Who Is Liable if a Roofer Is Injured on Your House?

It is the question homeowners ask quietly, usually while watching someone carry a bundle of tiles up a ladder: if he falls, am I the one who pays?

In almost every ordinary domestic re-roof, no. The law deliberately moves that responsibility onto the contractor. But the exceptions are real, they are specific, and one of them has nothing to do with roofing at all.

At a Glance: Who Carries the Risk

This article covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland differ in places, and none of this is legal advice for your own situation.

The Default Position: The Duties Pass to the Contractor

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to all construction work, including work on your house. That part surprises people. What matters is what happens next.

What CDM 2015 Actually Says

Regulation 7, "Application to domestic clients", does something unusual: it takes the client duties and hands them to somebody else. Where the client is a domestic client, the duties in regulations 4(1) to (7) and regulation 6 must be carried out by the contractor where there is only one, by the principal contractor where there is more than one, or by the principal designer under a written agreement. Regulation 7(2) closes the gap: appoint nobody and the contractor in control of the construction phase becomes the principal contractor automatically. Doing nothing is the mechanism.

The HSE puts it in a sentence, in guidance updated 11 November 2024: CDM 2015 does not require domestic clients to carry out client duties, as these normally pass to other dutyholders.

There is a second, deeper reason you are not in the frame. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 3, places duties on every employer conducting an undertaking, and on self-employed people conducting undertakings of a prescribed description. A homeowner having their roof done is neither. The HSE states the principle plainly in its asbestos guidance, updated 4 September 2025: in owner-occupied domestic properties, the owners are not legally responsible for risks to contractors from asbestos, as the owners themselves are not engaged in any work activity. That final clause is the whole answer.

Enforcement follows the same pattern. In May 2026 the HSE prosecuted a contractor after a roofer fell around 11 feet through an unguarded loft hatch at a private house in Wimbledon. The company was fined £20,000 with £5,607 costs for failing to plan the work at height. The homeowner was not a defendant and is not named. We could find no case in which the HSE has prosecuted a homeowner in their capacity as a domestic client.

One limit matters. A domestic client is one for whom a project is carried out which is not in the course or furtherance of a business of that client, so the moment business enters, the full duties come back. Per HSE guidance and its CDM guidance document L153, a landlord having work done on a let property is a commercial client, as are housing associations, property developers and companies managing domestic property.

The Three Ways a Homeowner Actually Does Get Caught

Taking Control of the Work

In June 2024 a man in Old Trafford received a 12-month custodial sentence suspended for 18 months, 180 hours of unpaid work and £6,450 in costs over unsafe work at height at his own home. He had engaged operatives himself and instructed them to re-roof the property, then ignored an enforcement notice and a prohibition notice and carried on, including in darkness. He was charged under the Work at Height Regulations 2005, regulations 4(1) and 6(3), and the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. He was not prosecuted as a domestic client, but because those regulations reach any person, in relation to work by a person under his control, to the extent of his control. He had made himself the contractor.

The mirror image is Kmiecic v Isaacs [2011] EWCA Civ 451, where a labourer was seriously injured falling from a ladder while re-roofing a garage at a Hampstead property. His employer was uninsured, which is why the claim was aimed at the homeowner instead, she having refused to let the workers carry materials through her son's bedroom window. The Court of Appeal dismissed it: control over access to work exercised by an occupier of premises does not of itself connote control over the construction work.

That is the line. Hiring a firm and getting out of the way puts you on the safe side of it. Telling the workers when to start, lending them your ladder, or deciding they can manage without scaffolding, push you the other way.

Known Hazards and the Dog

Your ordinary duty as occupier survives all of this. Under the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957, section 2(2), you owe visitors a duty to take such care as is reasonable to see they will be reasonably safe. But section 2(3)(b) limits it: an occupier may expect that a person, in the exercise of his calling, will appreciate and guard against any special risks ordinarily incident to it.

That was decisive in Mathewson v Crump [2020] EWHC 3167 (QB). An experienced plasterer visiting a bungalow being converted fell through chipboard covering a stairwell opening and claimed over £230,000 from the owner and her husband. It was dismissed: the owner did not have sufficient control over the premises while the property was being converted, so occupier status lay with the building company, and in any event the danger should have been obvious to a plasterer of his experience.

What section 2(3)(b) does not protect is a hazard you know about and the roofer cannot discover: a rafter you know is rotten, a rooflight that has cracked underfoot, an unsafe supply in the loft. Tell them, in writing, before they start. We could find no UK case squarely on this point, so treat it as reasoning from the statute rather than settled law.

Two exposures deserve naming because almost no roofing article mentions them. The first is your dog. Under section 3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, as expanded with effect from 13 May 2014, it is an offence for a dog to be dangerously out of control in any place, whether or not a public place, which expressly includes your own home and garden, with an aggravated offence where it injures any person. The householder exception applies only where the injured person is a trespasser, or was reasonably believed to be one. A roofer you invited is not a trespasser. This is criminal liability, sitting entirely outside CDM, and it is the most realistic way an ordinary homeowner gets into trouble.

The Insurance Gap Nobody Mentions

Here is the part that inverts the usual advice. Employers' liability insurance is compulsory only for an employer carrying on a business, with a statutory minimum of £5 million. A homeowner carries on no business, so has no employers' liability duty. But neither does a self-employed roofer with no employees. And public liability insurance is not compulsory at all, typically runs from £1 million to £10 million, and excludes personal injury to the policyholder themselves.

Chain those together. A sole trader working alone who falls off your roof holds no policy that pays him anything, even if he carries both certificates. His only route to compensation is a claim against you. That is the honest answer to the question in the title, and it is the reverse of what most pages tell you.

Which is why checking matters, and why it is more than prudence. The Occupiers' Liability Act 1957, section 2(4)(b), protects an occupier who acted reasonably in entrusting work to an independent contractor and took such steps as he reasonably ought to satisfy himself that the contractor was competent. Doing the checks is the statutory defence. Aviva's own guidance, updated 20 July 2026, puts it plainly: it is so important to check that whoever is doing your building work does have their own liability insurance.

Your buildings policy probably includes public liability cover as homeowner, commonly at £5 million, but every wording is conditional on your being found legally liable first, and given Kmiecic and Mathewson that threshold is high. Tell your insurer about structural work in any case, because most home policies exclude accidental damage arising from alterations, renovations or repairs.

Start with a contractor who can produce the paperwork. Search localroofer.directory to find roofing firms covering your postcode, and ask every one of them for insurance certificates before you accept a quote.

Regional Price Differences

The practical conclusion is to let the roofer arrange the scaffold: it costs you the markup and saves you the licence, the handover certificate and the inspection chain. Here is what the scaffold itself is worth, so you can judge whether that markup is fair.

Always ask whether a price is per week or for the job, and how many weeks are included before extras begin. Much of the apparent disagreement between guides is a units problem, not a pricing one.

On region, the sources conflict, and they are measuring different things. MyBuilder, updated 21 August 2026, puts the London and South East premium on scaffold hire at 15% to 25% above the national average, and Rated People, dated 5 June 2025, says London and South East labour rises by as much as 20%. But MyJobQuote, updated 26 August 2026, says scaffolding can be up to three times higher in London than in rural areas, and Checkatrade's own worked example for a four metre tower, published February 2026, gives £250 in the North East, £400 in Colchester and £600 in London, a 2.4 times spread.

The likeliest reconciliation is that the percentages describe larger jobs where materials dominate, while the multiples describe small jobs where a day of labour and a van dominate. Do not average them. Get three quotes, and remember what you are buying: the HSE's provisional figures published 1 July 2026 record 31 falls from height among 126 worker deaths in Great Britain in 2025/26, with construction accounting for 25 deaths, the highest of any industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to do anything at all under CDM 2015?

On a normal domestic roof job, no. Regulation 7 transfers the client duties to the contractor, or to the principal contractor where more than one is involved, and regulation 7(2) makes those appointments happen by default if you make none. The one thing worth doing is choosing a competent contractor, which is a legal defence in its own right rather than just good sense.

Does booking my own scaffolder make me liable?

Not in itself, and the common claim that it "makes two contractors" misses the point: a scaffolder is a contractor whether you book them or the roofer does. What changes is coordination. Book it yourself and you become the hirer in the HSE's sense, the inspection report is addressed to you, the highway licence is your problem, and if something goes wrong you are the only person standing between two trades who have no contract with each other.

What should I actually ask a roofer for before work starts?

An employers' liability certificate of at least £5 million if he has employees, a public liability certificate, and a straight answer to whether he works alone. If scaffolding is going up: a handover certificate, the TG20 or TG30 compliance sheet, the seven-day inspection reports, and a council licence if any of it stands on the pavement. Ring the insurer named on any certificate, and use the free registers: CSCS Smart Check, the NFRC Competent Person Scheme search and TrustMark.

My roofer says the scaffolding is unnecessary for a small job. Should I agree?

Do not make that decision. Deciding how the work is done is exactly the control that shifts responsibility onto you, as the Old Trafford prosecution shows. Access is a matter for the contractor, who is the person the regulations bind and whose competence you checked. If you think the proposed method is unsafe, do not negotiate it, find a different roofer.