Should you replace 20-year-old gutters?

Published guides give a rough sense of how long roofline plastics last, and they disagree. Checkatrade gives no set age at which uPVC boards under the eaves should be changed, while a retailer, the Plastic Centre, argues for 20 to 40 years. Those figures describe the boards, not the gutters. A twenty-year-old gutter sits right on the border of both estimates, which is exactly why its condition should decide the question and the date on the calendar should not.

What counts is how the run has been looked after. A gutter cleared every year on sound brackets can be in better shape at twenty than one that was ignored for ten. Material matters too, because plastic, cast iron and aluminium age at different speeds. So the question to ask is simple: what is actually wrong, and would a smaller job put it right? Anyone who tells you to replace on age alone has not looked at your gutters.

Cross the road when it is dry and sight along the eaves. Dips between the brackets, a gutter leaning away from the board, or a front edge that looks bowed all point to fixings that have given up. A dip in the middle of a long run often means the brackets were set too far apart, or bent over time under the weight of wet leaves.

Then watch it in rain. Water trickling down the wall below a joint, drips from the seam between two lengths, or a front edge pouring over when the outlet is clear, all suggest the joint seals have failed. Green streaks on the brickwork under the gutter show where water has been escaping for a long time. Our pages on sagging gutters and leaking gutter joints go through each symptom. Plastic that has turned chalky, faded or brittle, or that cracks when tapped, is tired in itself and will not hold a repair.

A sound gutter with one fault can usually be mended. A weeping joint can be re-sealed or have its union replaced. A loose bracket can be reset or swapped. A length that a ladder has cracked can be sawn out and a fresh piece joined in its place. A blocked outlet is a very common reason for overflow, and it needs clearing, not replacing. Silt and moss come out, and the fall is checked afterwards.

Brett Martin's guide to fitting its system allows 1mm of fall per 600mm of run and puts brackets no more than 900mm apart. A tape measure and a spirit level on a ladder will show whether your run is still within reason. If brackets are further apart than that, or water stands in the gutter after rain, re-hanging may fix it without a new system. Repair suits supple plastic with local damage. Once the whole run is failing, mending one joint a year costs more than starting again.

Replace when trouble is widespread: several joints weeping, brackets failing along the run, plastic gone brittle, or fascia boards behind the gutter soft or stained. A new gutter fixed to a rotten board is money wasted, because the board will not hold a bracket. We probe the fascia with a screwdriver and photograph what we find, so the pictures that come with the quote show you the same boards we saw. If they are sound, they stay. If they are soft, we show you where and how far it runs, because the extent of rot changes the job.

A replacement also lets you correct design faults. An undersized run can be swapped for a larger section, an outlet can move closer to the heaviest flow, and a downpipe that empties onto brickwork can be turned to a gully. Where the soffit and fascia are tired too, doing the whole roofline together avoids paying for access twice. Our full roofline replacement page explains the combined job, and the guttering, soffits and fascias hub covers the whole range of work.

Checkatrade's price guide, its table refreshed in September 2026, puts fascias and soffits at around £150 per linear metre. Checkatrade's scaffolding guide, updated in October 2026, quotes about £875 per month for a semi-detached house on two storeys, and that matters here because roofline work at that height normally needs a platform. Run length, house height, the gutter material and the state of the boards behind it all move the total, so a number from a guide is a starting point only.

Once the survey is done, we put one price in writing. With any quote for this work, check that it mentions VAT and access, and ask what becomes of the old guttering. Ours is taken away. Should a repair be enough, our quote recommends it and prices the repair, not a new run for its own sake. That is the plain verdict we give before any price.