Can you claim for a new roof on your house insurance?

Most people asking this have already decided the roof needs replacing and are hoping someone else will pay for it. Here is the honest position.

Wey Valley Roofing is family run, with founder Scott on Surrey roofs for more than 36 years and a 25-year written workmanship guarantee on every job. We also take on roof repairs in Godalming and right across the area.

Call 07428 300474 and a real person will answer, whatever the hour.

Can you claim for a new roof on your house insurance?

Usually not. A buildings policy pays for sudden accidental damage, storm damage, fire or a falling tree, and then only for the damaged part. A roof that has simply worn out over thirty or forty years is wear and tear, which every policy excludes, so a full replacement normally comes out of your own pocket.

Insurance pays for damage, not for age

The line an insurer draws is between an event and a process. An event is a named storm that strips a run of tiles, a chimney stack that comes down in the wind, a branch that punches through the slope. A process is nail fatigue, perished felt, mortar that has crumbled over decades, or battens that have quietly gone soft. Events are insured. Processes are not, because if they were, every policy would be a savings plan for a new roof.

That is why a claim for a whole roof so rarely succeeds. Even where a storm has genuinely done damage, the insurer will settle for the repair that puts the roof back to the condition it was in beforehand. If forty tiles came off, you get forty tiles fixed, not a reroof. If the loss adjuster looks at the rest of the covering and sees a roof at the end of its life, that observation works against you, not for you. Some policies go further and reduce or refuse a payout where the roof was already in poor repair, on the grounds the property was not maintained.

The same rule applies to roof repairs in Guildford as anywhere else: an honest report on what actually failed is worth more to a claim than an optimistic one. Scott has spent more than 36 years on Surrey roofs and will tell you plainly whether what you are looking at is storm damage or thirty winters catching up.

What a storm claim usually covers

Most policies define a storm by wind speed, or by hail, snow and rain of unusual force, and the damage has to be consistent with it. Typical successful claims include tiles or slates lifted and thrown, ridge tiles and hip tiles dislodged, flashings peeled back, a flat roof membrane torn open, a chimney stack cracked or toppled, and water that has come in through any of those and damaged ceilings or decoration below.

• Sudden, identifiable damage on a date you can name.
• Damage limited to the area the event actually affected.
• Internal water damage that follows on from that external failure.
• Debris damage from trees, fences or neighbouring structures.

What tends to be refused is just as predictable: a leak with no obvious cause, slipped tiles on a roof already patched a dozen times, ponding on a flat roof that was never laid to fall, blocked gutters, moss growth, and any defect an insurer can call gradual. Frost damage to old mortar sits in an awkward middle ground and is usually argued rather than paid.

On roof repairs in Woking, as anywhere in the area, the first job after any storm is a proper look rather than a guess from the ground. If you are hunting for a roofer near you after a bad night of wind, a real person answers the phone here, day, night or weekend, and emergencies go to the front of the queue.

How to give a claim its best chance

Claims are won on evidence and lost on delay. Report the damage to your insurer as soon as you find it, because most policies expect prompt notification and a gap of weeks invites the argument that the problem was there all along. Take photographs before anything is moved, including the debris on the ground, and keep the broken tiles rather than skipping them.

A temporary repair to stop water getting in is not only allowed, it is usually expected of you, and the cost of it is often recoverable. Keep the paperwork. Get a written report that says what failed, why it failed and what putting it right involves, in language a loss adjuster can work with. A free survey here includes a drone view where it helps, which is often the difference between describing damage and showing it.

Two other things are worth knowing. Your excess applies, and on smaller repairs it can swallow most of the settlement, so a claim is not always worth making. And if the roof is old and the honest answer is that the storm merely finished off a covering that was already failing, we will say so rather than dress it up. That is a harder conversation than the alternative, but it saves you a refused claim and a wasted month.

When paying for a reroof yourself is the better answer

If a roof is patched every other winter, the sums usually stop favouring repairs somewhere around the third or fourth visit. A reroof is not an insurance event, it is planned work, and it is treated as such: stripped properly, defects in the timber dealt with, then refixed to BS 5534 for fixing and wind uplift so the covering stands up to the weather that took the last one apart. Ventilation is set out under BS 5250 so condensation does not rot the new structure from inside, and rainwater goods are sized to BS EN 12056 rather than whatever happened to be there before.

A reroof also brings insulation into scope. Where you are replacing more than half of a roof, the thermal upgrade rule in Approved Document L applies, and it is priced into the quote at the start rather than sprung on you halfway through. Building regulations approval is worth checking early on work of that scale, and GOV.UK sets out when it is needed.

The quote is fixed, in writing, with no obligation and no charge for the survey. If a smaller repair will genuinely do, that is what gets recommended. Every job, repair or full replacement, carries a 25-year written workmanship guarantee handed over before the team leaves, and if something is not right inside those 25 years, the same roofers come back and put it right. Work is done by the firm's own experienced local roofers, never subcontracted strangers.