What Your Roofing Quote Should Actually Itemise

You have three quotes on the table. One says £6,200, one says £8,900 and one says £11,400, and all three describe the job in about two lines. There is no way to tell whether the cheapest man is efficient or whether he has simply costed the scaffold for less time, not allowed for building control, and is not VAT registered.

That is the real problem with roofing quotes. It is rarely dishonesty, it is omission. Two entirely honest quotes can differ by around 17 percent on VAT registration alone, by another 12 to 22 percent on how much scaffold is specified and for how long, and by nearly £400 on the building control route, before anybody has priced a tile. This guide goes through the quote as a document, line by line.

At a Glance: What Each Line Is Worth in 2026

Figures below are drawn from Checkatrade, MyJobQuote, MyBuilder, Best Builders, TailoredQuote, FixMyRoof, published council schedules and the NFRC, dated between November 2025 and September 2026.

The Lines That Make Two Quotes Uncomparable

Scaffolding: the hire period matters more than the price

Scaffold is 12 to 22 percent of the total project cost on a two-storey terrace or semi. Published guides put a semi anywhere between £750 and £2,800, a 3.7 times spread, and that is not regional noise. It is a difference in how many elevations are scaffolded and how many weeks are included.

The number almost no cost guide prints is the hire period. Checkatrade treats four weeks as standard; MyJobQuote, Best Builders and MyBuildAlly all say six to eight. A quote with four weeks included, sitting £400 below a rival's eight week quote, becomes the more expensive one the moment the job runs a fortnight late, which on a British roof it will. Extension runs £10 to £25 a week at the cheap end, but MyBuildAlly puts a two-storey full wrap at £80 to £120 a week.

Two more scaffold lines almost never appear. The first is the highway licence, needed if the scaffold stands on the pavement: £40 to £150 outside London, but £150 to £700 or more per 28 days in London boroughs, sometimes with a refundable deposit and four to six weeks of processing. If the scaffold will touch the pavement and there is no licence line, somebody pays for it later.

The second is debris netting, which is genuinely unstandardised. MyJobQuote quotes £3 to £6 per square metre without saying whether that is one-off or weekly, Checkatrade quotes £5 per square metre per week, and Best Builders treats it as a flat £50 to £250 for the job. Over a six week hire those produce wildly different totals, which is the point: this line needs specifying, not just pricing.

Ask for the scaffold's own paperwork by name too. The NASC Guide to Appointing a Scaffolding Contractor, issued August 2025, says the scaffold should be erected to a TG20 compliance sheet, or TG30 for system scaffold; that you should receive a Scaffold Handover Certificate; that statutory inspections happen at least every seven days; and that the contractor should carry £10 million employers liability and £5 million public liability cover.

Building control, waste and who carries the duties

Waste on a full re-roof runs £400 to £700, typically two 8 yard skips, plus £30 to £80 for a council permit and over £150 in some London boroughs. The line nobody looks for is the waste carrier registration number. Under the householder's duty of care you must ensure waste leaves your property with a registered carrier, and if it is later fly-tipped you must say who took it, with councils warning of prosecution, a £5,000 fine and a criminal record. A quote saying "waste removal included" with no registration number has transferred that risk to you silently, and the register is free to check with the Environment Agency on 03708 506 506. Asbestos is separate again: it cannot go in a general skip, and removal runs £45 to £60 per linear metre for cement soffits, or £105 to £120 for insulating board.

On building control, the Planning Portal's test is specific. You avoid approval only if less than 25 percent of the total building envelope and less than 50 percent of the roof is affected. You need it if you exceed those limits, make structural alterations, significantly change the covering's fire performance, or use a covering that increases the roof's weight by 15 percent or more. That weight rule is the one to watch: swapping natural slate for concrete interlocking tiles is the classic way to make a quote look cheap, and a quote that says "tiles" without naming the product cannot be assessed for it at all.

The route matters financially. Two published 2026/27 council schedules for replacement roof weathering put the fee at £396 including VAT (Hillingdon) and £400 (Oxford), while an NFRC CompetentRoofer can self-certify and issue a compliance certificate from £15 digitally. That is roughly £385 sitting invisibly inside two otherwise identical quotes.

Finally, if a separate scaffolding firm is involved there is more than one contractor, and under HSE guidance the domestic client's CDM 2015 duties pass to the principal contractor. Book the scaffold yourself and those duties may land on you, so the quote should say who is principal contractor.

VAT, Binding Prices and the Specification

The VAT line, which mainstream roofing sites get wrong

A well-ranked UK roofing cost site, updated in June 2026, states that re-roofing an existing home typically qualifies for the reduced 5 percent VAT rate. That is not what HMRC says, and believing it will make you misread an honest quote.

HMRC's VAT Notice 708, updated 26 August 2026, restricts the 5 percent rate to premises empty for two years or more, conversions changing the number of dwellings, and changes of residential use. Ordinary repair and re-covering of an occupied dwelling is standard-rated at 20 percent. Listed buildings get nothing either: zero-rating for approved alterations to protected buildings was withdrawn on 1 October 2012.

There is one live reduction worth itemising for. Energy-saving materials, including insulation installed in roofs and lofts for its insulating qualities, and solar panels with their cabling and inverter, carry 0 percent VAT from 1 May 2023 until 31 March 2027, reverting to 5 percent after. If your quote bundles loft insulation into an undifferentiated total, you cannot see whether the zero rate has been applied. That is a concrete, dated reason to insist on itemisation this year.

The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover. A genuinely unregistered roofer should show no VAT line at all, so his £8,000 is a real £8,000 against a registered rival's £8,000 plus £1,600. That is a legitimate 17 percent gap between two honest quotes. But a quote showing VAT from an unregistered trader is a penalty offence, and you can check any VAT number free at gov.uk. As for a cash price that happens to save about 20 percent, paying cash is not itself illegal, but where the discount is explicitly VAT-shaped you are being invited into tax evasion, and HMRC can pursue both parties in clear cases.

A quote is binding. An estimate is not.

Citizens Advice is unambiguous: a quote is a fixed price, an estimate is a rough guess, and once you say yes to a quote it is a binding agreement whether or not it is written down. The trader cannot then charge more unless he told you extra work was needed and you agreed to pay for it, or the quote contained an obvious mistake most people would have spotted. He specifically cannot charge more because his own costs have gone up.

With an estimate you have less protection: the final price must be reasonable, judged against the original figure, any changes and any unforeseen circumstances. Section 51 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 implies a reasonable price where the contract does not fix one, and what is reasonable is a question of fact. So the word at the top of the document matters more than anything below it.

A written quote should also carry a fixed total rather than a day rate, a breakdown of work and materials, a validity period, VAT information and the conditions under which the price may increase. There is no legal default validity period, and 14 to 30 days is the usual commercial range. On deposits, Citizens Advice says not to agree to more than 25 percent, while Checkatrade advises caution above 10 percent.

Finally, BS 5534 turns a vague "strip and re-cover" line into a checkable specification. Battens must be indelibly marked with the supplier, species code, the words "Graded BS 5534" and the size, so you can read the grading off the timber on site. All bedded ridge and hip tiles must be mechanically fixed rather than only mortared, and all single lap tiles need two fixings at the verge. None of it costs much, which is exactly why leaving it out looks like a bargain and is not.

Regional Price Differences

Those medians come from RoofingCalculatorHQ, published May 2026 on Q1 2026 data. It is a calculator site rather than an official body, so treat them as indicative. The national range on the same basis is £8,400 to £13,500.

The useful detail is that scaffolding is the most regionally elastic line in the whole quote. On the same source's per linear metre weekly figures, London zones 1 to 3 run £55 to £95 against £24 to £42 in Northern Ireland, a spread of about 2.3 times, while the whole-job spread is only around 1.65 times on medians. Roofer day rates follow the same shape, with TradeDayRates putting the July 2026 national typical at £255 to £310 a day, from around £180 in Northern Ireland to £530 in London. Skip hire in London and the South East runs 20 to 40 percent higher than in the North, Wales or the Midlands.

If your quotes are two lines long and thousands apart, the answer is not to guess which one is honest. Find a trusted local roofer at localroofer.directory and ask for a written, itemised quote you can actually compare.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a roofing quote legally binding, or can they charge me more?

Once you accept a quote it is binding, written down or not, according to Citizens Advice. The trader can only charge more if he told you extra work was needed and you agreed, or if the quote contained an obvious error. He cannot charge more because his own costs rose. An estimate is different: the final price only has to be reasonable.

Should scaffolding be a separate line, and who pays if it overruns?

It should be separate, because it is 12 to 22 percent of the job and the biggest driver of quote divergence. Ask how many elevations, how many weeks are included and what an extra week costs. Ask for the TG20 or TG30 compliance sheet and handover certificate too. On liability for overrun, no authoritative source settles it, so get it written into the quote.

Do I need building regulations approval to replace my roof, and what does it cost?

You need it if more than 25 percent of the building envelope or more than 50 percent of the roof is affected, if there are structural alterations, if fire performance changes significantly, or if the new covering is 15 percent or more heavier. Two published 2026/27 council schedules put the fee at around £396 to £400 including VAT, but an NFRC CompetentRoofer can self-certify from £15.

Should there be VAT on my roofing quote, and is a cash price to avoid it legal?

A standard re-roof of an occupied dwelling is standard-rated at 20 percent. The 5 percent rate applies only to homes empty two years or more, conversions and changes of residential use, while insulation and solar carry 0 percent until 31 March 2027. A roofer below the £90,000 threshold should show no VAT at all, which legitimately makes his quote around 17 percent cheaper, and you can verify any VAT number free at gov.uk. Paying cash is not illegal in itself, but a discount sized to the VAT is an invitation to join in tax evasion.