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Roof Price Guide
Roof repairs come in many shapes and sizes, the raw material cost can be high when working with lead for instance, so our labour price & material cost is at a trade price to the customer. Here is a rough guide of what you can reasonably expect to pay a competent roofer for his services depending on location and overheads.
This can be a couple of slipped slates or a broken tile, maybe a disconnected guttering or broken pipe joint. The material cost is normally low and supplied for free, we would charge £50 for most jobs like this with short distance locations.
Similar tiles – Give or take a few pounds the covering cost of these tiles, or similar by other manufactures will allow us to flesh out some price comparisons. Let’s also assume all of the properties are fairly standard two storey houses with good access, and no huge structures like conservatories to scaffold over, or unusual roof shaped roofs.
Here is a quick example of how GM Home Improvements would estimate for a new roof, We will use a basic terrace house as an example. Firstly we calculate the square meterage, this can be done exactly by measurement from the top of a ladder, or from the floor if a quick ‘guestimate’ is required.
Square metres of a roof – All roofs break down into a series of manageable chunks where the amount of tiles required can be worked out from the final square metre figure.
Now we know we require 55m2 of tiles to tile the roof including a 3m2 allowance for breakages. Using Redland 49 tiles at the correct overlaps, it works out to 15.7 tiles per square metre X the 55m2 we require, which means that 864 roof tiles are needed to tile this roof.
Any roofing supplier will tell you the amount of roof tiles and batten for a given tile if asked, as long as you supply them with an accurate m2 figure.
- Normal grade tanalised roofing battens (tiling lath) £100
- New milled lead valley plus sundries £100
- New milled lead flashings £100
- Reasonable quality breather membrane £100
- Nails / fixings £20
- 4 low profile roof vents £120
- Ridge tiles £90
- Skip £150
- Scaffolding £700
- Roof tiles £750
- Labour – 1 Weeks work for two men
GM Home Improvements have plucked this job straight from thin air, but you can see the process of how the roofing estimate is formed and how you could price up your own roof. The quality of materials and costs could go up or down with specification as could the profit margin for the roofing contractor. Don’t forget the hidden overheads of any roofing firm like, advertising, insurance, fuel, wages, storage premises, vehicle and machinery running costs, down time due to rain…
Semi detached roof area – Some semi detached houses are a simple front and back ‘up & over’ roof whilst others incorporate a gable end type design. A four bedroom semi is normally similar in design but on a slightly larger scale.
Bungalow roof estimate – Quite often a bungalow roof is a simple ‘up and down’ roof, sometimes with a ‘L’ shape to accommodate a gable end feature. Estimate your square metre figure by breaking the roof into easy rectangles, and apply the square metre result to the listed examples above for other property types.
- You may have all the slate already on your roof in great condition so it could be used again at say a 90% rate.
- If the condition is not good what percentage is viable to re-use?
- You may need a full roof of slate, it comes in different qualities and at a different cost from all over the world.
- The size of the slate not only determines cost but also man hours, large slates can cover four or five times quicker that small slates. Labour is a big cost.
- Small slates means more timber batten or slating lath, big slates need less.
You can see that if you combine these factors with the considerations as outlined above and in roofs costs, it is almost an impossible task to guess a roof estimate worth giving. But if you’re really keen for an rough estimate I would double the prices I have just given in the tiled roof section, given as standard welsh slate can cost between 30 pence to well over £1 per slate depending on the roof. Prepare for a large margin of error though.