Most cost pages make you fill in a form before they tell you anything. Here are the numbers.
Traditional three-coat stucco in the Phoenix metro runs about $5 to $9 per square foot of wall. Bids often come written in square yards instead, which is the same money said a different way.
That is a wide range on purpose, and the rest of this explains what decides where your house lands in it.
Start with wall area, not house size
Stucco is priced by the wall, not by the square footage of your home. Those two numbers are not close, and mixing them up is the most common reason a homeowner thinks a bid looks wrong.
A 2,000 square foot single story home has roughly 1,800 to 2,400 square feet of wall. Two stories on the same footprint run well past that. Same floor plan, twice the height.
We measure the wall as it stands and do not deduct the windows and doors. Cutting every opening out of the math is tedious and it is not how the trade prices the work.
At $5 to $9 per square foot, that puts a typical single story re-stucco in a range of roughly $9,000 to $21,000. The spread inside that range is what the next sections are about.
Single story, average plan
Roughly 1,800 to 2,400 square feet of wall, measured as it stands.
Two story
Much more wall plus scaffolding, which is a real line item and not a markup.
Square yards on the bid
One square yard is nine square feet. Divide a per yard price by nine and you can compare it straight against a per foot price.
The four things that move your number
Two houses on the same street get different bids for good reasons. These are the ones that matter most in the Valley.
Height and access
Anything above one story needs scaffolding, and scaffolding takes days of labor before a trowel touches the wall. Tight side yards, steep lots, and walls behind pools all add setup time.
How much prep the wall needs
Cracks to seal, a buried weep screed to open up, a spot of damaged lath to tie back in. Prep varies house to house, and a bid that ignores it is a number that will move later.
Your finish
A heavy lace texture is faster than a dead smooth Santa Barbara finish, which takes more material and far more labor to get flat. Smooth costs more, always.
Detail and shape
Pop-outs, parapets, arches, deep eaves, and banding all add corners. Corners are where the slow, careful hours go, so a detailed elevation costs more than a plain one of the same size.
Where the cheap bid saves its money
When one bid comes in thousands under the others, the difference is almost never magic. It is scope.
The usual places money gets cut are the parts you cannot see once the wall is finished. A thin brown coat instead of a full thickness one. No diamond mesh at the window and door corners. Expansion joints left out. The weep screed sprayed over instead of masked off.
Every one of those saves a day and costs you a wall. The corners crack in the first summer, and the coated screed dams water inside the assembly until the base of your wall crumbles.
So compare bids line by line, not by the total. Ask each contractor what the brown coat thickness is, where the mesh goes, and how the weep screed is protected. The answers will separate them quickly.
What the price should include
A complete re-stucco bid in Phoenix should cover all of this. If an item is missing, it is not a lower price, it is a smaller job.
Prep and protection
Washing the wall down, masking windows and doors, and covering the landscaping before any material goes up.
Lath and flashing where the wall needs it
New paper, wire, weep screed, or flashing anywhere the wall calls for it, and at the openings in particular.
Base coat at full thickness
Floated and straightened level. This is the layer that makes the wall flat and keeps it from going brittle.
Crack defense
Diamond mesh at corners, mesh embeds in high stress areas, and expansion joints where the wall needs to move.
Finish coat in your color
Sampled on your wall before the crew commits, because color reads differently in Arizona sun than on a chip.
Cleanup and walkthrough
Scaffolding struck, site cleared, and a walk of the whole exterior with you before anyone calls it done.
When you do not need a re-stucco at all
Plenty of the homes we look at do not need this job yet.
Say your cracks are at the window and door corners. The wall sounds solid when you tap it, and only one or two sides are damaged. Crack repair plus an elastomeric coating gets you a wall that looks new for a fraction of the cost.
That package runs a long way under a full re-stucco and buys 7 to 10 years. We would rather do that job and be the crew you call in a decade than sell you a job you did not need.
Prices here are Phoenix metro ranges for planning, not a quote. Your wall area, your access, and the detail in your walls set the real number. That takes a walk of the property.
Call 602-583-4683 and we will come measure it, or send photos and we will tell you roughly where you land before anyone drives out.
