Editorial policy

Roofing is ordered in squares and bundles, but often measured from the ground with a tape and a guess. Get the pitch wrong and you are a bundle short on the last afternoon of the job.

That is the whole reason RoofPitchMath exists. We would rather show you one number you can trust, and exactly how we got it, than ten numbers you have to second-guess. Here is how we work.

We show our working

Our calculator pages show the formula behind the answer, so you can do the math on paper if you would rather. Where a result depends on published data, such as a standard size or a typical weight, we link the source, and we keep adding step-by-step worked examples. If our answer and yours disagree, one of us has made a mistake, and we want to know which.

We test before we publish

We check the pitch, area and bundle math against worked roofs and against the minimum slopes in the residential building code. Right now RoofPitchMath has 5 calculators and 15 automatic checks. Each check is a hand-worked answer the calculator has to match exactly. They run every time the site is updated, and an update that breaks one does not go live.

Codes set minimums, makers can ask for more

We quote minimum slopes from the International Residential Code and remind you that local codes and the manufacturer's instructions can be stricter. Roof area is an estimate from the footprint, and complex roofs are best measured plane by plane.

Dates mean something

The "Updated" date on a page only changes when the page itself changes. We do not bump dates to look fresh.

Ads pay the bills, not the answers

RoofPitchMath is free to use and is meant to be supported by advertising. Advertisers never see or influence our numbers, and we do not sell links, sponsored rankings or paid reviews.

Tell us when we are wrong

If a number looks off, send us the page and the value. Hassan Nawaz reads every message. Confirmed mistakes are fixed, the page date is updated, and if your note made a page better, we are grateful for it.

Hassan Nawaz
Publisher, RoofPitchMath