Cost Per Door Knocked: The Roofing Canvassing Metric That Tells You If Your Crew Is Bleeding Money

Walk into almost any roofing company that runs a door-to-door crew and ask the owner one question: what does it cost you to knock a single door? You will get a shrug, a guess, or a number pulled out of thin air. They can tell you their close rate. They can tell you their average job size. They can usually tell you what they pay a canvasser. But the cost to put one knuckle on one door is a black box, and that black box is where a huge chunk of roofing payroll quietly disappears.

Cost per door knocked is the unsexy metric that separates roofing companies who scale their canvassing from the ones who burn through reps every spring and wonder why the math never works. It is the denominator under every other canvassing number you care about. Your cost per appointment, your cost per inspection, your cost per signed contract all start with what one door costs. Get that number wrong and every downstream decision — how many reps to hire, what to pay them, which neighborhoods to work, whether to run a crew at all — is built on sand.

The goal here is to make that number knowable. Not a benchmark you read in a forum and parrot back, but a figure you can pull from your own crew, by neighborhood, by rep, by week. The kind of number you can act on Monday morning. Below is the full operating system: the exact formula, what goes in it and what people leave out, real worked examples with dollars, the benchmarks that actually mean something, and the levers that move the number down without grinding your people into the dirt.

What Cost Per Door Knocked Actually Means

Cost per door knocked is the total money you spend to generate door-knocking activity, divided by the number of doors your crew physically knocked in that period. It sounds simple. The trap is in the word "total." Most owners only count the obvious cost — the canvasser's base pay or per-door bonus — and ignore four or five other costs that are just as real.

Think of it the way you think about cost per square on a job. The shingle bundle is the obvious cost, but if you forgot to count underlayment, drip edge, dumpster fees, fuel for the crew truck, and the hour your foreman spent loading the trailer, your real cost per square is 30 to 40 percent higher than your napkin math. Door knocking is identical. The base pay is the bundle. Everything else is the line items people forget.

The metric matters because door knocking is the only lead source where you pay for the activity whether or not it produces anything. When you buy a shared lead, you pay for a lead. When you run direct mail, you pay for a piece that lands in a box. But when a canvasser knocks 80 doors and sets zero appointments, you still paid for all 80 knocks. That is the structural risk of canvassing, and the only way to manage a risk is to measure it. Cost per door knocked turns the fuzzy fear of "is my crew wasting money" into a hard number you can watch trend up or down.

The relationship to every other canvassing number

Here is the funnel cost per door sits at the top of. Each row below is the row above divided by a conversion rate:

The reason to start at the very top and not jump straight to cost per contract is leverage. A 10 percent improvement in cost per door flows all the way down the funnel and compounds. If you only ever look at cost per signed contract, you cannot see whether the problem is too many empty doors, a weak pitch, no-show inspections, or a closer who can't close. Cost per door knocked, paired with the contact rate, tells you whether your problem is in front of the door or behind it.

The Formula, And The Costs Everyone Forgets

The headline formula is short:

Cost per door knocked = Total canvassing cost for the period / Total doors knocked in the period

The work is in defining "total canvassing cost" honestly. Here are the eight buckets. Skip any of them and you are lying to yourself.

1. Canvasser direct pay

Whatever you pay the person at the door. This comes in a few structures and the structure changes everything downstream:

• Hourly: Simplest to track. A canvasser at a given hourly rate working a set number of hours is a fixed input; your cost per door floats entirely on how many doors they hit per hour.
• Per-door or per-knock pay: Some companies pay a few dollars per qualified knock or per logged door. This makes cost per door look stable but invites gaming — reps log doors they barely touched.
• Per-appointment-set bonus: Common as a layer on top of a base. It does not change cost per door directly but pulls behavior toward setting, which can be good or can mean reps over-promise to set.
• Commission / per-deal: The back-end. Real, but it lands at the contract level, not the door level. For a clean cost-per-door number, keep commission out of the numerator and account for it in CAC instead.

2. Payroll taxes and burden

This is the line that turns a number into reality. Employer-side payroll taxes — Social Security and Medicare (FICA), federal and state unemployment — plus workers' comp and any benefits add a meaningful percentage on top of gross wages. Workers' comp for roofing-adjacent field labor is not cheap, and a ground canvasser who never climbs may still sit in a roofing comp class depending on your carrier and state. If you run W-2 canvassers, your true labor cost is materially above the wage you quote them. Account for the burden or your cost per door is fiction.

3. Vehicle and fuel

If you drive a crew out in a company vehicle or van, fuel, mileage, insurance, and wear are canvassing costs. If reps drive their own cars and you reimburse mileage, that reimbursement is a canvassing cost. The federal standard mileage rate set each year by the IRS is the cleanest way to value this if you reimburse; even if you don't reimburse, use it as a proxy for the real cost of moving a crew around a metro.

4. Management and field leadership time

The person who builds the route, runs the morning huddle, drives the van, and rides along to coach is a canvassing cost. If a field manager spends six hours a day on the crew, a proportional slice of their salary belongs in the numerator. This is the single most-forgotten cost and it is often the largest hidden one, because management time does not show up on a per-door pay stub.

5. Technology and tools

Canvassing apps, lead-tracking software, the tablets or phones, the territory/route tools, any data you buy to decide where to knock, branded door hangers, yard signs, business cards, and homeowner leave-behinds. Spread the monthly cost across the doors knocked that month.

6. Recruiting and onboarding

Canvasser turnover in roofing is brutal. Field sales roles broadly carry some of the highest turnover of any occupation, and door knocking is the hard end of field sales. Every rep you recruit, interview, train, and equip costs money before they knock a single productive door, and a chunk of them quit inside the first month. Amortize recruiting and training cost across the doors a cohort actually produces and the picture gets sobering. This is also why retention is a cost-per-door lever, which is covered later.

7. Incentives, contests, and spiffs

Gift cards, weekend trips, the steak dinner for the top setter, the $100 bonus for the most doors in a day. Real money, often run off the books mentally. Put it in.

8. Allocated overhead (optional but honest)

A slice of office rent, admin, and your own time managing the program. You can leave this out of cost per door and reserve it for full CAC, as long as you are consistent. Just pick a definition and never quietly change it, or your trend lines become meaningless.

Counting the denominator: what is a "door"?

The numerator gets all the attention, but a sloppy denominator ruins the metric just as fast. Define a knocked door before you measure anything, and put the definition in writing so every rep logs the same way:

• A knock is a door the rep physically approached and attempted contact at — rang, knocked, or rang a video doorbell.
• A house with an obvious no-soliciting situation that the rep correctly skips is not a knock. It is a skip, logged separately.
• A repeat visit to the same address is a new knock only if it was a deliberate planned callback, not the rep wandering back.
• Drive-bys, "I looked at it," and "the dog was out" are not knocks.

If reps log doors generously, your cost per door looks great and your cost per appointment looks terrible, and you will chase the wrong problem for months. Tighten the definition first.

A Worked Example, Start To Finish

Numbers make it concrete. Take a hypothetical four-person canvassing crew over one week. The figures below are illustrative — plug in your own — but the structure is exactly what you should build in a spreadsheet.

The crew and the week:

• 4 canvassers, paid hourly plus a per-set bonus
• Each works 30 field hours that week (afternoons/evenings, the productive knocking window)
• One field lead spends 20 hours that week building routes, huddling, and riding along

Doors knocked:

• Average of 18 doors knocked per field hour per rep
• 4 reps × 30 hours × 18 = 2,160 doors knocked for the week

The cost stack:

Cost per door knocked = $5,050 / 2,160 = $2.34 per door.

Now watch what most owners do. They look only at base pay, so they think their cost per door is $2,160 / 2,160 = $1.00. They are off by more than half. Every decision they make off the $1.00 number — "we can afford to knock anything," "hire two more reps," "close rate just needs to tick up" — is wrong because the real cost of activity is $2.34.

Flowing it down the funnel

Now layer the conversion rates onto that real $2.34:

If the average job nets a few thousand dollars of gross profit, $686 to acquire it through canvassing is a healthy machine. If your set rate halves, your cost per signed job doubles to roughly $1,372 — and now you are in a conversation about whether this crew should exist. None of that conversation is possible without the $2.34 starting point.

The same crew, knocking smarter

Keep every cost identical. Change one thing: instead of knocking 2,160 doors across whatever streets the route tool spat out, the crew knocks the same 2,160 doors but on streets pre-filtered to older roofs. Suppose that lifts the set rate from those 30 sets to 45 sets because more homes actually have an aging roof worth a conversation.

• Cost per door knocked: unchanged at $2.34 (same activity, same spend)
• Cost per inspection set: $5,050 / 45 = $112 (was $168)
• Cost per signed contract: roughly $459 (was $686)

This is the single most important thing to understand about the metric. Cost per door is the price of activity. The leverage almost never comes from making the door cheaper — it comes from making the door more likely to be the right door. Hold that thought; it is the whole back half of the playbook.

Benchmarks: What Is A Good Cost Per Door?

Everyone wants a number. The honest answer is that a universal "good" cost per door does not exist, because the inputs vary wildly by market, pay structure, and whether you are in a fresh storm market or a steady retail one. Beware anyone quoting a precise national benchmark for this — there is no authoritative dataset for it, and a confident number is usually someone's single company repeated as gospel.

What is real and useful is the relationship between numbers, and how your own number trends. Here is how to judge yours.

Judge the ratio, not the raw dollar

The raw cost per door is close to meaningless in isolation. A $4 cost per door in an expensive metro with a high contact rate and a 6 percent set rate is a far better business than a $1.50 cost per door in a market where nobody answers and the set rate is 1 percent. The metrics that actually tell you if canvassing is working:

• Cost per signed contract as a fraction of gross profit per job. A common rule of thumb across many sales-driven businesses is to spend in the rough neighborhood of 10 to 20 percent of the gross profit of a job to acquire it. If a typical job throws off several thousand in gross profit, an acquisition cost in the few-hundred-dollar range is healthy, and the high triple digits start to pinch.
• Set rate per 100 doors. Whether 100 knocked doors produce 1 set or 4 sets matters more than the per-door cost. Track this by neighborhood and you will see your good streets light up.
• Doors per rep-hour. This drives the denominator. A productive canvasser in a walkable neighborhood can knock far more doors per hour than one in a spread-out rural route, and that alone swings cost per door by a wide margin.

Build your own benchmark in four weeks

Forget the internet's number. Yours is the only one that matters, and you can have it fast:

1. Week 1: Instrument the crew. Lock the door definition, start logging knocks/contacts/sets cleanly, and total every cost bucket above. Expect the first week's data to be messy.
2. Week 2: Repeat. Now you have two weeks and can see variance between reps and neighborhoods.
3. Week 3: Segment. Break cost per door and set rate down by rep and by neighborhood. The spread will surprise you — it is normal for your best street to be 3–5x more efficient than your worst.
4. Week 4: Set your bands. Define a "green" cost-per-signed-contract you are happy with, a "yellow" you tolerate, and a "red" that triggers action. Those bands are your benchmark. They are specific to your market and pay structure, which is exactly why they are useful.

The Hidden Costs That Wreck The Number

The formula is only as good as the inputs. Four hidden costs distort cost per door more than any others, and pros learn to watch them like a foreman watches the weather.

Empty doors and dead neighborhoods

Every knock on a house that will never be a customer still costs you the full per-door amount. The two biggest sources of dead knocks:

• Contact rate — nobody home. You pay for the knock whether or not anyone answers. Evening and weekend timing lifts the answer rate, which is why serious crews knock when people are home, not when it is convenient for the rep.
• Wrong-house rate — someone answered, but the roof is five years old and there is nothing to talk about. This is the killer, and it is invisible if you only track contact rate. A high contact rate on a street of brand-new roofs is busy work that looks productive and produces nothing.

The wrong-house problem is the one most worth attacking because it is the most fixable. You cannot make people stay home, but you can choose which streets to send the crew down.

Rep churn as a per-door cost

A canvasser who quits after two weeks took your recruiting cost, your training time, and a chunk of a field lead's coaching attention, and produced almost nothing in return. Spread that loss across the few doors they did knock and their effective cost per door is enormous. High churn does more than hurt morale — it mathematically inflates your blended cost per door because you keep paying the fixed front-loaded costs of people who never reach productivity.

This is why "reduce turnover" is a cost-per-door strategy and not only an HR nicety. A green rep who knocks the right doors, sets appointments in their first week, makes money, and therefore stays is cheaper per productive door by a wide margin than a churning roster you constantly refill.

Windshield time

The minutes a crew spends driving between knockable clusters are paid minutes that produce zero doors. A route that bounces across a metro instead of working dense, contiguous blocks can cut doors-per-hour by a third or more, which directly inflates cost per door. Tight, walkable routing is free money. Loose routing is a tax you pay every single hour.

Burnout and the productivity cliff

A fresh rep at 9 a.m. knocks more doors and pitches better than the same rep at hour six on a 90-degree day after fifty rejections. Doors-per-hour and pitch quality both decay across a shift. Push reps past the point of diminishing returns and you are paying full freight for low-quality, low-energy knocks. The cheapest doors are the early, energized ones. Schedule and route around that reality.

The opportunity cost nobody books

There is one more hidden cost that never shows up in any ledger: the better door the rep did not knock. Every hour a crew spends on a street of new construction is an hour it could have spent on a street of twenty-year-old roofs. The dollars spent are identical; the outcomes are not. This is the cost that does not feel like a cost, which is exactly why it is the most expensive one. When you evaluate a neighborhood, do not only ask "what did it cost to work it?" Ask "what did we give up by working it instead of somewhere better?" That framing is what turns a flat blended number into a reallocation decision.

Pay Structure: How It Quietly Decides Your Number

The way you pay canvassers does more than affect morale — it pre-loads your cost per door before the first knock and shapes every behavior you will later try to coach. Run the two most common structures side by side on the same week and the trade-offs get obvious.

Hourly versus per-door, head to head

Take one rep working a 30-hour week who knocks 540 doors and sets 8 inspections.

The straight per-door number looks identical to hourly on paper, but it hides a denominator problem: when reps are paid per door, the temptation to inflate the door count is constant, which makes your cost per door look artificially low and your cost per set artificially high. You then spend weeks coaching pitch quality when the real issue is a padded denominator. Hourly keeps the denominator honest because there is no pay incentive to log a door that barely happened. That single fact is why many disciplined operators run hourly plus a modest set bonus rather than per-door: it trades a slightly higher headline cost per door for a number they can actually trust.

The commission trap on cost per door

Low-base, heavy-commission structures show the cheapest base cost per door of any model, and owners love them for that reason. The catch is churn. If the back-end does not pay out fast enough for a green rep to feel money in the first few weeks, they quit before their commission ever lands, and you eat the full recruiting and training cost with almost no doors to spread it across. The cheap base cost per door was an illusion; the blended cost per door, once you fold in the churned cohort, can be the highest of any structure. Cheap pay is only cheap if the rep stays long enough to produce.

Seasonality: Why Your Number Moves Without You Touching Anything

Cost per door is not a constant — it breathes with the calendar, and confusing a seasonal swing for a real problem sends owners chasing fixes they do not need.

• Daylight. In midsummer, the productive evening knocking window can run several hours longer than in late fall. More daylight means more doors per shift, which lowers cost per door for free. The same crew at the same pay looks more efficient in July than in November purely because of the sun.
• Storm timing. In a market that just took hail or wind, contact rates and set rates spike because homeowners are already thinking about their roof. That same crew on those same streets six months later, with no recent weather, will see set rates fall and cost per signed contract climb. Neither is a crew problem; it is the calendar.
• Heat and fatigue. A 100-degree afternoon flattens doors-per-hour and pitch quality. The productivity cliff arrives earlier in the shift, which quietly raises cost per door in peak summer heat even as daylight helps in the other direction.

The practical move is to compare like to like. Judge this July against last July, not against last November. Track a rolling four-week trend so a single hot week or a single post-storm spike does not panic you into changing a pay plan or firing a rep who is actually fine.

Tying Cost Per Door To Crew Sizing

The metric earns its keep at the moment you decide whether to hire. Most owners size their crew on gut — "things are busy, let's add two guys" — and then wonder why margins thinned. Cost per door, run down the funnel, turns that gut call into arithmetic.

Start from the bottom. Decide the most you are willing to spend to acquire one signed job — say, a number that lands comfortably inside 10 to 20 percent of your average job's gross profit. Work backward through your real conversion rates to find the cost per door that ceiling implies. If your current cost per door is below that implied number, you have room to add reps; the marginal door still pencils. If you are already above it, adding reps makes the problem bigger, not smaller — the fix is in the funnel (better streets, better timing, better pitch), not in headcount. Hiring into a broken funnel just buys more expensive doors.

This is also how you decide when to shrink. If a crew's cost per signed contract has drifted into your red band for a month and reallocation and coaching have not pulled it back, the honest answer may be fewer reps on better streets rather than the same reps on marginal ones. A smaller crew knocking the right doors can out-earn a larger crew knocking everything, at a lower blended cost per door.

How RoofPredict Changes The Denominator Math

Everything above points at one conclusion: the cheapest way to improve canvassing economics is almost never to shave the cost of a door. It is to raise the odds that the door you pay for is a door worth knocking. That is squarely where RoofPredict fits, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do.

RoofPredict scores the roofs in an area by two things at once: an estimated roof-age range read from aerial imagery, and the storms each individual roof has actually taken — modeled per roof, rather than "it hailed in this ZIP." The output is a ranked picture of which houses on which streets are most likely to have a roof that is aging out or storm-worn, versus the ones that are obviously too new to bother with. You can also enrich a list you already own — an old estimate database, a past-customer book, a mailing list — with those same roof-age and storm signals.

Connect that back to the metric. Cost per door knocked is the price of activity and it barely moves. What moves is the set rate per 100 doors, because you are aiming the same crew, at the same per-door cost, down streets with a higher concentration of roofs that genuinely warrant a conversation. In the worked example earlier, holding every cost flat and lifting the set count from 30 to 45 cut cost per signed contract from roughly $686 to roughly $459. That entire gain came from the denominator of the funnel — better doors — not from paying anyone less. That is the mechanism RoofPredict is built to drive.

There is a second, quieter benefit on the churn cost. A green canvasser sent down a pre-filtered street hits more live conversations sooner, sets sooner, earns sooner, and is far more likely to make it past the brutal first few weeks. Lower churn pulls those front-loaded recruiting and training dollars out of your blended cost per door. The rep enablement angle matters too — walking up with a specific, honest talking point about a roof's likely age and storm history lets a new hire sound credible without having climbed a thing.

Honest limits, because the metric only works on honest inputs. Roof age comes back as a range, not a birthday — aerial imagery cannot read the install date off a permit. Storm modeling gives you odds that a roof was worn, not proof that it was damaged; only an inspection settles that. RoofPredict is not a lead service and does not hand you a homeowner who is ready to buy — it ranks the doors so your own crew spends its paid knocks where the math is best. It sharpens the outbound you already run; it does not replace the knock, the pitch, or the close.

A quick note for storm and restoration crews, because the intent overlaps with insurance work: the right and legal lane is to document thoroughly and write an accurate, Xactimate-aligned repair estimate, then hand it to the homeowner. The homeowner files; the insurer decides coverage. Targeting which roofs likely qualify by age and storm exposure, and documenting condition with photos and a clean scope, is squarely on the safe side of that line. Negotiating or "handling" the claim for a fee, interpreting the homeowner's policy or coverage, promising a specific approval or payout, telling anyone their deductible is waived or absorbed, or advertising a "free roof" is unlicensed public adjusting in most states and is not a place to take your canvassing pitch. Keep the door conversation on documentation and the estimate. RoofPredict's job in that workflow is which-roofs-likely-qualify plus the documentation target, never the claim itself.

The Playbook: Driving Cost Per Door Down Without Burning Out The Crew

This is the operational core. Each lever below is something you can act on, with the mechanism spelled out so you know why it moves the number.

Lever 1: Fix the denominator before the numerator

The instinct is to cut pay to lower cost per door. Almost always wrong — cut pay and your best reps leave, churn spikes, and your blended cost per door rises. Instead, attack the two things that decide whether a paid knock is wasted:

• Knock when people are home. Shift the bulk of field hours to the late-afternoon and evening window and weekends. Raising the answer rate from, say, one in four doors to one in three converts dead knocks into live conversations at zero added per-door cost.
• Knock the right streets. This is the biggest lever in the whole playbook. Pre-filtering routes to streets with a higher concentration of aging or storm-worn roofs raises the set rate per 100 doors directly. New roofs are pure cost with no upside; skipping them is the cheapest improvement available.

Lever 2: Tighten routing to kill windshield time

Build dense, contiguous routes. A rep should be able to work a cluster of blocks on foot for hours without getting back in a vehicle. Every minute saved driving is a minute spent knocking, which raises doors-per-hour and lowers cost per door mechanically. Audit your routes for the bounce — reps crisscrossing a metro is a silent, expensive leak.

Lever 3: Standardize the door definition and the logging

You cannot improve what you measure loosely. Write the door definition, train it, and audit it. A field lead who spot-checks logged doors against reality keeps the denominator honest, which keeps every downstream cost real. Loose logging makes cost per door look good and cost per set look bad, and sends you chasing the wrong fix.

Lever 4: Coach the contact-to-set conversion

Once someone answers, the pitch decides everything. A weak opener that gets the door shut wastes the entire cost of that contact, which is several times the cost of the door. Short, role-played openers, a clear and honest reason for the visit, and a simple ask for a quick roof look will move set rate more than any spreadsheet tweak. Track set rate per contact by rep and coach the laggards specifically.

Lever 5: Attack churn as a cost line

Every lever above also reduces churn, which feeds back into cost per door:

• Reps sent to better streets set appointments sooner and earn sooner.
• Reps who earn in week one stay past week four.
• Reps who stay never re-incur the recruiting and onboarding cost.

Pair that with a real ride-along coaching cadence in the first two weeks and a pay structure where good behavior pays well, and you pull the single largest hidden cost out of your blended number.

Lever 6: Segment relentlessly and reallocate

Once you have four weeks of data broken down by rep and neighborhood, act on it. Move hours away from your worst-performing neighborhoods toward your best. Pair struggling reps with strong streets to rebuild their confidence and your set rate. The spread between your best and worst segments is where all the savings live — reallocation costs nothing and can move blended cost per signed contract substantially.

A simple weekly review cadence

Run this every Monday for the prior week. It takes fifteen minutes once the spreadsheet exists:

1. Total all eight cost buckets for the week.
2. Total clean doors knocked (audited definition).
3. Compute cost per door, cost per set, cost per signed contract.
4. Break cost per set down by rep and by neighborhood.
5. Compare cost per signed contract to your green/yellow/red bands.
6. Pick one lever to pull this week. One. Not five.
7. Note the change and check next Monday whether it moved.

A Practical Build: The Spreadsheet You Actually Need

You do not need fancy software to start. A single sheet with these columns, filled in weekly, gets you 90 percent of the value:

From those columns every metric in the funnel is a formula. Cost per door is total cost columns divided by doors knocked. Cost per set is total cost divided by sets. Add a pivot by rep and by neighborhood and you have everything in this playbook running off one tab. Build it once, fill it weekly, and you will never again answer "what does a door cost you?" with a shrug.

Common Mistakes Pros Make

A short list of the errors that show up again and again, even in companies that think they have this handled:

• Counting only base pay. The number-one error. Real cost per door is routinely double the base-pay-only figure once burden, management time, vehicle, and recruiting are in.
• Loose door definitions. Generous logging flatters cost per door and ruins every downstream metric.
• Chasing the wrong lever. Cutting pay to lower cost per door, when the real problem is a low set rate from knocking new-roof streets.
• Ignoring churn math. Treating turnover as an HR issue instead of the largest hidden inflator of blended cost per door.
• Trusting internet benchmarks. Quoting a national "good" number that has no real source instead of building your own four-week bands.
• Measuring cost per contract only. Skipping the top of the funnel hides whether the problem is in front of the door or behind it.
• No segmentation. A blended company-wide number hides the 3–5x spread between your best and worst streets and reps, which is exactly where the money is.

Putting It Together

Cost per door knocked is not a vanity metric and it is not an accounting exercise. It is the base unit of a canvassing business, and once you can measure it honestly — all eight cost buckets, a clean door definition, segmented by rep and neighborhood — every other decision gets easier. You will see which streets pay, which reps need coaching, whether the crew should grow or shrink, and exactly how much room you have on acquisition cost before a job stops being worth chasing.

The leverage, almost always, is not in making the door cheaper. It is in making the door more likely to be the right one. Knock when people are home, route tight to kill windshield time, coach the pitch, treat churn as a cost line, and aim the crew at streets where the roofs are actually aging out or storm-worn instead of the whole subdivision. That is where a $686 cost per signed job becomes a $459 one without anyone working harder or getting paid less.

If the "which streets" part is the gap, that is the problem RoofPredict is built to close — ranking the roofs in your area by age range and the storms each one has actually taken, so your paid knocks land on the doors most likely to need you. It will not knock the door or close the job for you. It just makes sure the door you are paying for is one worth the knuckle. Measure your real cost per door first; then go make every one of those dollars count.

FAQ

What is a good cost per door knocked for a roofing company?

There is no reliable national benchmark, and anyone quoting a precise one is usually repeating a single company's figure. The raw dollar amount is also nearly meaningless on its own because it swings with your market, pay structure, and how walkable your routes are. Judge the relationship instead: your cost per signed contract as a fraction of the gross profit on a job. Spending roughly 10 to 20 percent of a job's gross profit to acquire it is a common healthy range. Build your own green/yellow/red bands from four weeks of your own data rather than trusting an internet number.

How do I calculate cost per door knocked?

Divide your total canvassing cost for a period by the total clean doors knocked in that period. The catch is in 'total cost.' Include eight buckets: canvasser base pay, payroll burden (employer taxes and workers' comp), vehicle and fuel, field-management time, technology and tools, recruiting and onboarding, incentives and spiffs, and optionally an overhead allocation. Most owners count only base pay and end up with a number that is roughly half the real cost. Pair the honest numerator with a strictly defined denominator — a knock is a door physically approached with a contact attempt, not a drive-by.

Why is cost per door knocked more useful than cost per appointment?

Cost per door sits at the top of the funnel, so it shows you leverage that cost per appointment hides. If you only look at cost per appointment or cost per signed contract, you cannot tell whether your problem is too many empty doors, knocking the wrong streets, no-show inspections, or a weak closer. Cost per door knocked, paired with the contact rate and set rate, tells you whether the leak is in front of the door or behind it — and a small improvement at the top compounds all the way down the funnel.

What costs do roofers forget when measuring canvassing?

The four most-forgotten are payroll burden (employer-side taxes and workers' comp on wages), field-management and route-building time, vehicle and fuel or mileage, and recruiting plus onboarding cost amortized across the doors a rep actually produces. Management time and churn cost are usually the largest hidden inflators because they never appear on a per-door pay stub. Leave them out and your real cost per door is commonly double your base-pay-only estimate.

How does rep turnover affect cost per door knocked?

Heavily. A canvasser who quits after two weeks consumed your recruiting cost, training time, and a field lead's coaching attention while producing almost nothing. Spread those front-loaded costs across the few doors they knocked and their effective cost per door is enormous, which inflates your blended company number. That is why reducing turnover is a cost metric and not only an HR concern: reps who knock productive streets, set appointments early, earn quickly, and therefore stay are dramatically cheaper per productive door than a roster you constantly refill.

Should I pay canvassers per door, hourly, or per appointment?

Each structure changes the metric. Hourly is simplest to track and makes cost per door float on doors-per-hour. Per-door pay stabilizes the number but invites gaming, where reps log doors they barely touched, so it demands tight logging audits. Per-appointment bonuses pull behavior toward setting, which helps unless reps over-promise to book. Commission lands at the contract level. For a clean cost-per-door figure, keep commission out of the door-level numerator and account for it in customer acquisition cost instead. Whatever you choose, audit the logged doors.

What is the fastest way to lower cost per door without cutting pay?

Attack the denominator of the funnel, not the price of the door. Knock when people are home (evenings and weekends) to lift the answer rate, route tight to kill windshield time so reps knock more doors per hour, and — the biggest lever — aim the crew at streets with a higher concentration of aging or storm-worn roofs instead of new-roof subdivisions. That raises set rate per 100 doors at the same per-door cost, which lowers cost per signed contract directly. Cutting pay usually backfires by spiking churn.

How does knowing roof age help my canvassing numbers?

Roof age, read as a range from aerial imagery, lets you skip the new-roof houses that are pure cost with no upside and concentrate paid knocks on roofs that are actually aging out. Holding crew size and per-door cost flat, raising the set rate per 100 doors flows straight down the funnel to a lower cost per signed contract. This is also where RoofPredict fits: it ranks roofs by age range and the storms each one has actually taken, so the doors you pay to knock are more likely to be ones worth the conversation. Roof age is a range, not an exact date, and storm modeling gives odds, not proof of damage.

Can canvassing connect to insurance and storm claims work safely?

Yes, if you stay on the documentation and estimate side of the line. A roofer can inspect, photograph and document damage, and prepare an accurate, Xactimate-aligned repair estimate, then hand it to the homeowner, who files the claim while the insurer decides coverage. Targeting which roofs likely qualify by age and storm exposure is fine. What crosses into unlicensed public adjusting is negotiating or handling the claim for a fee, interpreting the homeowner's policy or coverage, promising a specific approval or payout, telling anyone their deductible is waived, or advertising a 'free roof.' Keep the door pitch on documentation, never on the claim outcome.

How long does it take to build a real cost-per-door benchmark?

About four weeks. Week one, instrument the crew: lock the door definition, log knocks, contacts, and sets cleanly, and total every cost bucket. Week two, repeat to see variance. Week three, segment cost per door and set rate by rep and by neighborhood — expect your best street to be three to five times more efficient than your worst. Week four, set your green/yellow/red bands for cost per signed contract. Those bands are your benchmark, specific to your market and pay structure, which is exactly what makes them worth acting on.