Home Improvement ROI: The 2025 Cost vs. Value Data

Short answer: Of the seven projects this ROI file verifies from the 2025 Cost vs. Value data, garage door replacement recoups the most at resale, an average 267.7% of its $4,672 job cost. Fiber-cement siding also beats its job cost, at 113.7%. Vinyl siding, wood decks and composite decks all recoup most but not all of their cost, in the 88% to 97% range. Asphalt and metal roofing recoup the least of the seven, at 67.5% and 50.1%.

Home improvement ROI gets talked about constantly and verified rarely. Most of what circulates is a recycled headline number with no stated source, no stated methodology and no way to check whether it is this year’s figure or five years old. This ROI file does the opposite: it cites exactly seven project line items, each pulled directly from one named, dated source, with the job cost and resale value figures shown in full rather than reduced to a single percentage.

The source is the Cost vs. Value Report, 2025 edition, the 38th annual study published by Zonda Media through Remodeling and JLC magazine. Each year it compares average job cost against average resale value added for a defined set of common remodeling projects, nationally. This page cites seven of those line items verbatim: garage door replacement, vinyl siding, fiber-cement siding, a wood deck addition, a composite deck addition, asphalt shingle roofing and metal roofing. For the underlying cost drivers behind two of these jobs, see the garage door replacement cost file and the siding replacement cost file, both of which price the work itself rather than its resale math. Run any of the seven projects through the ROI calculator as you read.

What the Cost vs. Value Report actually measures

The Cost vs. Value Report measures two things side by side for each project type: the average amount homeowners paid contractors to have the job done, and the average amount real estate professionals estimate that project adds to a home’s resale price in the same market, surveyed separately. Dividing the second figure by the first produces the cost recouped percentage that gets quoted everywhere, but the two underlying numbers matter more than the ratio, because they tell you the scale of the project as well as its return.

It is worth being precise about what this is not. It is not a controlled experiment where identical houses are sold with and without each project. It is not a guarantee about any individual home, any individual buyer, or any individual market. It is a national survey average, built from contractor-reported job costs and real-estate-professional-estimated value, for a defined national project specification. Two houses a mile apart can see different outcomes from the identical project, and this report cannot capture that variation. What it is reliably useful for is comparing projects against each other on a consistent methodology, which is exactly how this ROI file uses it.

The seven line items cited here are a subset of the 28 projects the full study covers nationally. ProsNook has verified these seven directly; this page does not cite, estimate or imply a recoup percentage for any of the other 21 project types in that study, and it does not cite a specific web address for the report since the live URL was not independently confirmed at the time this was written. Cite the report by its name, publisher and edition, as this page does throughout.

The complete 2025 line item table

Here is every figure this ROI file verifies, in full, with no rounding beyond what the source itself reports. Job cost is the average amount paid for the project. Resale value added is the average amount real estate professionals estimated the project adds at sale. Cost recouped is resale value added divided by job cost.

Reading this table left to right rather than top to bottom is the more useful habit. Garage door replacement costs $4,672 and is credited with adding $12,507, a gap of $7,835 in the project’s favor. Metal roofing costs $51,865, over eleven times as much, and is credited with adding $25,972, roughly double what the garage door adds in absolute dollars, but at less than a fifth of its recoup rate. Scale and recoup rate move in opposite directions across this set, which is the pattern the rest of this file works through.

Garage door replacement: the top return in this data

Garage door replacement is the standout of the 2025 figures by a wide margin. Job cost averages $4,672. Resale value added averages $12,507. Cost recouped averages 267.7%, meaning the typical project is credited with adding roughly two and two thirds times what it cost. No other project among the seven verified here gets within 150 percentage points of that figure.

Part of the explanation is scale. A garage door sits at the cheap end of this data set, so even a moderate dollar gain between cost and value translates into a large percentage. Part of it is visibility: a garage door frequently occupies a sizable share of a home’s front elevation, more than a front door, often more than the windows combined, and it is one of the first things a buyer’s eye lands on pulling into a driveway. An old, dented, mismatched door reads as neglect even when nothing else about the house suggests it. A new one reads as a maintained house before a buyer has set foot inside.

This ROI file does not re-price garage door construction, material or width, since that work already exists in detail in the garage door replacement cost file, which covers single versus double doors, steel gauge, insulation layers, openers and springs. What this file adds is the resale side of that project that the cost file deliberately does not claim, because a specific recoup percentage needs a named source, and now it has one.

Siding replacement: vinyl versus fiber-cement

Siding is the one category in this data set with two materials verified, and the comparison is genuinely close in dollar terms but different in which side of the cost line it lands on. Vinyl siding averages a $17,950 job cost against $17,313 in resale value added, a 96.5% recoup. Fiber-cement siding averages a $21,485 job cost against $24,420 in resale value added, a 113.7% recoup, the only siding option in this set that is credited with adding more than it cost.

That does not automatically make fiber-cement the better choice for every homeowner. It costs roughly $3,500 more on average to install, and the decision between the two materials involves durability, maintenance, fire resistance and appearance as much as this one resale figure. What the data does establish is that fiber-cement’s higher job cost is not, on average, money lost at resale; real estate professionals in this survey estimated it back and then some.

Our siding replacement cost file prices both materials, along with wood, metal and brick veneer, by square foot and by house size, and works through the install-over-existing-siding question that this resale-focused file does not cover. If you are deciding between materials on cost alone, start there; if you are weighing the resale case specifically, these two figures are the verified ones.

Deck additions: wood versus composite

A deck addition is the one project type in this data set built from nothing, rather than a replacement of something already there, and the two material choices split in the opposite direction from siding. A wood deck addition averages an $18,263 job cost against $17,323 in resale value added, a 94.9% recoup. A composite deck addition averages a $25,096 job cost against $22,199 in resale value added, an 88.5% recoup.

Wood costs less to build and recoups a slightly higher share of that lower cost. Composite costs roughly $6,800 more on average and recoups a slightly lower share. In absolute dollars, the composite deck is still credited with more total resale value, $22,199 against wood’s $17,323, so the choice is not simply which number is bigger; it depends on whether the comparison that matters to you is the percentage or the dollar figure.

What this report does not price is what happens after the sale closes for the owner who does not move. Composite decking is widely chosen for lower ongoing maintenance, meaning less sanding, staining and board replacement over the years the deck is actually used, which is a real cost and time saving this resale figure is silent on. A buyer evaluating a listing and a homeowner planning to live in the house for a decade are, in effect, weighing two different things that this single percentage cannot separate.

Roofing replacement: asphalt versus metal

Roofing is the largest category by job cost in this data set, and it is also where the cost recouped percentages are lowest. Asphalt shingle roofing averages a $31,871 job cost against $21,501 in resale value added, a 67.5% recoup. Metal roofing averages a $51,865 job cost, over $20,000 more, against $25,972 in resale value added, a 50.1% recoup.

Neither figure is a reason to avoid either material if the roof genuinely needs replacing. A roof is functional infrastructure before it is a resale lever, and the more relevant comparison for most homeowners is not recoup percentage but the cost of deferring the work: a roof past its service life is a disclosure item, an insurance concern in some markets, and a source of water damage that can cost considerably more than the roof itself to repair. Our cost to replace a roof file and metal roof cost file both price these projects by size and material; the roof repair cost file covers the smaller fixes that sit below a full replacement.

The gap between asphalt and metal here is informative on its own. Metal costs roughly 63% more on average and is credited with roughly 21% more resale value, which is a worse trade on paper than asphalt’s own numbers. Metal roofing is chosen for longevity, energy performance and storm resistance far more often than for resale math, and this data set is consistent with that: it is simply not primarily a resale decision for most buyers of the material.

Why some projects return more than they cost

Looking at all seven figures together, a pattern holds across every pair in this set: the cheaper the project, the higher its recoup percentage tends to run, and the more expensive the project, the lower it tends to run. Garage door replacement, the cheapest job cost of the seven at $4,672, has the highest recoup at 267.7%. Metal roofing, the most expensive at $51,865, has the lowest recoup at 50.1%.

There is a mechanical reason this shows up in survey data generally, separate from any specific project. A dollar of added value is easier to achieve, proportionally, on a small, highly visible item than on a large, structural one, because small visible items influence a buyer’s snap impression disproportionately to their cost, while large structural items are frequently valued by buyers more as an absence of future expense than as a feature they would pay a premium for. That asymmetry between perceived upside and perceived necessity is the throughline across every project in this table, and it is worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a coincidence of this particular year’s survey.

None of this means expensive projects are poor decisions. It means their justification usually lives outside a resale percentage: safety, function, comfort, energy cost, or simply that the old version has failed and needs replacing regardless of what a buyer would pay for the new one.

Curb appeal and the psychology of a buyer’s first look

Real estate agents describe a buyer’s reaction to a home’s exterior as happening within the first several seconds of arrival, well before a showing officially starts, and every project in this verified set that scores well sits in that first field of view. A garage door is frequently the single largest flat surface facing the street. Siding covers the entire visible shell of the house. A deck is seen the moment a buyer steps into the backyard. Buyers form an impression of how well a house has been maintained before they have opened a single interior door, and that impression colors how generously they read everything that follows.

This is a general pattern about buyer behavior, illustrated by this data set rather than proven by a single year of it, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as a statistic: a worn, dated or damaged exterior reads as a maintenance backlog, implying the buyer should discount their offer to cover problems they cannot yet see, while a clean, current exterior reads as evidence the rest of the house has probably been looked after too. The exterior functions as a signal of overall condition, not merely as its own line item, which is a plausible explanation for why visible exterior work recoups disproportionately well compared to work hidden inside walls, under floors or above ceilings.

Fixed problems versus optional upgrades

A second useful lens on this same data is the distinction between a project that fixes a visible problem and a project that is purely an optional upgrade with no problem behind it. An old, dented garage door or cracked, faded siding reads to a buyer as a defect: something that will need attention regardless of who owns the house next. Replacing it does not just add a feature, it removes a negative that was actively working against the sale.

A deck addition sits closer to the optional end of that spectrum, since many homes function perfectly well without one, and that may be part of why its recoup percentages, while still strong, trail the fixed-problem categories of garage door and siding. Roofing is interesting because it is usually both: a roof near the end of its life is a defect, but a brand-new premium metal roof on a house that did not need one yet is closer to a discretionary upgrade, and buyers appear to price the two situations differently even though this report only tracks the average outcome, not the starting condition.

The practical takeaway is that this data set rewards fixing visible, defect-reading problems more generously than it rewards adding optional amenities, and that distinction is worth applying to your own project list even for project types this page has no verified figure for.

Job cost, resale value, and net cost explained

Three numbers sit behind every project in this data set, and keeping them separate avoids the most common misreading of a cost-versus-value percentage. Job cost is what you pay. Resale value added is what a real estate professional estimates the project adds to the sale price. Net cost is the difference between the two, the portion of what you paid that is not, on average, recovered at resale.

Asphalt shingle roofing is a clean illustration because its numbers divide into simple shares. The $31,871 job cost splits into $21,501 of value recouped (67.5%) and $10,370 of cost not recovered (32.5%), and those two shares sum to the whole project.

A project recouping over 100%, like garage door replacement or fiber-cement siding, does not divide this way, because the value credited exceeds the cost, with nothing left as “not recovered.” For those two projects, the entire job cost is recouped and then some; there is no net cost share to chart. Try your own project in the ROI lookup to see its job cost, resale value added, and net cost broken out the same way.

What resale value added actually measures

Resale value added in this report is an estimate, not a measured outcome from an actual sale. It comes from real estate professionals surveyed about what they believe a defined, standard version of each project would add to a home’s sale price in their market, based on their professional judgment and local experience, not from tracking identical houses sold with and without the improvement. That distinction matters because it means the figure reflects professional opinion about buyer behavior in aggregate, which is a reasonable and widely used proxy, but not a laboratory measurement.

It also means the figure describes a defined national-average project specification, not your specific materials, your specific contractor’s workmanship, or your specific neighborhood’s buyer pool. A garage door replacement done with premium materials in a market where buyers notice and reward that kind of detail could outperform this average; the identical project done sloppily, or in a market where buyers are focused entirely on square footage and school district, could underperform it. The number is a sound starting point for comparing project types against each other, which is this file’s purpose, and a much weaker tool for predicting your own house’s exact outcome.

Why exterior projects tend to outperform interior ones

All seven of the project types verified on this page are exterior work: a garage door, siding, a deck, a roof. That is not an editorial choice, it is simply the set ProsNook has independently confirmed figures for, but it does point at a broader and well-documented pattern in cost-versus-value research generally, worth naming honestly as a pattern rather than as a number this page can cite for interior projects.

Exterior projects are seen by every single potential buyer before they decide whether to walk through the front door, and in competitive markets, a weak exterior can cost a showing it never gets. Interior projects, including kitchens and bathrooms, are seen only by buyers who already chose to tour the house, and their resale math tends to depend heavily on how badly outdated the existing version was, which is a variable this report’s national averages cannot capture for any individual home. This is offered as a general explanation for a known pattern in the field, not as a specific percentage claim for any project type outside the seven cited above.

Kitchen and bathroom remodels in context

Readers asking about home improvement ROI almost always think of kitchens and bathrooms first, so it is worth being explicit about what this page does and does not say about them. Neither project appears among the seven line items ProsNook has verified from the 2025 Cost vs. Value data, and this page does not cite, imply or estimate a cost-recouped percentage for either one.

What ProsNook does offer is its own illustrative cost estimates for both projects, built the same way every cost file on this site is built: typical cost ranges by scope and finish level, not a resale guarantee. The kitchen remodel cost file and the bathroom remodel cost file both price these jobs in detail. If you are comparing a kitchen or bathroom project against the seven verified here, treat any resale percentage you find for them elsewhere as a separate, independently sourced claim, not an extension of the figures on this page.

Big ticket projects and the law of diminishing recoup

Lay the seven job costs next to their recoup percentages and a rough rule emerges: as job cost rises across this set, recoup percentage falls, almost without exception. Garage door ($4,672) leads at 267.7%. The two siding options ($17,950 and $21,485) sit in the 96 to 114% range. The two deck options ($18,263 and $25,096) sit in the 88 to 95% range. The two roofing options ($31,871 and $51,865), the most expensive pair, sit lowest at 50 to 68%.

This is a pattern worth taking seriously when prioritizing a list of projects against a resale goal specifically, separate from any project’s functional necessity. A homeowner choosing between several discretionary projects purely on resale math, with no urgent functional need behind any of them, would be reading this data correctly to favor the smaller, highly visible items first. A homeowner whose roof is actively leaking has a different, non-discretionary problem that this percentage was never meant to answer.

Using this data before you list your house

If a sale is on the calendar, the useful exercise is sorting your own project list by two questions this data set helps answer: does the item look broken or dated to someone glancing at the house for the first time, and is it one of the visible, exterior categories this report shows recouping the most. A dented garage door, tired siding, or a sagging deck railing hit both marks, and the figures above suggest addressing them is reasonable to expect back at least most, and sometimes all, of what you spend.

A roof already near the end of its service life is a harder call purely on resale math, since this data credits it with the lowest recoup of the seven, but a roof that is visibly failing is also a disclosure problem and a negotiating lever for the buyer regardless of the recoup percentage, which can cost more in a lowered offer than the replacement itself. Compare quotes carefully using our walkthrough on comparing contractor quotes before committing to any pre-sale project, since a rushed pre-listing job is exactly the kind of work where price and quality can drift apart.

Using this data when you are not selling

If there is no sale on the horizon, this data still has a use, just a different one. A garage door, siding or deck that scores well here is, by the same logic, work you get to enjoy for years before any resale question arises, which is arguably the stronger case for doing it. The recoup percentage becomes a pleasant side benefit of a decision made for your own comfort and curb appeal, rather than the entire justification.

Roofing stays in a different category regardless of whether you are selling. A failing roof needs replacing on its own timeline, set by leaks, missed shingles, flashing failure or simple age, not by a resale calendar. Our hvac maintenance guide and fall home maintenance checklist both cover the kind of ongoing upkeep that keeps small problems from becoming the expensive, non-discretionary kind of project roofing represents in this data set.

Common home improvement ROI myths

Myth: every remodel pays for itself. The data above directly contradicts this for five of the seven projects verified here; only garage door replacement and fiber-cement siding average over 100% recoup. Myth: the biggest project gives the biggest return. The opposite shows up consistently in this set: the two cheapest projects recoup the highest share, and the two most expensive recoup the lowest.

Myth: resale value added means the house sells for that much more. It is a professional estimate of a project’s contribution to sale price, not a line item a buyer sees or a guarantee attached to any specific offer. Myth: a national percentage applies evenly everywhere. It is a national average; cost vs. value figures are also published by region in the full study, and regional figures for any given project can differ meaningfully from the national number cited here.

A worked example: choosing between two projects

A homeowner has $20,000 to spend before listing and is deciding between replacing aging vinyl siding, in generally sound but dated condition, and building a new wood deck where none currently exists. Neither is urgent; both are discretionary.

Using the verified 2025 figures as a guide rather than a prediction: vinyl siding at a $17,950 average job cost would be estimated to add roughly $17,313 at resale, a net cost of about $637, inside the $20,000 budget with room left over. A wood deck at an $18,263 average job cost would be estimated to add roughly $17,323, a net cost of about $940, also inside budget and almost identical in dollar terms to the siding option.

On resale math alone the two projects land within about $300 of each other, close enough that the deciding factor should probably not be this report at all. The stronger questions are which problem the house actually has, meaning whether the existing siding genuinely reads as dated to a walk-up buyer, and whether a deck is something the next owner’s typical buyer profile in that specific neighborhood actually wants. Run your own project’s numbers in the ROI calculator to compare them the same way.

Limitations of the Cost vs. Value data

Four limitations are worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. First, it is a survey of professional estimates, not a record of actual completed sales with and without each project. Second, it describes a defined, standardized national project specification; a custom, upgraded or downgraded version of any project will not track the figures shown here. Third, national averages blend together markets with very different buyer preferences, price points and climates, and the report itself publishes regional breakdowns that can diverge from the national figures cited on this page. Fourth, it only measures resale value, not the years of personal use, enjoyment, safety or functional necessity a project delivers to the owner before any sale happens, all of which are real returns this percentage cannot capture.

None of this makes the data unreliable for its intended purpose, which is comparing project types against each other on a consistent, repeatable national basis. It does mean treating any single percentage, including the seven cited throughout this page, as one input into a decision rather than the entire decision.

Regional swings the national averages hide

The seven figures throughout this page are national averages, and the Cost vs. Value study itself is structured, by its own stated methodology, to also report regional breakdowns alongside the national numbers, because labor costs, material costs, climate and buyer expectations vary considerably by region. A project that recoups well nationally can recoup more or less in any specific metro area, and this page does not have a verified regional figure to cite for any of the seven line items, so none is given here.

The practical implication is to treat the national figures on this page as a starting comparison between project types, useful for deciding which category of project to prioritize, and to look to a local real estate professional or your own regional edition of the source report for a number specific to your market before making a spending decision based on resale math alone.

Financing a project with this data in mind

A strong recoup percentage does not change how a project gets paid for upfront, and several of the seven projects here carry job costs in the five figure range that many households finance rather than pay in cash. Our home renovation loan options file covers the common ways these projects get funded, and our home renovation tax deductions file explains, in general mechanism rather than as current rates, how improvement costs sometimes interact with the tax basis of a home at sale. Our budgeting walkthrough is the right next stop for turning any of the figures on this page into an actual household budget before committing to a contractor.

The bottom line

Across the seven projects this ROI file verifies from the 2025 Cost vs. Value data, garage door replacement leads by a wide margin at 267.7% cost recouped, followed by fiber-cement siding at 113.7%, the only other project in this set credited with adding more value than it cost. Vinyl siding, wood decks and composite decks all recoup most of their cost, in the 88% to 97% range, and asphalt and metal roofing recoup the least, at 67.5% and 50.1%. The pattern across all seven is consistent: smaller, highly visible exterior projects tend to recoup more of their cost than larger structural ones, a pattern grounded in how buyers read a home’s condition at first glance rather than in any single project’s materials.

Use these seven figures as a comparison tool between project types, not as a prediction for your specific house, your specific market or your specific contractor’s work. For the projects covered in detail elsewhere on this site, start with the garage door replacement cost file and the siding replacement cost file to price the work itself, then come back to this page to weigh what the national data says each project tends to recoup.

This ROI file cites seven specific project line items (job cost, resale value added and cost recouped) directly from the Cost vs. Value Report, 2025 edition (the 38th annual study, published by Zonda Media via Remodeling and JLC magazine), and does not alter, extrapolate or round those figures beyond what the source itself reports. All other discussion on this page, including any reference to kitchens, bathrooms, buyer psychology or regional variation, is offered as general illustration or mechanism, not as a sourced statistic, and should not be read as a cost-recouped figure for any project beyond the seven named above. Resale value added is a professional estimate, not a guaranteed sale outcome, and your own project, market, materials and buyer pool will affect your actual result. This is not real estate, financial or legal advice; confirm any resale assumption with a local real estate professional before making a renovation decision based on it.