About costterrain

Most cost pages on the internet are copied from other cost pages. Nobody can tell you where the number came from, when it was true, or for which city.

costterrain works differently. Every range here is computed from public data: hourly wages that construction crews actually earn in your metro area, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; calibrated man-hour norms; material costs with stated waste factors. The full recipe is on the methodology page, including the parts we simplify and the parts we're less sure about.

We publish ranges, not single numbers, because real markets have spread. We date every figure, because prices age. And we never ask for your phone number to show you an estimate.

costterrain is part of the same family as rateterrain, which applies the same approach to insurance data.