HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO MOUNT A TV? WHAT'S ACTUALLY PUBLISHED

The Short Answer

For labor alone, most TV mounting in the United States lands between $100 and $350. The averages depend on who you ask, and they don't agree:

That's a wide spread for the same task, and the reason is simple: those numbers are measuring different scopes. Some include the bracket, most don't. Some include hiding the cables, most don't. Comparing them straight across tells you almost nothing.

Every figure on this page was taken from a public source in August 2026. Prices move — check before you rely on any of them, including ours.

What Chicago Installers Actually Publish

We looked up fifteen TV mounting companies serving Chicago and went to their websites to find a price.

Ten of them don't list one. No figure, no range, no starting point — a contact form and a promise of a free quote. To find out what mounting your TV costs, you have to hand over your details and wait for someone to call you back.

Of the five that do publish, here's the shape of it:

One of the five advertises itself as the lowest price in Chicago at $129 to start — with parts supplied by you. Another charges by size in five tiers from $100 to $225, and bills a one-hour minimum for every add-on you request.

None of that is dishonest. It's just how the trade prices itself, and it means the number you see first is the floor of your bill rather than the bill.

Where The Money Actually Goes

Base price is the part everyone competes on, so it's the part that stays low. The bill grows in the add-ons, and those are far less consistent from company to company.

Screen size

Size tiers are the most common structure in the trade, and the spread is steep — among Chicago companies that publish, the same job on an 85″ can run more than double what it runs on a 50″. A big TV genuinely is heavier and wants a second pair of hands. But what really decides how long a mount takes is the wall, not the screen: an 85″ on modern wood studs is a faster job than a 43″ on century-old plaster. That's why we don't charge by size.

The mount itself

Read the fine print for “customer supplied parts.” A base price that excludes the bracket isn't comparable to one that includes it, and brackets range from $30 to several hundred. Ours are $50 for fixed or tilting and $100 for full motion, listed openly.

Hiding the wires

This is the widest spread of anything we found: in-wall concealment is published anywhere from $59 to $175, and a recessed outlet behind the screen runs up to $299. Nationally Angi puts concealed wiring, soundbar brackets and fireplace work at $150–300 on top. If cables matter to you, ask about this before you compare base prices at all — it can be the largest line on the invoice.

The wall

Plaster, brick, concrete and steel studs all take longer than drywall, and many installers charge a “difficult wall” surcharge for them. We don't — those are normal Chicago walls. Tile is our one exception, at $50, because it genuinely destroys drill bits.

Why Booking Through A Lead Site Costs More

Look again at those national averages. Thumbtack reports $139. Angi reports $249 — nearly double, for the same task. That gap isn't about quality, and it isn't a coincidence. It's the business model.

Sites like Angi and Thumbtack don't take a cut of the job. They sell leads — your contact details, to contractors, up front, whether or not anyone ever books you:

• Angi charges roughly $15 to $85 per lead (sometimes over $100), on top of a membership that runs around $300 a year. Each enquiry is sold to three to eight businesses at once.
• Thumbtack runs $25 to $75 per lead for most home-service trades, with each one shared with four or five other pros.

Now do the arithmetic from the contractor's side. Five installers each pay for the same enquiry. One of them gets the job. The other four paid for nothing — and roughly three quarters of homeowners simply hire whoever replies first, so it isn't even the best installer who wins, it's the fastest one to a phone.

At $25 a lead and one win in five, the installer who does get your job has spent about $125 acquiring it. At $50 a lead, $250. That money is real and it has to come from somewhere, so it comes from the price on the invoice — yours, and everyone else's who booked through the same channel.

To be fair to the platforms: they do deliver customers, and that service is worth paying for if you have no other way to find work. But you should understand what you're looking at when a lead-site quote comes in higher. You are paying for the four quotes that didn't win.

What About The Guarantee?

There's a genuine reason people book through the platforms, and it isn't price — it's protection. For a stranger drilling into your wall, that's a reasonable thing to want. But the guarantees are not equivalent, and the gap between them is enormous.

Forty times the coverage, for what a homeowner experiences as the same act of booking a tradesperson through an app. Almost nobody comparing the two knows that.

And Thumbtack's — the stronger of the two — is narrower than most people assume:

• You have to pay through the platform. Pay your installer in cash, by check, or through Venmo — the way most people actually pay a tradesperson — and the guarantee is void.
• It excludes faulty installation and incomplete work. It covers direct physical damage, not the job being done badly. For TV mounting specifically, that's a meaningful gap: a bad install is the most likely thing to go wrong.
• The clock is short. Fourteen days to report property damage. A mount that was anchored wrong often doesn't fail for months — that's exactly how anchors fail, slowly — and by then the window has closed.

So it's real protection, with real edges. What it is not is insurance on the installer.

It's also worth being honest about how rarely any of this gets used. For a job this size, the thing that actually keeps installers honest isn't a claims process — it's that the work is public. A company that doesn't take care of people accumulates reviews saying so, on Google and Yelp, where the next customer reads them. That record follows a local installer far more closely than a guarantee they'll probably never claim against, and it's the single most useful thing you can check before booking anyone.

The Cost That Never Appears On The Invoice

There's a difference between a big installer and an owner-operator that nobody prices, and it shows up on the day rather than on the quote.

You don't know who's coming

When you book a large company, you're booking a brand. The rating you read is an average across dozens of technicians, and the person who knocks on your door isn't named in any of those reviews. They might be excellent. You have no way to know, because nothing you read was about them.

Book an owner-operator and the reviews and the person are the same thing. Whoever is at your door is the one whose name is on the record and who wears every job. That alignment is the whole value of a review, and it quietly disappears the moment the company is big enough to have staff.

The installer often isn't allowed to solve your problem

This is the one that costs customers the most, and it's rarely the technician's fault.

A tech working for a big-box retailer or a large outfit works to a scope sheet. There's a standard install, a list of what's included, and a list of what they're not permitted to touch. When your room needs something slightly off that script — a different height because of where the sectional actually sits, drilling a surface the policy excludes, a second trip to the van for a bracket that suits your wall better, twenty more minutes to get the tilt exactly right — a policy-bound installer frequently can't do it. Not won't. Can't. The answer is "that's not something we do," and the job ends at the boundary of the scope sheet rather than at the point where your setup is actually right.

Someone who owns the business makes that call standing in your living room. If the job needs another twenty minutes, it gets another twenty minutes. If it needs a different approach than the one planned on the phone, it gets one. There's nobody to ask.

Two examples we run into constantly, both of which end with a customer being told no:

“You'll need to speak to a tile expert”

Big-box installers routinely decline tile. The customer books a TV mount, the tech arrives, sees a tile wall or a tiled fireplace surround, and the job stops there — go find a tile specialist.

Tile is genuinely the hardest surface we drill, and it's the one wall we charge extra for. But it's a normal part of the work, not a different trade. Hammer mode off, a diamond bit, slow and wet, and ease off at breakthrough — it's a slower job, at $50 more, and it gets done on the same visit. Nobody needs to be referred anywhere.

“It has to go on the stud, so it can't be centered”

This one comes up on Samsung Frame TVs, and it's worth understanding because the customer usually loses the argument.

The Frame uses an unusual flush mount with two mounting points, and the aim is to catch at least one stud across them. When the studs don't line up with where the customer actually wants the TV — centered on the wall, centered over the fireplace, centered on the console — a policy-bound installer's answer is that the TV moves. So a television bought specifically to look like a framed picture ends up hung visibly off-center, because of where a stud happens to be.

Where a stud genuinely isn't available, we use heavy-duty snap toggles in place of it. The load case here is about as gentle as wall mounting gets: a Frame is a light television, and it sits nearly flush, so there's almost no leverage pulling the anchors out of the wall — nothing like the cantilever of a full-motion arm holding an 85″ screen twenty inches off the drywall. Those toggles are rated in the hundreds of pounds each, far beyond what a Frame asks of them, and we've never had one come back.

The result is the TV hangs where the customer wanted it. That isn't a trick or a shortcut — it's just being allowed to choose the right hardware for the situation instead of following a rule written for every situation at once.

To be fair about the trade-off: a big company has real advantages. Scheduling capacity, someone to send if your installer is sick, a corporate complaints process. If those matter most to you, that's a legitimate reason to choose one. Just know you're trading away the flexibility, and that the trade isn't listed anywhere on the price sheet.

What We Charge, And Why It's Flat

Everything is published on our prices page, but the short version:

The flat rate isn't a gimmick and it isn't charity. It's that size is a poor predictor of how long the job takes, so charging by it means overcharging half our customers to hedge against the other half. Charging one number for the mount and pricing the genuine variables separately — the bracket, the cables, the tile — is simply more honest arithmetic.

What we don't charge for: travel anywhere in our service area, fuel, hauling the box away, weekend appointments, or plaster, brick and metal studs.

The Short Version

• Nationally, expect $100–$350 for labor. Thumbtack says $139 average; Angi says $249; Geek Squad runs $99.99–$249.99 plus $25 on weekends.
• Of fifteen Chicago installers we checked, ten publish no price at all.
• Of the five that do, every one quotes “starting at” — and at least one excludes the bracket.
• Base price is where everyone competes; the add-ons are where bills actually differ.
• In-wall concealment is the widest spread we found: $59 to $175, and up to $299 for an outlet.
• Make every quote price the same five things, or you're not comparing anything.
• Lead sites sell your enquiry to 3–8 installers at $15–85 each. Only one wins, and the winner's acquisition cost lands in your quote.
• Platform guarantees differ wildly — Thumbtack covers property damage to $100,000, Angi to $2,500 — and both require paying on-platform.
• Ask any installer for proof of insurance. It beats a guarantee with exclusions, and reviews beat both.
• With a big company the reviews aren't about the person who shows up, and a scope sheet often stops them customizing your setup even when they'd like to.
• Ask two questions before booking: who is actually doing the install, and can they decide on the day?
• Ours: $100 flat any size, every add-on listed, tile the only wall surcharge.

Who You're Actually Hiring

A personal note from Lance, who owns this business and does the installs.

During COVID, when almost nobody would set foot inside a stranger's home, I did. People were shut in with the world at its worst, and getting a TV properly on the wall was a small thing that made the days more bearable. For a long stretch, that was the work.

The big retailers pulled back, and then came back with marketing budgets I had no way to match. I don't hold it against them — in their position I'd have done exactly the same, and honestly nobody over there was thinking about me at all. That's the part that took me a while to understand. The ad auctions don't care how big you are, only what you can bid, so a one-person business gets treated exactly like a corporation and quietly priced out of being found. My business shrank. Most of the people I'd helped through the worst of it had long since moved on, which is just how it goes.

So I'm rebuilding, and somewhere in there I found I enjoy designing software and websites as much as I enjoy the installs. The two turned out to be closer than I expected. I've spent years watching how people actually use the technology in their homes — what they reach for, what they give up on, what they complain about afterwards. That's what I bring to a setup now: not just getting the screen on the wall, but making the thing genuinely work once it's there. One remote that runs everything, no cords hanging down the wall, at a height you can watch for two hours.

The world isn't a bad place. We're all just human, doing what makes sense from where we're standing.

If you've got questions about your setup, ask me. Not a form, not a lead that gets sold to five installers. If you want someone with experience to think through your room with you before you spend anything, that's a phone call, and it's free. It's also the one thing you can't get once your details have been bought and resold to people who need to make back what they paid for you.

Know Your Number Before We Arrive

$100 flat for the mount, whatever the size. Every add-on published. Pick what you want and the total is the total.

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