations. On a commercial crew, membrane — welding TPO or torching mod bit.
- 03
Crew lead / foreman
Running a roof: layout, pace, quality, safety, and the homeowner standing in the driveway. Responsible for whether the job comes back.
- 04
Service and repair technician
Leak hunting on roofs other people built. The best-paid route that does not involve running a crew, because diagnosis is rarer than installation.
- 05
Superintendent or estimator
Multiple crews, or measuring and pricing. Increasingly done from aerial measurement rather than a ladder.
Tickets and licenses
What to get, and in what order
The ones you cannot work without come first. After that, the question is which one pays for itself quickest — not which one sounds most impressive.
Worth having, in rough order of return
OSHA 10 and fall protection training
The real credential in roofing. Fall protection is the most cited hazard in construction, many commercial sites will not let you past the gate without a card, and a crew that treats harnesses as optional is telling you what the rest of the job is like.
Manufacturer certifications (GAF, Owens Corning, CertainTeed, Carlisle and similar)
Usually held by the company, but the training is yours. Certified installers are required for the warranties that win the better-paying jobs, and the card follows you between employers.
Driver’s license, and a clean record
Practically required to lead a crew, because somebody has to move the truck and the trailer.
Welding or torch experience for commercial membrane
Hot-air welding TPO and torch-applied mod bit are learnable in weeks and move you off residential shingles onto commercial crews, which run more of the year.
Bilingual on-site communication
Not a certificate, and worth saying plainly: a lead who can run a mixed crew in both languages is one of the hardest people in this trade to replace, and it is reflected in the pay.
How the money works
How roofing pay is actually structured
No rates here on purpose — they vary by market and by year, and a stale number is worse than none. What does not change is the structure, and it is the part nobody explains before you take the job.
Production residential crews are commonly paid by the square — piece rate — which means weather and crew size decide your week as much as your skill does, and a rained-out stretch is unpaid. Service, repair and commercial work is more often hourly, steadier and lower-ceiling. Storm and insurance restoration work after a hail event pays unusually well for a few months and then stops, and the crews that chase it travel. If you are comparing offers, convert everything to what you would actually have earned over a whole year including the bad weeks, not a good week in June.
The interview
What you will be asked
Not a warning — a list to think about on the drive over. These are the questions that separate somebody who has done the work from somebody who has watched it.
- 01
“Are you comfortable at height, on a steep pitch, in summer heat?”
- 02
“How do you flash a pipe penetration, and a wall-to-roof transition?”
- 03
“Have you run a crew, or been on one?”
- 04
“What do you do when you find rotten decking mid-tear-off?”
- 05
“Tear-off through dry-in in one day — walk me through your sequence.”
Timing
When this trade is actually hiring
Applying in the right six weeks is worth more than almost anything you can put on a resume.
Roofing is the most seasonal trade on this list in cold markets: crews staff up in spring and shed people in late autumn, so the strongest time to be hired is March through May and the weakest is December. The exception is storm work, which is driven by hail and wind rather than the calendar and can start hiring hundreds of people in a region within days of an event. Commercial and service work runs closer to year-round.
Questions
Common questions about roofing work
- Do I need a license to be a roofer?
- In most states the licensing sits with the roofing contractor, not the individual installer, so you can be hired with no license at all. What you do need is the safety training and, in many places, proof of it before you can be on a commercial site.
- Is piece rate better than hourly?
- It pays more on a good week and nothing on a rained-out one. A fast installer on a well-run production crew usually earns more on piece rate; anyone who wants a predictable paycheck, or who is still learning speed, is better off hourly. Ask what the crew averaged across last year.
- How do I stop being a laborer?
- Learn flashing and detail work, because that is what separates an installer from a loader, and learn to find leaks, because repair diagnosis is the scarcest skill in the trade. Both are learned by asking to be put on the detail rather than the field.
- Is commercial roofing a different job?
- Largely yes. Flat and low-slope membrane work — TPO, EPDM, mod bit — is a different skill set, runs more of the year, is less weather-dependent day to day, and the crews are more likely to be hourly with benefits.
Put your roofing experience somewhere it keeps working
A free profile holds your licenses, tickets, equipment and where you have worked, so you stop retyping them into every application. It gives you a page at your own address that you can text to a foreman or a friend who says they are hiring. And when a company hires through HireWRX, every application is read and scored — nobody’s gets skipped because it arrived at eleven at night.
- Free, and free to delete — your data goes with it.
- You choose whether the page is public at all.
- Pay expectations are never on your public page.
- No employer notes or scores ever appear on it.
Other trades
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Hiring in roofing rather than looking? Read the other side of this page.