How long does a new roof last?

Every figure below comes from a published guide or a manufacturer. Read each as a typical range for a roof that was laid well and then looked after, not as a date you can hold anyone to.

The EPDM row is wide because the guides disagree. GreenSpec says 20 to 30 years, while Less says 30 to 50. For concrete tile, Marley adds its own caution that the number is no guarantee or warranty, and the same spirit applies to every row. Whichever covering is chosen, the survey and written quote name it so you can look up its expected life.

A roof is more than its covering. One batch of tiles can serve three generations on a well-built house and need attention in half that time on the next, and the difference usually sits in the details around the tile.

Fixing is the first of them. BS 5534, revised in 2014, expects ridge and hip tiles to be mechanically fixed, with the mortar bed no longer trusted on its own. The ridge is the horizontal capping at the apex, and each hip is an angled capping that descends a corner on a hipped roof.

Workmanship is the second. Less makes the point about felt: a competent job can reach 20 years, while a bad one may give out inside ten. Falls, laps, edges and upstands decide where water goes on every flat covering, and they are down to whoever laid it. Gales and driving rain are part of life on this coast, which is a reason to insist on good fixings and neat edges, not a reason to assume that every roof here ages quickly.

A tile that will outlast you still sits on parts with shorter lives. Flashings are strips of metal that weatherproof the joint between the roof and a chimney stack or a wall. MyJobQuote says lead flashing can last over 80 years, but that is for a well-dressed strip, and a poorly sealed joint beside it may fail much earlier.

Valleys, the angled channels formed where two roof planes join, carry the run-off from both sides, so they deserve lead or another long-lived lining rather than something thin. Gutters, fascias and soffits belong to the roofline, not the roof proper, and it often makes sense to renew them while the scaffold is already up. Underlay, the membrane laid beneath the battens, is never seen again once the job is finished, which is why its quality is chosen on day one and not later.

Ask what goes into every one of these places. A long-lived tile on a short-lived detail still ends in a leak, and the detail is usually where it begins.

A lifespan is a forecast about material, and a promise about work is something else again. A fifty-year tile does not make a fifty-year roof. When a firm quotes a number of years, ask which of those two things it is describing, and what it is based on.

Be careful with age-based rules of thumb. Building Conservation warns that the 60-year minimum for clay tells you little about old handmade peg-tile roofs, which can be much older and still sound or can fail early where pegs and battens have gone. Age alone does not decide whether a roof needs replacing, which is why our survey photographs and the repair-or-replace verdict count for more than a date on a deed.

Ask also whether the figure assumes a particular fixing method and a particular level of upkeep. If the answer is vague, the number is a sales line and not a technical fact.

Most of the extra years come from small habits. Keep the gutters running clear so rainwater leaves the roof and does not back up beneath the lowest tiles, and have moss dealt with before it lifts edges and blocks channels. After a gale, glance at the ridge and the verges from the garden, and if a tile has shifted, get it refixed before the next gale arrives.

Keep the paperwork and photographs from the job. They record what was fitted, which fixing method was used and when, and they save arguments years later when someone has to work out what lies under the tiles.

When the time does come, the question is not simply how old the roof is but whether a repair will still hold. Our guide on when a roof should be replaced rather than repaired sets that out. For one covering in depth, see how long a tiled roof lasts or a flat roof, or go back to roof replacement and new roofs.