What permanent Christmas lights cost per foot, and why houses differ

The short answer: $22–34 per lit foot, once

Permanent Christmas lights from LightCast cost $22–34 per lit foot of roofline, installed once. Every house we price falls somewhere inside that band, and where yours lands depends on the shape of the roof, how high the eaves sit, and how often the trim line turns or breaks.

A national range does not tell you where your own house lands. A band only helps if you know what moves you inside it. That is what this guide covers: what counts as a lit foot, why a peak costs more than a straight eave, what a second story adds, and the whole price table from a 60-foot ranch front to a 400-foot two-story with wings.

A rough way to place your house before you measure anything:

• Low end of the band. One story, long straight eaves, one simple gable or none, and easy ground for a ladder along the front.
• Middle of the band. A two-story front with one or two gables and an attached garage, which describes the standard colonial across Macomb and Oakland County.
• Top of the band. Several peaks, dormers, a steep pitch, eaves at two or three heights, and porch roofs or bump-outs that break the line every few feet.

What counts as a lit foot

A lit foot is one foot of roofline edge that actually carries the channel. It is not the width of your lot, the width of the house, or the length of every roof edge on the building. Three numbers get mixed up here, and only one of them ends up on the quote.

1. House width. What a tape pulled across the front yard gives you. It skips every sloped edge, so it always comes out short.
2. Total roofline. Every eave and rake on all four sides, including the back of the house, the far side of the garage and dormers nobody sees from the street.
3. Lit feet. The edges you choose to light, measured along the edge itself. A gable rake counts at its sloped length, which is longer than the level span underneath it.

The price follows the third number only. Lighting only the street-facing elevation and stopping at the corners keeps lit feet well under total roofline. Wrapping the sides, or lighting a back eave that faces a deck or a lake, adds footage at the same rate.

Our guide to how many feet of lights your house needs walks through measuring the lit number with a tape from the ground, and measuring gables and peaks covers the slope math on the rakes.

Why peaks and dormers cost more than straight eaves

A long straight eave is the cheapest foot of lighting on any house, and a front made mostly of it sits near the bottom of the band. Every peak on the front moves the house up. A single gable over the garage barely shifts it. Three gables and a front porch roof across the same width can move it a third of the way up.

Dormers move a house further per foot than anything else on the roof. They add only a few feet of edge each, but those feet are the slowest on the house, so a row of three dormers can lift the whole quote more than their footage suggests. They are also the easiest part to leave dark, since the house still reads clearly with the main eaves and gables lit. Tracing the front with and without them is the quickest way to see what they cost you.

Trim complexity works the same way on a smaller scale. Cornice returns at the foot of a gable, a porch roof tucked under the main eave, a bay window with its own little roof, a garage set forward of the house: each one is a break in the line, and each break is a cut, a corner and a ladder reset. Two houses with identical lit footage can sit at opposite ends of the band because one turns a corner every few feet and the other runs straight.

Stories and ladder work

A second story does not add lit feet by itself. A 40-foot eave is 40 feet whether it sits over the first floor or the second. What height changes is where those feet land in the band. On a two-story colonial the upper eave is usually the longest run, so most of the footage is priced at the harder height.

A rough guide to how height places a house, using the same lit footage:

1. One story, one eave height. A ranch front sits near the bottom of the band, which is why an 80-foot ranch runs $1,800–$2,700 and usually lands in the lower half.
2. Two heights. Split-levels, and colonials with a one-story attached garage, sit in the middle, because part of the line is low and part is high.
3. Full two-story front. Most of the footage is at the upper eave, which pushes the house toward the upper half.
4. Two stories plus steep pitch or a second-story eave above a porch roof. Tudors and larger colonials with these features sit at the top.

Our crews are on these same fascias all summer washing siding and cleaning gutters, so eave height is no surprise to us. A straight-on photo shows it clearly. A width measurement misses it.

Priced examples for every table row

These are the installed ranges for common footages, from a 60-foot ranch front to a 400-foot two-story with wings. The permanent column is the only bill you pay. The seasonal column is what a leased C9 display on the same footage costs every season, shown because the one-time permanent figure sits close to a single year of leasing on every row. The last column adds up five seasons of that lease.

Each row spans the whole band. A 150-foot front made mostly of straight eave sits near $3,300. The same 150 feet broken up by two gables, a dormer and a porch roof sits near $5,100. The footage matches. The shape does not.

For local context, the city pages publish typical footage for each area's housing. Smaller two-stories in Sterling Heights run 100 to 150 feet and Troy two-story colonials 120 to 180, while the large two-stories with wings on the Bloomfield Township page run 250 to 400 feet, the bottom three rows of the table. If you own a colonial, our colonial guide covers which of its lines are worth lighting. The five-year permanent and lease comparison shows how the two columns pull apart over time.

What is already inside the per-foot price

The per-foot figure is the installed price: the diodes and channel, mounting, the one autumn install, the controller and phone control, zoning, the warranty on track and diodes, and the on-site check. It is not a materials price with labor added later.

Two things sit outside the rate. If you want lit wreaths or garland, those are quoted as part of the design. And if a seasonal lease suits your plans better, for instance if a move is coming soon or the December look is all you want, we will tell you and price that instead. The breakdown of why permanent lighting costs what it does goes deeper on where the money goes.

Getting your own number from a photo

You do not need a tape or a ladder to find out where your house sits in the band. The LightCast measuring tool works from one straight-on photo of the front of your house, taken from the street. The tool traces the roofline on its own, then asks for one reference of known width, and it converts the line to linear feet and counts the peaks and valleys. A double garage door is the best reference at 16 feet, and a single door is 9 feet.

The result is priced for both permanent and seasonal from the same math, and the photo is never uploaded. If the automatic trace follows an edge you would leave dark, switch to manual mode and tap only the lines you want. Tracing the front twice, once with the dormers and once without, is the fastest way to see what those small rooflines are worth to you.

Measure your roofline and see where it lands in the band from your phone. When the number looks right, request an estimate with your measurement attached and we will confirm the details within 24 hours. Earlier callers pick their install date, since the calendar fills in order.

Where this applies

Typical roofline lengths and priced examples for these communities are on their own pages.

• Troy
• Sterling Heights
• Bloomfield Township