The short answer. Published national ranges in September 2026 put house demolition at $4 to $17 per square foot, with most jobs landing between $6 and $10. A typical 2,000-square-foot house runs $6,000 to $25,000 to take down and haul away, with about $15,800 as a common midpoint. Mobile home demolition runs $2 to $4 per square foot, or $3,000 to $5,000 for a single-wide and $5,000 to $8,000 for a double-wide. A detached garage is usually $2,000 to $6,000. Those figures come from Angi, HomeGuide, and Dropcurb guides checked September 4, 2026.
Per square foot is how the homeowner thinks about it. It is not how the job costs. A demolition job is a stack of separate costs, most of which have nothing to do with how big the building is. This guide walks through each one so you can build a bid you can defend, and so you stop losing money on the jobs that looked easy from the truck.
If you are a homeowner or a builder trying to understand a demolition quote, the section near the end called “If you are the one paying” is for you.
Why square footage lies
A 1,200-square-foot house on a slab with municipal water and a paved driveway, and a 1,200-square-foot farmhouse with a fieldstone basement, a well, a septic tank, asbestos siding, and a quarter mile of two-track to get to it, are the same size. One is a day and a half. The other is a week and two permits.
Square footage tells you roughly how much debris you will haul. It tells you nothing about what has to happen before the first bucket goes in, what is under the building, or how far the debris travels. Pricing by square foot alone is like a mover pricing by the number of rooms without asking about the piano or the third-floor walkup.
Use the published square-foot ranges the way a homeowner uses them: as a sanity check on the finished number. Build the number itself from the parts below.
The eight costs in every demolition bid
1. Permits and paperwork
Almost every jurisdiction requires a demolition permit, and many require more than that: a utility disconnect confirmation, a rodent baiting certificate in some cities, an asbestos survey and notification, a stormwater or erosion control plan, and sometimes a historical review if the building is old enough. Published permit costs run $50 to $500, but the time to get them is the real cost. If a permit takes three weeks and your excavator sits, that is your money.
Find out on day one who pulls the permit. If it is you, price your hours and the fee. If it is the owner, put in writing that work starts after you have the permit in hand.
2. Utility disconnects
Gas, electric, water, sewer, and communications all have to be cut and capped before demolition, and the utility company usually has to do it or sign off on it. Some utilities are quick. Some take weeks. Some charge. A private well needs to be capped or protected and a septic tank has to be pumped, crushed, and filled or removed, which is a job of its own.
Never assume the disconnects are done. Verify each one yourself before the machine is on site. A gas line under a foundation is the kind of surprise you only get once.
3. Hazardous materials
Asbestos, lead paint, mold, old fuel oil tanks, mercury thermostats, and PCB ballasts in commercial lighting. Any building older than about 1980 should be surveyed for asbestos before you touch it, and in most states you cannot legally demolish without the survey on file. Abatement is a licensed specialty. If you are not licensed, you sub it, and the sub’s number goes in your bid as a pass-through with your markup for coordinating it.
Abatement can be a few hundred dollars for some floor tile or many thousands for a house with asbestos siding, pipe wrap, and popcorn ceilings. It is the single biggest reason two bids on the same house are $10,000 apart. If your competitor did not include it, he either did not check or he is planning to find it after he starts.
4. Structure and method
How the building comes down decides your machine hours.
- Mechanical demolition with an excavator and a thumb or shear is the standard. A wood-frame house is a day of knocking down and a day or two of sorting and loading, depending on size.
- Selective or interior demolition keeps part of the building. Slower, more hand labor, more dust control, and the price should reflect that it is a different job.
- Deconstruction takes the building apart to salvage material. Very slow. Only makes sense when the salvage value or a tax deduction for the owner pays for the labor.
- Structure type matters. Wood frame is fast. Block and brick is slower and heavier to haul. Concrete tilt-up and steel need bigger iron or a shear. A basement means you are also demolishing a foundation and filling a hole.
Estimate machine hours for the teardown separately from hours for sorting and loading. On a typical house the loading takes longer than the knockdown.
5. Foundation, slab, and what goes in the hole
Every bid has to say what happens below grade. Options:
- Leave the slab or foundation in place and cap it. Cheapest, not always allowed, and the owner needs to know they cannot build on it later.
- Break and remove the slab or foundation walls. Now you are hauling concrete, which is heavy, and it either goes to a recycler or a landfill at a per-ton rate.
- Fill the basement hole with clean fill and compact it. Fill has to come from somewhere. Trucked-in fill at $10 to $25 a yard plus delivery adds up fast on a full basement.
State it in the bid in plain words. “Foundation walls broken and removed to 12 inches below grade. Basement backfilled with imported clean fill, compacted in lifts, rough graded” is a sentence that prevents a lawsuit.
6. Hauling and disposal
This is where demolition bids go wrong most often. You need three numbers:
- How much debris. A rough rule for a wood-frame house is about 0.3 to 0.5 tons per square foot of floor area including the roof, or 40 to 60 tons for a 1,500-square-foot house. Add the foundation separately, roughly 2 tons per cubic yard of concrete.
- How many loads. A tri-axle dump or a 30-yard roll-off holds 8 to 12 tons of mixed debris depending on how well it is compacted. A 1,500-square-foot house is 5 to 8 loads before the foundation.
- What each load costs. Truck and driver time for the round trip, plus the tipping fee. Construction and demolition landfill fees vary widely, from $40 a ton in rural areas to over $100 a ton near cities. Concrete and clean wood are cheaper at a recycler. Mixed debris is the expensive stuff.
Sorting on site saves tipping fees. Clean concrete to the recycler, metal to the scrap yard where it is money back, clean wood to a grinder if there is one, and only the mixed junk to the landfill. The hours you spend sorting are usually cheaper than the fees you avoid.
7. Site restoration
Rough grade, seed and straw, topsoil, a gravel pad, silt fence removal. Most owners assume the site will look like a lot when you leave. Say what “done” is. New Wave Concepts in Cape Coral, Florida handles this with a line that says what the site looks like when they leave, graded, seeded, or hauled clean, and it removes the argument before it starts.
8. Mobilization, protection, and the stuff nobody itemizes
Moving the excavator in and out. Silt fence and tree protection. Dust control and water. Protecting the neighbor’s fence and driveway. Temporary fencing if the site sits for a weekend. A porta-john. Two hours a day of cleanup. Each of these is small. Together they are a full day on most jobs. Put a line in the bid for them.
Building the number: a worked example
A 1,400-square-foot wood-frame house, built 1968, on a crawl space with a block foundation, in a small town with municipal utilities. Owner wants it gone and the lot rough graded for a new build. Illustrative numbers, rounded. Put your own in.
| Item | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Permit and paperwork | Fee $180, 4 hours of your time at $95 | $560 |
| Utility disconnects | Owner arranges, you verify. 2 hours | $190 |
| Asbestos survey and abatement | Survey $450 by sub. Floor tile and pipe wrap found, abatement sub $3,200, 10 percent markup | $4,465 |
| Knockdown | Excavator with thumb, 8 hours at $225 | $1,800 |
| Sort and load | Excavator 14 hours at $225, laborer 14 hours at $48 | $3,822 |
| Foundation | Break and remove block walls, 6 hours at $225 | $1,350 |
| Hauling | 7 loads mixed debris, 1.5 hours round trip each, truck and driver at $135 an hour | $1,418 |
| Tipping fees | 58 tons mixed at $62, 9 tons concrete to recycler at $18 | $3,758 |
| Scrap metal credit | 2 tons at $180 | ($360) |
| Backfill and rough grade | 30 yards of fill delivered at $22, 4 hours skid steer at $165 | $1,320 |
| Mobilization, silt fence, dust control, cleanup | Flat | $1,100 |
| Cost subtotal | $19,423 | |
| Profit and contingency, 20 percent | $3,885 | |
| Bid | about $23,300 |
Divide by 1,400 square feet and you get $16.64 a square foot. That is at the top of the published range, and this is a plain house. The abatement pushed it there. Take the abatement out and it is $13.45 a square foot. Take the foundation and backfill out and it is under $12. That is why the published range is so wide, and why quoting by the square foot without the site walk is a coin flip.
Mobile home demolition is its own animal
Mobile homes are lighter and faster than a stick-built house, and the published $3,000 to $8,000 reflects that. But watch for these:
- The title. In most states the owner has to surrender the title or get a demolition affidavit before the unit can be legally destroyed. Ask before you bid.
- Axles, tires, and the frame. Steel frames are scrap money. Tires are a disposal fee.
- Older units have asbestos in floor tile and lead in the paint just like a house.
- Skirting, decks, porches, and sheds. Everything the owner added over the years. Walk it and count.
- The pad. Concrete runners or a full slab either stay or go.
A single-wide with no additions and a clear title is a good one-day job for one machine and two loads. A double-wide with a built-on porch and a slab is a different bid.
Garages, sheds, pools, and small jobs
Garage demolition at $2,000 to $6,000 is mostly disposal and mobilization. The knockdown is an hour. The temptation is to price it low because it is small. Do not. Your mobilization cost is the same as a house. A $1,800 garage that takes half a day plus an hour each way on the trailer is a $1,800 day, which is under your cost for a machine, a truck, and two people.
Pool removal is a separate guide, but the short version: partial removal, where the shell is broken and buried, is cheaper than full removal, and the buyer needs to know that partial removal can affect what can be built there later and what the disclosure says when they sell.
Writing the bid
A demolition bid is a description of a site that no longer has a building on it, with the steps in order. Use this structure and the customer will trust it even if it is not the lowest.
- Scope in plain words. “Complete demolition and removal of the 1,400-square-foot house at [address], including attached deck, block foundation, and crawl space.”
- Sequence. Permit, disconnects, survey and abatement, demolition, hauling, backfill, rough grade. Say who does each.
- What is included. Every line from the table above, grouped so the customer can read it.
- What is not included. Utility company fees, the septic abandonment if there is one, tree removal, finish grading, topsoil, seed. Anything they might assume.
- Unknowns. “If undocumented underground tanks, additional asbestos, or buried debris are found, work stops and we agree on the added scope in writing before continuing.”
- Price, deposit, and payment schedule. A deposit before you pull the permit is normal.
- Timeline. Start date depends on permit and disconnects. Say that.
- A photo of a finished lot. Show what “done” looks like.
For a template, take that structure and put it on your letterhead. There are demolition estimate templates for sale online, but every one of them is that list with a logo on it.
If you are the one paying
If you are a homeowner, a builder, or an investor comparing demolition quotes:
- Ask whether the price includes an asbestos survey and abatement. If a bid does not mention asbestos and the building is older than 1980, the bid is incomplete.
- Ask what happens to the foundation and the basement hole.
- Ask where the debris goes and whether the tipping fees are included.
- Ask what the lot looks like when they leave.
- Ask who pulls the permit and handles the utility disconnects.
- Look both companies up. A demolition contractor who shows finished lots on a website, names the towns they work in, and has reviews from people you could call is telling you they plan to be around when the lot needs something else.
A quote that is $8,000 lower with none of those answers has $8,000 of surprises in it.
The part that has nothing to do with the excavator
Demolition customers are often one-time buyers. They will never need you again, and they know almost nothing about the trade. That makes them nervous, and nervous buyers pick the company that looks like it knows what it is doing.
New Wave Concepts is a demolition company in Cape Coral, Florida. Their new site went live May 23, 2026. By August 11, 2026 it held the number one spot on Google for “demolition contractor cape coral fl.” Visitors who arrive from Google stay on the site for 2 minutes and 13 seconds on average, against 28 seconds for the site as a whole, which means the people who find them are reading the mobile home and pool demolition pages and deciding. Those numbers are dated and sourced on our results page, and they are early.
None of that changed how New Wave tears down a house. It changed which company the nervous buyer calls first.
If your demolition company’s website does not do that job, I will look at it and tell you the three things I would fix first. Two business days, no charge. Show me what you would fix.