Why 75 percent of commercial roofers expect growth in 2026

The headline number on every industry deck right now is the same. More than three quarters of commercial roofing contractors expect 2026 sales to come in higher than 2025. That number is real. The work is real. But it hides a story the optimists are not telling, and the bottom quartile of the industry is telling a very different one. After 24 years running commercial roofing companies, the split I see right now is the cleanest K-shape I can remember.

TL;DR: More than 75 percent of commercial roofing contractors expect higher sales in 2026, per Roofing Contractor's State of the Industry report. The work is non-discretionary. But the bottom quartile sees margin compression, deferred maintenance backlog, and labor flight. The growth forecast hides a K-shaped split between operators with pricing discipline and the ones still bidding the old way.

What the State of the Industry data actually says

The 2026 State of the Roofing Industry report from Roofing Contractor put the optimism figure at more than 75 percent of contractors expecting higher sales next year. That tracks with where the market is sized. IMARC Group projects the US roofing market at $44.24 billion by 2034 from $23.35 billion in 2024, almost a doubling in a decade. Mordor Intelligence ties the growth path to storm damage frequency, aging building stock, and re-roof cycle replacement, not to new construction volume.

That last point is the one I want operators to sit with. The growth is not coming from cranes in the sky. It is coming from a 40-year-old EPDM membrane on a warehouse roof that has hit the end of its service life and needs to be replaced before the next winter. Demand is non-discretionary. The building owner is not choosing whether to do the work. The owner is choosing who does it and on what terms. That distinction is where the K-shaped split inside the 75 percent number actually lives.

Why the top quartile is calling for double-digit growth

The operators projecting the biggest growth in 2026 are not the ones chasing the most bids. They are the ones who fixed their pricing discipline 18 months ago and are now collecting the spread. Three things show up on every one of those operations when I talk to peers running them.

First, the metal allowance is dead. The static line item where a 2024 vendor sheet sets the price for edge metal, coping, and fasteners is gone. Every metal-heavy assembly is quoted inside 14 days of the bid date. The contingency is broken out and visible to the owner, not buried in overhead where it gets margin-compressed at the negotiating table.

Second, the bid expiration is short. A 30-day proposal in a market where input costs are still moving every month is a free option you hand the owner. The discipline operators run 7 to 15 day expirations. If the owner sits on the number, the number expires and gets re-quoted at current cost.

Third, the escalation clause is real. Not a paragraph buried in the AIA boilerplate, but a clause tied to a published index with a worked numerical example in the contract attachment. The owners signing those contracts know exactly how the math runs before the trigger fires. There are no surprises. That is what builds the kind of repeat relationship that lets a contractor project growth in this market with a straight face.

What the bottom quartile is seeing right now

The 25 percent of contractors not calling for growth are not pessimists. They are looking at their backlog, their bid-to-job ratio, and their margin per square, and the numbers are telling them something the headline forecast is not.

The most common pattern I see in that quartile is what I call the cheap-bid hangover. These are operators who won jobs in late 2024 and 2025 on fixed-price contracts with no escalation language, often by being 6 to 9 percent below the disciplined competitors. The metal moved. The labor cost moved. The work is now being installed at break-even or worse. The company is busy. Cash flow looks fine on a 30-day window. But there is no margin to reinvest, and the next round of bids is going out against the same fixed-price expectations the owners now expect.

The second pattern is labor flight. The skilled installer who has been on the crew for eight years is now driving for a delivery service or working on a solar install crew that pays $4 more an hour with predictable hours. The roofing operator cannot raise wages without raising bids, but the bids that already won the work were priced before the wage move. The math does not close.

The third pattern is the deferred maintenance backlog turning into an emergency call book. That sounds like good news on the surface. It is not. Emergency reroofs run on schedules nobody chose, with material specs that are whatever the supplier can ship in 48 hours, and labor pulled off scheduled work where the margin was already priced in. The job gets done. The customer is grateful. The P&L is a mess. The operator works harder and earns less, and the headline forecast tells them they should be growing.

Which submarkets are growing and which are not

The aggregate growth number hides real divergence between segments. Reroof and repair are the engine. Mid-market commercial new build, the 30,000 to 80,000 square foot office and light industrial work that fed a lot of regional contractors through 2022 and 2023, is soft. Interest rates have not come down enough to unstick that segment.

Where the work is right now:

• Reroof on warehouse, distribution, and light industrial buildings 20 years and older. The membrane has reached end of service life and the insurance and lender pressure is real.
• Repair and maintenance contracts on existing portfolios, especially with REITs and property managers running multi-site programs.
• Storm response work in regions hit by hail and wind events, which Mordor and the trade press have flagged as a structural growth driver, not a one-time spike.
• Public sector and education reroof work funded by the maintenance backlog that built up during the pandemic deferral years.

Where the work is not, at least not yet, is speculative office, retail expansion outside grocery-anchored centers, and ground-up new construction below the institutional tier. If your backlog is heavy in those segments and light in reroof and portfolio maintenance, you are exposed to the bottom quartile’s pattern whether you have hit it yet or not.

What this means for the operator running a $5 to $50 million book

The honest answer is that the 75 percent growth forecast is not a guarantee. It is an opportunity that splits based on who has done the operational work in the last 18 months. The companies in the top quartile have done four things, and they have done all of them before this bidding season started.

They have a tight estimating template that re-quotes metal on every job over a threshold, with a contingency line the owner can see. They have a contract template with an escalation clause tied to a public index and a bid expiration that holds at 15 days or less. They have labor relationships that pay competitively for the regional market and a crew lead bench that can run jobs without the owner on every site. They have a customer mix tilted toward reroof, portfolio maintenance, and storm response, not toward speculative mid-market new build.

The companies that have done two of those four are flat. The companies that have done one or zero are in the bottom quartile, and the math is going to catch them in the second half of 2026 if it has not already. The split is operational, not cyclical, and that is why it is going to keep widening through the rest of the decade.

The growth is real, and so is the squeeze

I do not think the 75 percent number is wrong. I think it is incomplete. The work is there. Demand is non-discretionary. The roofing market is doubling over the next decade and the back half of that growth is loaded into reroof and storm-driven replacement, not new build. That is a tailwind for any operator who can take advantage of it.

But the operators who take advantage of it are the ones who already rebuilt their pricing discipline, their contract terms, their labor cost structure, and their customer mix. The operators still bidding the old way will see top-line revenue grow and gross margin shrink at the same time. They will look busy. The P&L will tell a different story.

If you are running a commercial roofing operation right now and you have not pulled your estimating template apart in the last 12 months, that is the work to do this quarter, before the 2026 bid season fully opens up. The growth is real. The squeeze is real. The winners in this cycle are the ones who priced it honestly before the market made them.