How much does it cost to re-felt a garage roof?

Checkatrade's roof replacement guide, carrying an October 2026 update, quotes around £1,000 to £2,000 for re-felting a garage, with an average of £1,500. Treat that as a national yardstick for budgeting, not as a price for your building. Guides and quotes handle VAT differently, so find out whether a number includes it before you compare anything.

A re-felt means stripping the old covering back to the deck, checking the boards beneath, laying new felt in layers and finishing the edges. Smaller jobs cost far less. Less, whose flat roof cost guide is dated March 2026, gives £150 to £500 for minor flat roof repairs, and Checkatrade's repair guide (table updated June 2026) lists bitumen flat roof repairs at £100 to £140 per square metre, excluding VAT. If one seam has opened, renewing the lot is money spent for nothing. Our garage roof repair or replace answer shows how we make that call.

Size comes first, yet it is rarely the largest swing. The condition of the deck matters more. Boards form the deck, the base the felt is stuck down to, and if damp has soaked into it the boards have to be replaced before any new felt goes down. Felt stuck to soft, rotten boards will not last, so that cost cannot be skipped.

Next is the fall, the gentle slope that carries rainwater towards the gutter. A garage roof that holds puddles needs its slope corrected, and that takes extra carpentry. The fall of a flat garage roof page explains the figures.

Then come the details around the edge: the drip trim where water leaves the roof, the upstands where felt turns up a wall, and the gutter fixed below. Reaching the roof matters too. A garage down a long, narrow drive means more carrying and more time than one with an open frontage, and that shows in the total.

One split, a lifted seam or a blister over a small area is usually a repair job. Felt that has gone hard and crazed across the whole roof is not. Patching old felt that sits on a soaked deck only hides the trouble for a season or two.

Age gives a rough guide. Less quotes torch-on felt at 10 to 20 years, and notes that careful laying can carry a roof to the top of that span, where poor laying can end it inside a decade. A roof near the end of that span is a candidate for renewal, whereas a recent roof with a single fault is not. Our leaking garage roof page shows how to trace where the water gets in before any money is spent.

When we survey, we photograph each defect and say plainly whether the smallest fix will hold. If it will, that is the job we put in writing, and we do not push a full re-felt when a repair will do.

Insist on seeing the price written down as one sum. Check that it names the covering, includes stripping and taking away the old felt, and states whether VAT and any scaffolding are in the figure. A quote that is silent about waste or about the boards underneath leaves room for extras later.

Ask what happens if the deck proves rotten once the old felt is off. A sensible contractor explains that before starting, and survey photographs help you see what you are paying for.

If the garage is older, there is one more check. Corrugated sheets on early garages can contain asbestos, and the costs are then a different story altogether. Read whether your garage roof is asbestos first, and then the asbestos garage roof cost answer if it might be. For the full picture of garage roofs, start at our garage roof replacement page.

Felt is a familiar covering for garage roofs, but other coverings compete with it. EPDM is a rubber membrane supplied in one large piece. GreenSpec expects 20 to 30 years from it, whereas Less puts it at 30 to 50 years. GRP, glass-fibre laid in resin, is given by Less as 25 to 40 years.

A longer life usually means a bigger bill on the day, so the right choice depends on the years you expect to own the garage and how you want the roof to look from the house. Where the roof is small and sheltered, a short-lived but familiar covering can be perfectly sensible. Where it is large, exposed or hard to reach, paying once for something longer-lived tends to make more sense. Our pages on the EPDM garage roof and on felt against metal set the options side by side.