The baseline: roofline on a two-story home
For most homes, a roofline-only install on a two-story house starts around $800 and runs to roughly $1,200 depending on linear footage, peak count, and access. That figure typically covers commercial-grade LED strands sized to your eaves, professional clip work, timers, and takedown on a lease. The single biggest driver at this tier is how much roofline you have and how many stories and steep pitches the crew has to reach safely.
Full displays: trees, wreaths, and the jump to $1,600+
Once you add tree wrapping, shrub lighting, garland, and wreaths, the ticket commonly moves into the $1,600 to $3,500 range. Tree wrapping is the line item people underestimate: a single mature parkway oak can take as much material and labor as a modest roofline, and tall canopies turn a ladder job into a bucket-truck job. Full-property displays in higher-end suburbs regularly land at the top of that band or beyond.
Lease vs. buy, and why most people lease
On a lease, the installer owns the lights, replaces failures during the season, and stores everything in the off-season — you are paying for a lit house on a schedule. Buying your own lowers the recurring cost but shifts storage, failures, and re-measuring onto you, and cheap retail strands rarely survive multiple Midwest winters. For most homeowners the lease math wins once you price in storage space and the value of not re-hanging anything yourself.
Where this leaves you. Every figure above is a general range. What the same work is modeled to cost near you narrows it to the towns we publish, and what to have ready before you ask closes the remaining gap — no guide can price a roofline it has not seen.
The largest single lever on that number is not the light count but the ownership model — leasing against buying outright.