Per Square Foot or Per Job? How Denver Restoration Firms Actually Price Work
Per Square Foot or Per Job? How Denver Restoration Firms Actually Price Work
One Denver contractor quotes $4.50 a square foot and the next quotes a flat $2,700 for what sounds like the same wet living room, and the homeowner assumes one of them is hiding something. Both numbers describe identical work from opposite ends of the same calculation.
The two quotes are the same quote
Restoration pricing in Denver is built per square foot of affected area and then presented as a job total. The published metro band is $3.00 to $7.50 per square foot, and the typical Denver job lands at $2,500 to $3,000. Divide the second by the first and the implied job is a few hundred square feet of wet floor, which is what a single flooded room usually amounts to. The per-job number is the per-foot number with the multiplication already done.
What sets the rate inside $3.00 to $7.50
The rate tracks drying class. Class 1 covers part of one room, dries in 2 to 3 days, and prices around $3.75 per square foot. Class 2 is an entire room over 3 to 5 days at about $4.50. Class 3 means the water came from overhead and soaked the ceiling down, taking 5 to 7 days at roughly $6.25. Class 4 is bound water in hardwood, plaster or brick, needs 7 or more days, and starts at $7.00. A Barnum duplex with a second-floor tub overflow is a Class 3 job whatever the flat quote says.
Reconciling the two on a written estimate
The check takes one line of arithmetic. Measure the affected floor area alone, then divide the job total by it. A 600 square foot main floor quoted at $2,700 works out to $4.50 a square foot, which matches a Class 2 room-wide loss and should be accompanied by 3 to 5 days of equipment. A result above $7.50 means the estimate is carrying either a Class 4 assumption or line items that belong under repairs. A result below $3.00 usually means the scope is measuring an area larger than the crew intends to treat.
Is water damage restoration in Denver priced per square foot or per job?
Denver restoration work is calculated at $3.00 to $7.50 per square foot of affected area and then quoted as a job total, which for a typical Denver loss is $2,500 to $3,000. The two are the same figure expressed differently. Dividing a quoted total by the affected square footage should return a number inside that per-foot band, and most Denver-area jobs finish somewhere between $1,500 and $8,000.
Where the per-foot rate stops applying
Some items are billed by unit and sit outside the square-foot math entirely. Truck-mounted extraction runs $100 to $300 per room. Air movers cost $25 to $75 per day each, and jobs deploy 5 to 20 units. The cost tables published by Emergency Restoration Hub carry commercial dehumidifiers at $50 to $150 per day as a line separate from the $3.00 to $7.50 per-foot rate, and each of those days is a decision the crew makes on site rather than a quantity fixed at signing. An estimate that folds drying days into the square-foot number is harder to audit, because the homeowner loses the ability to see when the fans went out and when they came back.
The two questions that reproduce the total
What is the affected square footage, and what drying class was assigned to it. Those two answers multiply back into the quoted number, and they should be available on the spot, because a crew that has walked the loss with a moisture meter already has both written down. A firm that has to go away and work them out is quoting from instinct.
Rate and job-total benchmarks referenced here are drawn from cost tables kept by Emergency Restoration Hub, a 24/7 emergency water, fire, and mold cleanup service serving Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Boulder, Longmont, Fort Collins, and Greeley, reachable around the clock on (720) 605-6466. The full Denver breakdown appears at emergencyrestorationhub.com/denver-co/water-damage-restoration/.
