What the drywall for a room costs
Materials only, in the sizes a store sells, each at a price you can type over. The 12 by 10 foot room this page opens with — 439 square feet of board net of its door and window, walls and ceiling, hung in the cheapest sheet with 10% for cuts — comes to $317.58:
| Item | Quantity | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Gypsum board | 17 × 4 × 8 ft | $271.66 |
| Screws, #6 × 1¼ in | 2 × 1 lb box | $17.96 |
| Joint compound | 1 × 4.5 gal | $19.98 |
| Joint tape | 1 × 250 ft roll | $7.98 |
| Total | $317.58 | |
The board is 86% of it. That is why the sheet size is worth a minute: every size is laid out on the room and priced, and the page hangs the cheapest. The same room in 4 by 12 sheets is 11 hung and 13 bought, $331.66 in all — $14 more, and four fewer sheets to carry. The bigger sheet is cheaper per square foot and dearer per room here, because each 10 foot row cut from a 12 foot sheet leaves two feet nothing else can use. The gap is $14 on $318, so treat it as a tie and pick on handling.
The prices here are ours, not a store's
Every figure on this page is our own estimate, dated and marked as such. We do not call a store or an API for prices — the site makes no third-party requests at all — so the numbers are a starting point and nothing more. Each one sits in a box: type what your store charges beside the sheet, the screw box, the pail, the roll and the bead, and the total and the cheapest combination both move with them.
Untick anything you already have. A roll of tape and half a pail of mud in the garage take two ticks off and come off the total.
What is not in the number
No labor. A hanger and a taper are usually priced by the square foot and the rate varies more by region than the materials do, so a figure here would be a guess dressed as an estimate.
No corner bead unless you ask for it — a room has no outside corners until you say how many, and each part card has a box for the count. No primer, texture or paint; no screws for a steel-framed wall, which take a different point. And no delivery, which for 998 pounds of board is a real question: the weight is on the card so you can decide.
Where the quantities come from
Each one has a source and a row you can edit, under "What we assumed": the compound from USG's nine gallons a thousand square feet, the tape from 370 feet a thousand, the screws from the spacing in IRC Table R702.3.5, the sheet weight from the mills' published pounds per square foot. Nothing here is a coefficient we invented, and the two we could not source — every price — say so.
We are not connected with any brand or store named here.