How Many Roofing Nails Per Square of Shingles

Estimating How Many Nails for a New Roof

When it comes to estimating materials for building construction it’s helpful to have basic rules of thumb to rely on. Fasteners are that elusive building material that often gets forgotten when doing estimates and accounting for miscellaneous costs.

Every manufacturer has different specifications for their shingles but generally speaking shingles fall into two categories. For standard installation most manufacturers recommend 4 nails per shingle. For high wind zones the general rule is 5 nails per singles.

Number of Nails Per Square of Roofing

This ends up with approximately 320 nails per square for standard installation and 480 nails per square for high wind installations. A typical box of 1-1/4″ coil roofing nails is 7,200 nails. Using this we can come up with an approximate number of boxes of coil nails for each roofing job.

Standard Installation: 22.5 Square Per Box, if you assume 10% loss then it’s roughly 20 Square Per Box
High Wind Installation: 25 Square Per Box, if you assume 10% loss then it’s roughly 13 Square Per Box

Also, nails will be used for the drip edges, starters and caps so the 10% loss will likely cover those fasteners as well.

Todd Fratzel

I'm full time builder for a large construction company in New Hampshire. I run their design-build division that specializes in custom homes, commercial design-build projects and sub-divisions. I'm also a licensed civil and structural engineer with extensive experience in civil and structural design and home construction. My hope is that I can share my experience in the home construction, home improvement and home renovation profession with other builders and home owners. I'm also the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Tool Box Buzz. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, suggestions or you'd like to inquire about advertising on this site.