How much does an emergency roof repair cost?

National guides do not publish a separate price list for emergencies, so the best starting point is the ordinary repair range. The lowest-cost repair is a handful of slipped tiles replaced from a ladder. The dearest is a repair that needs scaffolding, new lead, or part of a slope stripped and relaid.

Checkatrade prices repairs by the square metre of roof and by covering. Its table, last updated in June 2026, reads:

Checkatrade states that these figures exclude VAT, so tax has to be added.

Neither guide covers the damage inside the house, such as a stained ceiling, wet loft insulation or a soaked carpet. Neither says what a roofer charges for coming out in the evening or at the weekend, so if a roofer attends at an awkward hour, ask how the written quote treats that visit. We begin by stopping the water, then price the proper repair when the survey is complete, as a single figure.

A make-safe visit has one purpose, which is to stop more water getting in until a proper repair can be done. It is often the smaller stage of an emergency, because it is short and uses simple materials. In practice it means a tarpaulin fixed over a damaged slope, a temporary patch over a split on a flat roof, a few tiles refixed, or a slate held with a tingle: a thin strip of lead or copper nailed into the gap below, gripping the foot of the replacement.

No national guide gives a standard price for a tarpaulin or a temporary patch, and a figure from nowhere would only mislead you. What decides it is simple enough. How big is the area open to the weather? Can the roofer reach it from a ladder or does it need a tower? Is the timber beneath already wet? A small opening above a bungalow porch is a quick job. A gable end missing a run of tiles on a tall house is not.

Some roofers will do the make-safe visit and then stop, leaving you to find somebody else for the repair. That is worth asking about before anyone climbs the ladder. Our guide to what a roof make-safe involves goes through each method, and the one on how long a temporary repair lasts explains why the second stage matters.

Keep photographs from the start. They help your insurer, and they help the roofer judge what the roof looked like before anything was touched.

Many urgent repairs are measured in metres rather than square metres. Three terms come up. The ridge runs along the very top, where two slopes meet. Hips are the angled cappings down the sloping corner of a hipped end. The verge is the stretch where tiles overhang a gable's end wall.

Checkatrade gives ridge tile repairs at £50 to £70 per metre; for lead flashing it quotes the same £50 to £70. A flashing is lead (usually) dressed where the roof meets a wall or chimney, to keep water out of the joint. Checkatrade puts a dry ridge, where the capping is screwed and clipped to a dry-fix system instead of being bedded in mortar alone, at around £800 for a semi-detached house.

The fixing method matters when a storm has lifted a ridge. BS 5534 was revised in 2014; since then a mortar bed has not been trusted alone to hold ridge or hip caps, and each also takes a screw or clip. BS 8612:2018 is the specification and test method behind dry-fix kits for ridges, hips and verges. A quick re-bed in mortar can look cheaper, but it leaves the capping held by the one thing the standard stopped trusting, so we fix ridges mechanically.

Chimney lead after a gale

MyJobQuote, last updated 22 September 2026, gives £150 to £250 for patching chimney lead. Replacing the lead in full is £350 to £460 without scaffolding and £700 to £920 with it. The gap between those last two figures is access, which is the next section. Our pages on chimney repairs explain the work in more depth.

Access can be the largest single variable in an urgent bill. A slipped tile on a bungalow may be reached with a ladder and a roof ladder. The same tile on a three-storey house can need a tower or a scaffold, and then the access costs more than the repair. Checkatrade's scaffolding table, last updated in October 2026, lists £875 monthly for a semi, £800 for a terrace, £1,000 for a detached bungalow and £1,200 for a detached house. A chimney scaffold is around £660 a week.

When scaffolding stands on the pavement

Section 169 of the Highways Act 1980 requires a licence for scaffolding on or over a public highway, granted by the highway authority. In West Sussex the county council wants a minimum of 10 working days' notice and charges £266 for one month, with a fast-track option for an additional £52. Over the border in Hampshire the licence costs £211.90 for the first fortnight and the council wants ten clear working days of notice. Across in Portsmouth, the application goes to the city council, which is the highway authority.

Those lead times mean an urgent job rarely begins with a scaffold already up. For the emergency stage, roofers work from ladders, a roof ladder, a tower on your own land, or a cherry picker. The proper repair can then wait for the scaffold.

When you lay two prices next to each other, check that each one says whether scaffolding is in it. A price that omits it is no bargain if the scaffold appears later as an extra. Our guide to scaffolding for a roof repair sets out when each method fits.

Flat roofs fail in their own ways and have their own rates. Less, in a guide last updated in March 2026, puts small flat roof repairs at £150 to £500. Typical jobs are closing a split, refixing a lifted edge trim or patching a blister. Checkatrade's area rates run from £100 to £140 per m² for bitumen felt, £120 to £170 for EPDM, a rubber sheet laid whole across the deck, and £130 to £180 for GRP, fibreglass and resin that set hard on site.

What lies beneath the covering decides the real cost. If water has been coming in for a while, the timber deck can be soft, and a patch over a wet deck will not hold. Cutting out and replacing rotten boards adds to the job, and past a certain point re-covering the whole roof costs little more than chasing leaks around it. Checkatrade's roof replacement guide, updated October 2026, gives a flat roof at £2,800 to £7,500 (the table is headed plus VAT).

Ponding and falls

Water that sits on a flat roof long after the rain has stopped means it is not draining. BS 6229:2025, which replaced the 2018 edition in December 2025, keeps a minimum finished fall of 1:80. Roofers usually aim steeper, around 1:40, to leave a roof that clears itself. A patch on a roof that ponds is likely to fail again. Our page on flat roof storm damage covers what to look for.

Labour is the piece that gets argued over. Checkatrade puts roofers at around £35 to £45 an hour or £280 to £360 a day, and lists slate roofers at an identical daily figure. Small repairs can carry a minimum charge, because every visit means travelling, setting up and clearing away, however small the repair.

VAT is added separately. The standard rate is 20 per cent, and Checkatrade's repair figures exclude it, so a £1,000 repair at those rates becomes £1,200.

Cancelling an urgent repair

Contracts agreed at your home can generally be cancelled within 14 days. Urgent repairs are treated differently. Regulation 28 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 takes out of the cancellation rules a visit the consumer has specifically requested for urgent repairs or maintenance. Extra goods or services sold on that visit stay covered. Our page on cooling-off rights on urgent repairs goes into the detail.

On a roof that is leaking now, the practical step is to ask what the quote covers before you agree to anything. We photograph the fault from the roof, say plainly whether it should be repaired, patched for now or replaced, and put one total price in writing. The figure we write down is the one you pay, and we set our prices to be good and fair. The emergency roof repairs page explains how we work, and you can ask for a written quote at any time.