Roof Repair Cost In Croydon
What should you actually expect to pay?
Honest price bands for the jobs that come up most often, and what makes the figure move
Roofing prices are opaque, which suits the trade and does not suit you. So here are real bands for real jobs in this borough. They are bands rather than fixed figures because the biggest variable on a Croydon roof is usually not the repair at all - it is how hard the roof is to stand on safely, and that changes enormously between a bungalow in Selsdon and a three storey Victorian frontage in South Croydon. Everything below assumes work in the borough and the surrounding CR postcodes.
Get a fixed written price
Four details and somebody will come and look at it. There is no charge for the visit, no obligation afterwards, and if the answer is that your roof is fine, that is what you will be told.
1,000+
Roofs put right
10 year
Written workmanship guarantee
£0
To have somebody come and look
Repair first
Replacement is the last resort
Roof repair prices in Croydon
Guide bands, inclusive of labour and materials, based on the work we do around the borough. Access is shown separately at the bottom because on many jobs it is the largest single line.
| Job | Guide price | What it assumes |
|---|---|---|
| Clear and check gutters, two storey semi | £80 - £180 | Includes checking the fall and the gully, not just scooping the leaves out. |
| Refix a slipped slate or tile, ladder access | £120 - £250 | Assumes it can be reached safely without scaffold or a tower. |
| Trace and repair a leak | £200 - £900 | The wide band is access and how buried the fault is, not the repair itself. |
| Rebed a ridge or hip line | £450 - £1,200 | A day's work on most semis. Mortar has to be right or it goes again. |
| Replace a section of guttering or a downpipe | £150 - £500 | uPVC. Cast iron is a different order of cost and quoted specifically. |
| Repoint and reflash a chimney stack | £900 - £2,500 | Access is usually the biggest single line in this one. |
| Rebuild a chimney stack | £2,000 - £5,000+ | Depends how far down it has to come and whether it is a party stack. |
| Repair a flat roof locally | £250 - £700 | Sensible on a sound roof with one split. Not sensible on a blistered one. |
| Recover a single storey rear extension | £1,800 - £4,500 | EPDM or felt. Building up the falls, where needed, is priced separately. |
| Full uPVC roofline, two storey semi | £1,600 - £3,500 | Fascias, soffits, bargeboards and new guttering, vented as standard. |
| Full roof replacement, two storey semi | £6,000 - £14,000 | Concrete tile. Natural slate and larger or taller roofs go well beyond this. |
| Scaffold, typical two storey elevation | £500 - £1,200 | Always its own line on a quote, never buried in the labour figure. |
These are guide figures to help you sanity check a quote, including ours. They are not a quotation, and no honest one can be given without somebody looking at the roof.
Six things that move the price
Access, almost always
This is the thing people underestimate most. The same slate replaced from a ladder on a Shirley bungalow and from full scaffold on a three storey Victorian frontage on the Brighton Road is the same twenty minutes of roofing and a very different bill. If a quote does not separate access out, you cannot tell which you are paying for.
What the roof is covered in
Natural slate costs more than concrete tile to buy and more to lay, and reclaimed slate for a match on a Victorian terrace costs more again. Hand-made clay tiles on the Arts and Crafts houses of the Webb Estate at Purley are a different bracket entirely.
How complicated the roof is
Hips, valleys, dormers, bay roofs, catslides and anything where two different roofs meet all add time and all add leadwork. A simple gabled roof is a fraction of the work of a hipped roof with three valleys and a dormer.
What is underneath
A quote can only assume so much until the covering comes off. Soft battens, rotten sarking or a failed deck on a flat roof change the job. An honest quote says what has been assumed and what happens if that assumption turns out wrong.
Where the skip goes
On most Croydon roads a skip has to go on the highway, which needs a licence from the council. It is not a large cost but it is a real one, and it belongs in the quote rather than appearing later.
Whether anything is protected
In a conservation area, or inside one of the borough's Article 4 areas, the material may be prescribed rather than chosen. That can rule out the cheap option before the conversation starts.
Why access is on its own line
Almost every complaint about roofing prices comes back to the same thing: the customer thought they were paying for a repair, and most of the money went on getting somebody safely to it. That is not a scandal - scaffold genuinely costs what it costs, and the alternative is somebody working unsafely on your house. What is unreasonable is hiding it inside a single figure so you cannot see it.
Every quote here separates access from work. If a twenty minute repair on your roof needs eight hundred pounds of scaffold, you will see both numbers and you can make an informed decision - including the decision to bundle other jobs into the same visit, or to wait until something else needs doing up there anyway.
It also makes quotes comparable. Two prices for the same job can only be compared if you can see what each of them included, which is the whole argument for itemising.
The 10 year guarantee, and why it is safe to offer
Promising a roof will stay dry is easy. What counts is what happens if it does not. Work booked through Roof Repairs Croydon carries a 10 year workmanship guarantee, on paper, handed to you on the day and written in language you can actually read. The slates, tiles, lead, mortar, membranes and rainwater goods carry their own manufacturer cover on top of that. It varies by product, so you get told which cover applies to your job rather than one headline number that would be wrong on most of them.
Here is the reason a guarantee like that is not a risk. Repairs come back for one reason above all others: the fault was never found in the first place. Somebody went up, saw a stain on the ceiling below, mended whatever looked worst directly above it, and left. Water does not cooperate with that approach. It lands on a slate, runs under it, drops onto a rafter and travels along the rafter before it finds anywhere to fall. On a wide hipped roof in Sanderstead or Shirley that can be five metres from where it came in.
Find the entry point and the repair holds for years. Miss it and no amount of guarantee wording helps anybody. That is why the survey happens before the price, and it is why, if the same water finds its way back into your house inside the guarantee period, putting it right costs you nothing.
10 year
Workmanship guarantee
1,000+
Roofs put right
Covered
Public liability insurance
Per product
Maker's own warranty
"On smaller repairs across the borough, getting somebody safely up to the work regularly costs more than the work itself."
Based on the quotes issued by Roof Repairs Croydon
Questions about cost
Why will you not give me a price over the phone?
You can have a band over the phone and you have one on this page. What you cannot have is a fixed figure, because until somebody has seen how your roof is reached and what has actually failed, any precise number is a guess. Firms that do give one tend to revise it upwards once they arrive, which is worse than not having had it.
Do you charge for quoting?
No. Attendance, the survey and the written quote are all free, including the visits that end with us telling you no work is needed. There is no call-out fee and no charge for the report.
Is the quote fixed?
Yes, for the work described in it. The only thing that changes a fixed price is something genuinely not visible at survey - rotten timber found once the covering is off, for example. Where that is a realistic possibility on your roof, the quote says so up front and says what it would cost, rather than leaving it as an open-ended risk.
Do you take a deposit?
Not for ordinary repairs. On larger jobs where materials have to be ordered specifically - reclaimed slate, a matched discontinued tile - a materials deposit is normal, and it will be itemised. Nobody should be asking for a large cash sum up front for a roof repair, and if somebody does, that is a reason to stop.
Is it cheaper to do several jobs at once?
Meaningfully, yes, and it is worth thinking about. Access is often the largest single line on a roofing quote, so if scaffold is going up for a chimney anyway, doing the roofline, the guttering or a ridge line at the same time avoids paying for that access twice. If your stack is borderline and the scaffold is already booked, it is usually the moment to deal with it.
How do I compare two quotes properly?
Get both itemised. Then check they include the same things: access, strip and disposal, membrane, battens, the actual covering, leadwork, ridge, ventilation and rainwater goods. A cheaper quote is very often a quote that has left something out - re-using old battens is the classic one, because it is invisible from the ground and it costs you a decade.
What Croydon homeowners say
From roads across the borough, once the ladders had gone.
"Damp patch on our landing ceiling for about three years. Two roofers had been out and both mended the tiles directly above it, and neither made the slightest difference. This chap spent twenty minutes in the loft with a torch before he even went outside, then showed me a photo of a split in the lead in the valley about four metres away from the stain. Fixed it in a morning. Three winters on and nothing."
"Water was coming down the front bedroom wall every time it rained hard and I had convinced myself the roof was finished. It was the gutter. Half of it had dropped so the water was sitting in the middle and going over the front rather than down the pipe. He reset the brackets and cleared the gully, charged me a fraction of what I had budgeted for, and told me the roof itself had years left. Could easily have sold me a new one."
"Ours is in the Chatsworth Road conservation area and I had no idea the rules on roof work here are stricter than the rest of Croydon. He knew straight away, explained what I could and could not do without an application, and did the repair in matching slate. That saved me a very awkward conversation with the council later on."
"Lost most of the ridge tiles along the back in a February gale. Rang in the morning, sheeted the same afternoon so the weather could not get in, came back the following week when it was dry and rebedded the whole ridge properly. Sent me photos of everything for the insurance without me even asking. The bill was exactly what the quote said it would be."
"Gutters had been overflowing under the trees for years and the fascia behind them had gone soft. What I appreciated was that he explained why the timber had rotted rather than just quoting to replace it, and pointed out the new soffits needed vents or I would end up with condensation in the loft instead. Nobody had ever mentioned that to me before."
Had us out to your roof?
Two minutes writing a review does more for a small local firm than any amount of advertising, and it helps the next person in Croydon work out who to ring.
Get a real figure, not a band
The bands above are for orientation. For an actual number, somebody needs to look at your roof - which costs nothing, commits you to nothing, and takes about half an hour.