A state audit's $12,981 Louisiana re-roof is not a measurement — it is 83% of a modeled median

Published 2026-08-05 · records retrieved 2026-08-05 · our band fixed as of 2026-07 · how we build these numbers

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Before anything else: these are not bills. They come from an email survey of Louisiana homeowners, and the figure our calculator can actually be checked against — the cost of re-roofing to code — was never measured. It was derived by multiplying a total by a percentage the report does not source. That is the finding; the rest of this page is the work of showing it.

What this record is

The Louisiana Legislative Auditor's informational report Louisiana Fortify Homes Program — Department of Insurance (Audit Control # 42240005, March 7, 2025) runs 59 pages on a state grant program that pays homeowners to re-roof to the IBHS FORTIFIED Roof standard. It is a Louisiana public record with no reuse licence attached, so what follows quotes and cites it rather than reproducing it. Here is how this copy was fetched and read:

# Louisiana Legislative Auditor — Audit Control # 42240005
# "Louisiana Fortify Homes Program — Department of Insurance"
# Informational report, issued March 7, 2025 (59-page PDF)

curl -sSL -D headers.txt -o lfhp.pdf \
  "https://app2.lla.state.la.us/publicreports.nsf/0/0c1a2861788223f986258c46007b7f23/\$file/00006fbfa.pdf"
# md5 c081bebdefce5c1362ec500e1583cd84 — 2,183,768 bytes
# HTTP Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:38:57 GMT
# Last-Modified: Sun, 26 Apr 2026 05:04:12 GMT

pdfinfo lfhp.pdf                   # CreationDate 2025-03-08 05:05 (KST)
pdftotext -layout lfhp.pdf lfhp.txt
pdftotext -f 19 -l 19 lfhp.pdf -   # p.15 — the cost split, footnotes 15 and 16
pdftotext -f  9 -l  9 lfhp.pdf -   # p.5  — the IBHS $1,000-$3,000 sentence
pdftoppm -png -r 130 -f 20 -l 20 lfhp.pdf ex9   # Exhibit 9 bar labels, read by eye

# Appendix D, question 12 — the bracketed cost answers, cumulated
python3 -c "import itertools; n=[11,4,13,62,92,64,59,171,4]; \
  print(sum(n), list(itertools.accumulate(n)))"
# 480 [11, 15, 28, 90, 182, 246, 305, 476, 480]

# the published 83/17 split, checked against the published dollars
python3 -c "c=16229-500; print(c, c*0.83, 12981/c*100)"
# 15729   13055.07   82.53

What it measures, and what it quietly does not

It measures what homeowners said in a survey of program participants. Every cost exhibit carries the same source line — "self-reported information from a survey of LFHP participants" — and the report never claims to have checked those answers against an invoice or a contract.

It does not measure roof size. The square footage of a respondent's home or roof is never published, and the floor-area figure the report does cite belongs elsewhere: an IBHS estimate that FORTIFIED requirements add $1,000 to $3,000 to re-roofing a 2,000-square-foot home — uncited, and not drawn from the survey.

It does not isolate the upgrade. The report is candid here — 52.7% of respondents said the roof needed replacing anyway and 15.7% that it was damaged or leaking, so whatever the crew found at tear-off is inside the same total. $16,229 is what that job cost, not what FORTIFIED cost.

And it is not a performance audit. The report states its own status: "these informational reports do not follow Governmental Auditing Standards."

The cohort, and what got filtered out

The auditor emailed 3,257 unique addresses — every applicant marked approved or denied, excluding pending — and received 761 responses, of which 694 survived de-duplication and a ZIP-code check: a 21% response rate. The cost question then narrows again. It drew 480 answers, and the report's cost cross-tabulations run on 449.

That 449 is worth pausing on: the bars in the cost-distribution exhibit sum to 449, the topline for the same question in Appendix D sums to 480, and the exhibit carries no sample-size label — a reader cannot tell which cohort produced the chart.

The report also discloses who is missing: homes valued under $90,000 are about 15% of the relevant Louisiana population and 1% of respondents. The cheapest roofs in the state are the least represented.

The distribution, and our band, on the same axis

Costs were not typed in. Question 12 offered brackets, and the largest has no ceiling. Of the 480 who answered: 2.3% under $5,000; 0.8% at $5,000–7,499; 2.7% at $7,500–9,999; 12.9% at $10,000–12,499; 19.2% at $12,500–15,000; 13.3% at $15,000–17,499; 12.3% at $17,500–19,999; 35.6% at $20,000 or more; 0.8% unsure. Cumulating those counts puts 37.9% at or below $15,000 and 51.3% at or below $17,499, so the median falls in the $15,000–17,499 bracket and $16,229 sits inside it. But straight linear interpolation on the same counts gives about $17,265, and the same method on the 449 bars in Exhibit 9 gives about $17,374. Footnote 16 explains the gap: the auditor fitted a log-normal distribution by interval regression, and did not publish the parameters. Neither cohort reproduces $16,229, and the headline figure cannot be rebuilt from the report alone.

Here is how each published number was built:

Every line of that split is hedged in the original — "we estimate that the baseline cost… is 83%," "an estimated $500 fee for the evaluator" — and the $500 is not a measured median either: evaluator fees "were typically reported to be anywhere from $300 to $600 per inspection." Nor does the split survive arithmetic. Remove $500 from the published total and 83% of what remains is $13,055, not $12,981 — a $74 gap, implying 82.53%. Against the total rather than the construction cost, $12,981 is 79.99%, which is why the summary's 80/20 framing is exact and the 83/17 framing is not. No intermediate step is published, so the gap cannot be closed from outside.

Now our side. Our roofing dataset carries a Louisiana roofer wage index of 0.88 from BLS OEWS May 2025 (occupation 47-2181, against a national median of $26.65/hr). Labor is roughly 65% of a roofing job, so the state multiplier is 0.35 + 0.65 × 0.88 = 0.922. Applied to architectural asphalt, single-layer tear-off, standard eaves, medium pitch:

The report publishes no roof size, so the reader has to supply one. Solving our arithmetic backwards, the audit's $12,981 baseline falls inside the Louisiana band for footprints between roughly 930 and 1,750 sq ft and slips under the low edge above that; the $16,229 total falls inside it from roughly 1,180 to 2,220 sq ft. Our band prices a code-compliant re-roof, not a FORTIFIED one — so the comparable figure is the derived one.

If you are pricing a FORTIFIED roof in Louisiana

The audit is useful once you stop reading it as a price list. Four things to carry into a bid conversation, on top of the quote checklist:

• Make the bidder split the roof from the standard. The state's own 83/17 split is an assumption that does not reconcile to the dollar. Ask for the code-compliant re-roof as one line and the FORTIFIED-specific scope as another.
• Price the evaluator separately. The audit folds an estimated $500 evaluator fee into its FORTIFIED increment, and the fees behind that estimate ran $300 to $600. Ask who books the evaluator and who pays.
• Get the per-sheet decking rate in writing. Just over half the respondents were replacing a roof that was already old, and these are whole-job totals — whatever tear-off uncovered is inside them, unlabelled.
• Ask whether the number is before or after the grant. The $10,000 grant is the only thing turning $16,229 into $6,229. A bid quoted net of a grant you have not been awarded is not a bid.

And treat the vintage seriously: the report issued in March 2025, and none of it has been re-observed since.

Frequently asked questions

Does a FORTIFIED roof cost $16,229 in Louisiana?

That is a modeled median of self-reported survey answers — not a price, and not a verified bill. Homeowners picked a cost bracket rather than typing a number, 35.6% picked the open-ended top bracket of $20,000 or more, and the auditor fitted a distribution to those brackets to produce $16,229. It is the best public Louisiana figure available, and still an estimate built on 480 answers.

How much does the FORTIFIED upgrade itself add to a re-roof?

Two published numbers disagree, from different lineages. The Louisiana Legislative Auditor splits its $16,229 median into $12,981 of baseline re-roofing and $3,248 of FORTIFIED increment — but that $3,248 includes an estimated $500 evaluator fee and rests on an 83%/17% assumption the report attributes only to "our review of literature," uncited. IBHS separately estimates the added requirements at $1,000 to $3,000 on a 2,000-square-foot home. Two estimates, not one number confirmed twice.

What is the Louisiana Fortify Homes Program grant worth?

The grant is $10,000. The report's $6,229 net figure is simply $16,229 minus $10,000 — it was not measured separately, and it inherits every weakness of the $16,229 it is subtracted from. Treat it as arithmetic on an estimate, not as a bill anyone paid, and never let a bidder quote you a price net of a grant you have not been awarded.

Is a state audit a better cost source than a contractor cost guide?

A different one, not automatically a better one. This document states on its own page that informational reports do not follow Governmental Auditing Standards, and every cost table carries the source line "self-reported information from a survey of LFHP participants." Its advantage over a commercial cost guide is not verification — it is that the sample, the question wording, and the response rate are all printed where you can read them.