Every roofing site quotes the same statistic — “about 80% of American homes have asphalt shingles” — and none of them say where it came from. We can check it. Across 50,687,261 single-family homes where the roof material is actually recorded, in 2,275 counties, 77.4% carry asphalt or composition shingle. The folk figure was close, and now it has a denominator. All figures derived August 25, 2026; methodology at the bottom.
What America’s roofs are made of
Shares are of homes where the material is recorded — not of all homes. Roughly 40% of single-family properties have no material on file, and those are excluded rather than counted as anything.
| Material | Homes | Share of recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Asphalt / composition shingle | 39,234,439 | 77.4% |
| Metal | 3,200,802 | 6.3% |
| Tile / concrete | 2,710,979 | 5.4% |
| Other / unclassified | 2,267,050 | 4.5% |
| Wood shake / shingle | 1,618,982 | 3.2% |
| Built-up / flat | 1,038,271 | 2.0% |
| Asbestos | 405,280 | 0.8% |
| Slate | 211,458 | 0.4% |
The second-place finish is the part worth sitting with. Metal roofing markets itself as the mainstream successor to asphalt, and it is on 3.2 million homes — real, but one home in sixteen among those with a recorded material. Slate, which dominates the visual language of “quality roof”, is on 211,458 homes: four in every thousand.
Nevada is the only state where asphalt does not win
In 33 states and the District of Columbia with usable coverage, asphalt is the plurality roof in every one except Nevada, where 69.7% of recorded roofs are tile or concrete and asphalt takes just 25.2%. Arizona comes closest to joining it at 37.1% tile. The pattern is climate plus construction era: tile tracks the post-1980 Sun Belt building boom, and both states did most of their growing inside it.
The other regional signatures land exactly where a roofer would expect them. Vermont is 29.3% metal — standing seam sheds snow. The District of Columbia is 20.4% slate and 17.6% built-up or flat, which is a rowhouse housing stock described in roofing terms. Alabama and Mississippi both run 20% metal, the rural South’s long preference. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island sit at 96–98% asphalt, about as close to a monoculture as this data gets.
| State | Homes recorded | Coverage | Asphalt | Metal | Tile | Wood |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 5,063,591 | 88.8% | 70.6% | 7.5% | 11.4% | 1.6% |
| Georgia | 2,243,378 | 72.9% | 85.2% | 11.5% | 0.0% | 2.7% |
| Indiana | 2,142,867 | 98.3% | 90.0% | 4.5% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Tennessee | 1,984,324 | 92.8% | 74.3% | 15.1% | 1.8% | 0.1% |
| Virginia | 1,962,592 | 83.9% | 89.0% | 7.1% | 0.2% | 1.8% |
| North Carolina | 1,909,182 | 61.8% | 83.9% | 6.8% | 0.1% | 6.0% |
| Alabama | 1,602,066 | 98.9% | 79.1% | 20.0% | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Arizona | 1,440,398 | 72.0% | 47.2% | 1.7% | 37.1% | 0.8% |
| Washington | 1,378,442 | 70.7% | 75.8% | 6.4% | 12.8% | 1.6% |
| Massachusetts | 1,360,329 | 93.4% | 96.1% | 0.7% | 0.1% | 1.5% |
| Oklahoma | 1,320,177 | 99.6% | 88.3% | 10.6% | 0.0% | 0.6% |
| Maryland | 1,262,060 | 97.9% | 94.8% | 1.9% | 0.1% | 1.0% |
| Colorado | 1,254,324 | 77.9% | 81.9% | 5.0% | 4.7% | 5.5% |
| Minnesota | 1,050,371 | 62.9% | 89.0% | 3.1% | 0.0% | 5.4% |
| Arkansas | 1,033,305 | 98.1% | 84.8% | 14.4% | 0.1% | 0.2% |
| Iowa | 968,835 | 94.6% | 91.9% | 6.3% | 0.1% | 0.7% |
| Kansas | 919,133 | 97.7% | 91.5% | 4.8% | 0.9% | 2.6% |
| Oregon | 890,196 | 80.3% | 83.0% | 3.0% | 1.9% | 7.3% |
| Kentucky | 873,809 | 74.3% | 91.6% | 7.5% | 0.1% | 0.2% |
| Mississippi | 813,464 | 92.3% | 74.0% | 20.5% | 0.1% | 0.4% |
| Connecticut | 796,128 | 93.6% | 96.2% | 0.6% | 0.1% | 2.3% |
| Nevada | 746,609 | 92.1% | 25.2% | 1.0% | 69.7% | 1.3% |
| Utah | 616,192 | 86.2% | 62.8% | 1.9% | 8.7% | 0.9% |
| Nebraska | 575,143 | 90.4% | 93.1% | 3.8% | 0.2% | 1.3% |
| Idaho | 450,497 | 72.7% | 86.0% | 11.1% | 0.2% | 1.3% |
| New Hampshire | 369,814 | 96.0% | 86.2% | 12.7% | 0.0% | 0.3% |
| Montana | 352,706 | 99.8% | 73.8% | 19.9% | 0.3% | 4.7% |
| Maine | 275,831 | 66.1% | 89.1% | 9.6% | 0.0% | 0.5% |
| Hawaii | 265,555 | 92.0% | 36.5% | 8.8% | 5.5% | 2.6% |
| Rhode Island | 246,459 | 99.2% | 98.1% | 0.3% | 0.0% | 0.7% |
| Delaware * | 241,066 | 76.3% | 66.5% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 32.4% |
| Wyoming | 170,702 | 97.6% | 81.6% | 14.9% | 0.2% | 2.5% |
| Vermont | 150,524 | 76.9% | 66.2% | 29.3% | 0.0% | 0.3% |
| District of Columbia | 48,456 | 99.9% | 51.7% | 7.6% | 1.2% | 1.1% |
* Delaware’s wood share is a county coding artifact, not a roof. Sussex County records “wood shingle” on 66,508 of its roughly 78,900 homes with a material on file — 84% of the county. No other jurisdiction in the country looks like that, and the Delaware beaches are not 84% cedar shake. We leave the row in with the state rather than quietly deleting it, because the honest version of this data includes its own defects. Read Delaware’s asphalt figure as a floor.
Asphalt has held ~75% of the market for 125 years
Group homes by the decade they were built and the surprise is how little moves. Asphalt’s share sits between 72% and 79% in every single decade from the 1900s to the 2020s. The competitive story in American roofing is not asphalt vs. a challenger — it is which minority material occupies the remaining quarter.
| Decade built | Homes | Asphalt | Metal | Tile | Wood | Slate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900s | 480,980 | 74.7% | 9.0% | 0.2% | 1.6% | 2.4% |
| 1910s | 399,272 | 79.3% | 5.3% | 0.5% | 1.6% | 2.2% |
| 1920s | 849,916 | 76.2% | 4.2% | 1.6% | 2.9% | 1.9% |
| 1930s | 628,531 | 72.3% | 6.5% | 2.4% | 3.5% | 3.4% |
| 1940s | 1,240,894 | 75.4% | 5.4% | 1.0% | 4.5% | 1.2% |
| 1950s | 3,154,612 | 72.8% | 3.5% | 0.9% | 5.7% | 0.4% |
| 1960s | 3,085,725 | 74.6% | 4.7% | 1.3% | 7.0% | 0.3% |
| 1970s | 3,998,489 | 75.2% | 5.9% | 2.5% | 6.8% | 0.3% |
| 1980s | 4,482,938 | 75.9% | 6.8% | 5.0% | 4.0% | 0.3% |
| 1990s | 5,474,462 | 76.3% | 6.4% | 8.2% | 2.6% | 0.2% |
| 2000s | 6,431,524 | 75.8% | 5.2% | 10.2% | 2.1% | 0.2% |
| 2010s | 3,605,613 | 75.5% | 5.8% | 8.5% | 2.3% | 0.3% |
| 2020s | 1,969,237 | 73.4% | 5.4% | 10.1% | 1.6% | 0.2% |
Three clear movements sit inside that stability. Wood shake peaked at 7.0% of homes built in the 1960s and has fallen to 1.6% of 2020s homes — wildfire codes and insurer pressure did that. Slate was a 1930s material at 3.4% and is now 0.2%. Tile is the one genuine riser, from around 1% of mid-century homes to roughly 10% of everything built since 2000, which is the Sun Belt’s share of new construction showing up on rooftops.
For a roofing contractor this table is a targeting map more than a history lesson. A neighborhood built in the 1960s is a wood-shake replacement market whether or not the current roof is still wood; one built after 2000 in Phoenix or Las Vegas is a tile market, which is a different crew, a different material cost, and a different sales conversation than the asphalt tear-off next door.
The asbestos footnote
405,280 homes carry a roof material recorded as asbestos. Treat that as a coding signal and not a hazard census: the label reflects what an assessor wrote down, sometimes decades ago and sometimes carried forward through a rebuild, and roughly 40% of homes have no material recorded at all. It is a reason to confirm before a tear-off quote on older stock, not a number to quote as a national asbestos count.
Methodology
- Source. Scout Data’s production property database, restricted to active single-family residences — 85,058,760 homes. Roof material is sourced from county assessor records.
- The denominator. Every percentage on this page is computed over the 50,687,261 homes with a recorded material. Homes recorded blank (23,831,495) or explicitly “UNKNOWN” (10,540,004) are excluded — never counted as “no material” or folded into another category. That exclusion is 40.4% of the stock, which is why we show per-state coverage rather than implying a census.
- Grouping. Assessors use inconsistent vocabularies, so raw values are grouped into families: asphalt/composition combines composition shingle, asphalt, shingle, fiberglass, roll composition and cement shake; metal combines metal, galvanized, aluminum, tin and copper; tile combines tile, ceramic tile, concrete and bermuda; wood combines wood and wood shingle; built-up/flat combines built-up, gravel, roll tar and gravel, urethane and gypsum. Slate and asbestos stand alone. “Other” is the assessors’ own catch-all.
- State inclusion rule. A state appears only if the material is recorded on at least 60% of its single-family homes. This excludes West Virginia (0%), Alaska (7.2%), Louisiana (9.6%), New York and Michigan (11.3%), Wisconsin (16.4%), New Jersey (20.1%), Pennsylvania (22.9%), Ohio (25.5%), North Dakota (34.3%), Missouri (40.8%), California (40.6%), South Dakota (44.2%), Illinois (49.8%), New Mexico (52.9%), Texas (52.7%) and South Carolina (58.6%). Their absence says nothing about their roofs.
- What that does to the national figure. Because recording rates vary by state, the national 77.4% is weighted toward the states that record diligently and away from California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania. It is the best available national read, not a population-weighted census, and it should be quoted that way.
- Decade figures. Grouped by the home’s effective build year, restricted to 1900–2025 and to homes with a recorded material. Effective build year reflects substantial reconstruction where an assessor recorded one, so the oldest decades are thinner and somewhat self-selected.
Derived August 25, 2026. Spot something that looks wrong? Tell us — we’d rather correct a number than defend it.
The companion to this page is roof replacement statistics, which covers how often those roofs actually get replaced and what the work is declared to cost. For turning material and age into a route, how to get roofing leads covers the targeting side.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common roofing material in the United States?
Asphalt and composition shingle, by a margin nothing else approaches. Across 50,687,261 single-family homes with a recorded roof material, 77.4% carry asphalt or composition shingle. Metal is a distant second at 6.3%, followed by tile and concrete at 5.4%.
Which states have the most tile roofs?
Nevada leads the country at 69.7% tile or concrete — the only state where tile, not asphalt, is the majority roof. Arizona follows at 37.1%, then Washington at 12.8% and Florida at 11.4%. In most of the country tile is a rounding error: twelve of the states in our table sit below 0.3%.
Is asphalt shingle losing ground to other materials?
No. Grouping homes by the decade they were built, asphalt’s share sits between 72% and 79% in every decade from the 1900s to the 2020s. What actually changed is what it displaced: wood shake peaked at 7.0% of 1960s homes and fell to 1.6% of 2020s homes, and slate went from 3.4% in the 1930s to 0.2% today. Tile is the one real riser, from about 1% of mid-century homes to roughly 10% of homes built since 2000.
Why are some states missing from the table?
Because their assessors don’t record the field often enough to rank honestly. Roof material is recorded for 0% of West Virginia’s single-family stock, 7.2% of Alaska’s, 9.6% of Louisiana’s, and 11.3% of both New York’s and Michigan’s. We publish only states where the material is recorded on at least 60% of homes, and show that coverage figure in the table so you can weigh each row yourself.
Can I cite these statistics?
Yes — cite freely with a link to this page. Figures come from Scout Data’s own property database, and the methodology section explains exactly what is and isn’t counted, including the states we leave out and why.