📊 The Home-Improvement Trades Most Likely to Overcharge You (2026 Data)
The Trades Most Likely to Overcharge You
When homeowners and drivers upload a real price quote to QuoteScore, our system scores it from 0 to 100 for fairness, where 100 is a clean, fairly priced quote and anything under 50 signals meaningful overcharging or missing detail. Across all 2,550 quotes analyzed to date, the average score is 56.
Break that number down by trade and a clear pattern appears. The five lowest-scoring categories are siding (average score 46, from 40 quotes), paving (48, from 46 quotes), general construction (49, from 23 quotes), auto repair (50, from 544 quotes), and concrete (51, from 64 quotes).
Siding is the worst, and it is not a coincidence sitting next to paving and concrete. Four of the five worst-scoring trades are exterior or structural jobs. The lone outlier is auto repair, which is also the single most-submitted category in our dataset at 544 quotes.
The common thread among the exterior and hardscape trades: the work is hard for a homeowner to price-check. There is no window sticker for a siding job. Square-footage math, material grades, and prep work are opaque, and that opacity is exactly where inflated quotes hide.
What a Worst-Scoring Quote Actually Looks Like
A quote scores poorly for two main reasons: the total sits far above the fair-value range for that job, or the quote is a vague lump sum with no itemization to justify the number. Exterior and structural trades are prone to both.
Consider a real quote submitted to QuoteScore: a contractor billed $15,000 to install 22 feet of channel drain on a driveway. The typical fair range for that job is $3,300 to $5,500. The quote scored a 5 out of 100, one of the lowest possible, with an overcharge of roughly $11,700 against fair value. It was a single line item on a single page. There was nothing itemized to defend the number, and nothing a homeowner could easily compare against.
That is the anatomy of a low-scoring exterior quote: a big round number, one line, and a job most people will price exactly once in their life. Before you sign anything on an exterior or hardscape job, ask for a line-item breakdown of materials, labor, and prep, and compare the total against a fair-value range for your area.
Scores Are Trending Down (With a Caveat)
There is a second pattern worth flagging. The average fairness score of submitted quotes has fallen month over month this year: 61 in February (from 1,550 quotes), 60 in March (42 quotes), 51 in April (306 quotes), 49 in May (310 quotes), 47 in June (276 quotes), and 43 so far in July (66 quotes). That is an 18-point slide from February to July.
The honest caveat: this trend measures the quotes people choose to submit, not the entire market. As word of the tool spreads, people may be bringing us their most suspicious quotes on purpose, which would pull the average down independent of any change in contractor pricing. What we can say is that the quotes landing in front of our system are scoring worse over time, and the July figure is early and may move as the month fills in.
Methodology: QuoteScore rates each quote 0 to 100 for fairness, weighing the quoted total against a fair-value range plus itemization quality. The sample is 2,550 real quotes uploaded by consumers between February and July 2026. Quotes are self-submitted, so the sample skews toward quotes people already found questionable, which makes it useful for studying overcharging patterns and unsuitable as a census of average prices. Total consumer savings identified across all analyzed quotes to date: $4,200,745.