Roofing costs: what the work actually costs
Roofing costs are quoted badly almost everywhere, because they are quoted per house. A house is not a unit of roofing. The roof is, and two houses that look identical from the pavement can differ by half again once you measure the slopes and see what is on them.
These guides do it the other way round: work out the rate, apply it to your roof, then check a quote against the result. Every figure is sourced from a published guide or derived from one, and says which.
The guides
Pick the job
How roofing is actually priced
Four things that decide every roofing quote
- Area, not bedrooms
- Roofing is priced by the square metre of roof. A bungalow has more roof than a three storey terrace with the same floor space, and costs more to cover.
- Pitch adds area
- A pitched roof is larger than the footprint under it, usually by about a fifth, and steeper roofs are larger again. Estimating from a floor plan without adding that on understates every time.
- Detail costs more than field
- Hips, valleys, dormers, chimneys and roof windows are where the hours go. A big plain roof is often cheaper than a small complicated one.
- Access is a line of its own
- Scaffolding is usually four figures on anything above a bungalow, and it is charged for the time it stands, not the time it is worked on.
Before you compare two quotes
The lines people forget to ask about
- Scaffolding, and whether the quote covers it standing for the whole job or a fixed number of weeks
- Waste, skips and taking the old covering away
- Building control notification, which a full re-roof needs
- Rotten timber found once the covering is off, and what the rate for it is before anyone starts
- VAT, if you are comparing a registered trader against one who is not
- Whether guttering, fascias and soffits are in or out, since the scaffold is already up and doing them later means paying for it twice
Two quotes are only comparable when they cover the same list. Most of the gap between a cheap quote and a dear one is not margin, it is scope.
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Send me a photo of the roof and the quote. I will tell you whether the number looks right for that house, whether or not you use me.
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