Roofing Nailers

Everything on coil and cordless roofing nailers — honest buyer's guides, model reviews, and the nail-size and technique answers roofers actually search for.

How to choose a roofing nailer

A roofing nailer is not a small framing nailer. It is a purpose-built tool that drives short, fat, wide-headed nails through asphalt shingles into deck, and it is the only nail gun that does that job properly. A framing nailer cannot run the fastener, and a siding nailer — which looks almost identical and also takes coils — runs longer nails with small heads that will pull straight through a shingle. If you take one thing from this page: the three coil guns are not interchangeable.

The spec that decides everything: the nail

Almost every roofing nailer on the market takes the same fastener, and that is good news for you. The standard is 15° wire-collated coil roofing nails, 0.120″ (11-gauge) shank, 3/4″ to 1¾″ long, with a head of at least 3/8″. Metabo HPT's guns run a 16° coil that is close enough that the same boxes usually feed. That means nails are cheap, stocked everywhere, and not proprietary to any brand — so you are choosing a gun on build quality and weight, not on what it will cost to feed. Our coil nail guide and the nail-size rules cover which length to buy for your deck.

Pneumatic or cordless?

The honest split, after three months of writing about these guns: pneumatic still wins for full roofs, cordless wins for everything else.

A pneumatic coil nailer weighs about 5 lb, costs a fraction of a battery gun, never runs out of charge, and holds ~120 nails in the canister. Tied to a compressor and a hose, that is the production tool, and it is what you will see on nearly every crew. Cordless guns — realistically the DeWalt DCN45RN and the Milwaukee 2909-20, because no one else builds a true battery coil roofing nailer — weigh around 7 lb and cost two to three times as much, but they turn a twenty-minute repair into a twenty-minute repair instead of a twenty-minute repair plus ten minutes of compressor setup. If you are doing a tear-off, buy air. If you are doing repairs, punch lists, or one roof a year, the hose-free version is worth the money. The full argument is in cordless vs pneumatic.

What you actually need to spend

There is no meaningful budget tier below the value guns worth recommending. A no-name roofing nailer saves you very little and jams enough to cost you the difference in a single day. Start at the best roofing nailer roundup, or go straight to the value pick.

Do not forget the air supply

A coil roofing nailer wants roughly 2–2.5 CFM at 90 PSI in sustained use. A 6-gallon pancake compressor runs one gun comfortably; it will not run two on a fast course. Use 3/8″ inside-diameter hose once you are past about 50 feet, because pressure at the regulator is not pressure at the nose on the ridge. Compressor sizing has the numbers.

Three mistakes that cost people money

• Buying a siding nailer because it was cheaper. It takes coils, it looks the same, it will not hold your shingles down.
• Setting depth on bare plywood. Set it on the shingle you are actually laying — architectural stock is much thicker than 3-tab, and a gun dialled in on one overdrives the other. Overdriven heads cut the mat and the shingle blows off in the first real wind.
• Nailing above the nail line. High nailing is the single most common cause of blow-offs, and no gun will save you from it. Four nails or six, and always in the marked zone.

Everything below goes deeper — model reviews, head-to-head comparisons, nail sizing, technique, and what to do when the gun starts jamming.

Guides & how-tos