Why this site exists

Restoration is a fair industry with an unfair information problem: you shop for it once, usually at 2 a.m., standing in water. Quotes vary wildly and there's no menu on the wall.

RestoreMeter is a data project, not a contractor directory. We build budgeting estimates for restoration work from public records — Bureau of Labor Statistics wages for the trades that do the work and the IICRC S500 definitions the industry itself prices by — and we publish every assumption so the numbers can be checked, criticized, and corrected. Estimates are a heuristic model's output, not quotes or appraisals.

Use the calculator before you sign anything, read the guides so the process holds no surprises, and treat every figure here as a sanity check on a written scope — never a substitute for one.

Who builds this

RestoreMeter is built and maintained by Joel, a software founder whose day job is building CRM integration systems. It started as a data project after seeing how opaque restoration pricing is at the moment homeowners need it most. The data pipeline, the cost model, and the site itself are his work, and the same engineering habit applies here as in his integration work: publish the assumptions, version the data, and treat corrections as bug reports.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong, it might be. The model, its inputs, and its build date are published on the methodology page; corrections and challenges to any assumption are genuinely welcome.