How Much to Charge for a Roof Repair in 2026 (UK Pricing Guide)

Roofing is one of the few trades where the cost of getting to the work regularly exceeds the cost of the work itself. A £90 slipped-tile repair can need £400 of scaffold. Price the tile and forget the tower and you have bought yourself a day's work for nothing.

This guide covers what to charge for common roofing jobs in 2026, and — more usefully — how to price the two things that actually decide whether a roofing job makes money.

Rough price guides by job type

Treat these as starting points for a domestic property in a typical UK region. Your own rates, city, and access conditions move them significantly.

• Slipped or broken tiles (a handful, easy access): £120–£250
• Ridge tile re-bed and repoint: £400–£900 depending on run length
• Lead flashing replacement (chimney or abutment): £300–£700
• Flat roof patch repair: £200–£450
• Full flat roof replacement (EPDM/GRP, small extension): £1,800–£3,500
• Full re-roof, 3-bed semi: £6,000–£12,000 including scaffold and disposal
• Gutter clearance and minor repair: £90–£200

The spread on each is wide on purpose. A roofer quoting the middle of every range without looking at access is guessing.

The two costs that decide your margin

1. Access is a line item, not an afterthought

Scaffold, tower hire, or a cherry picker is often 20–40% of the total on a small job. It is also the cost most likely to be forgotten in a quick verbal quote, because you are thinking about the repair.

Price it explicitly and show it on the quote. Customers rarely argue with a scaffold line — they argue with a total that seems high for "a couple of tiles" when they cannot see why. Making access visible does the explaining for you.

If you can genuinely do a job safely off a ladder, that is a competitive advantage worth pricing in. If you cannot, no amount of wanting to will make it safe.

2. You are quoting a roof you have not fully seen

Nobody prices a re-roof accurately from the ground. Battens rot, felt has gone, a previous repair was bodged, the chimney needs work nobody mentioned.

Two ways to handle it, both honest:

• Quote a provisional sum for what you can see, with a clear, written note on what triggers a variation and roughly what it would cost.
• Charge for a survey and deduct it from the job if they proceed. This filters out price-shoppers and pays you for the time either way.

What loses money is the third option: absorb it, do the extra work for free, and resent the customer for a fortnight.

Day rate versus job price

Most roofers do better on job price than day rate, because roofing rewards speed and experience — and a day rate quietly punishes both. A two-man team clearing a flashing job by lunchtime earns a full job price, not half a day.

Keep a day rate for genuinely open-ended work: storm damage, insurance jobs, anything where the scope really cannot be seen until you are up there.

Quote fast, because roofing is urgent

Roofing enquiries are disproportionately urgent. A leak is not a "get three quotes next month" job — it is a bucket on the landing. The roofer who quotes today frequently wins over the cheaper roofer who quotes on Thursday.

That is the single highest-leverage change most roofing businesses can make: not charging more, but quoting sooner. A quote sent from the van in ten minutes, off a template with your standard line items already priced, beats a carefully formatted one written at nine that evening.

Get the paperwork out of the way on site

Roofing carries more compliance than most trades expect — working at height assessments, scaffold inspections, CDM notifications on larger jobs, asbestos awareness on anything pre-2000, and a building regs notification on a full re-roof.

Gaffer ships those as ready-made forms you complete on your phone on site, including with no signal, so the certificate and the invoice go out the same day rather than the same month. See the full list of roofing certificates and forms.

The short version

• Price access as its own visible line — it is up to 40% of small jobs
• Never quote a re-roof as a fixed price on a roof you have only seen from the pavement
• Job price beats day rate for anything with a knowable scope
• Speed of quote wins more roofing work than price does