Roof inspection
Roof inspection explained: what it covers, and why access decides everything
A roof inspection is an examination of a roof covering and the components around it, including flashings, upstands, rooflights, gutters, outlets, fixings and any plant standing on it, carried out to record condition, locate defects and water ingress, and decide what work is needed and how urgently.
For a facilities or estates manager it is the building element with the worst cost curve. A lap that has lifted is cheap in March and a ruined suspended ceiling by November. It is also the element where the cost of simply looking is highest, because looking usually means putting a person on a roof.
What does a roof inspection cover?
- The covering. Membrane, felt, single ply, profiled metal, tiles or slates: splits, blisters, lifted laps, slipped units, failed seams.
- Junctions. Flashings, abutments, upstands, parapets and expansion joints. Most leaks are found at a junction rather than in the open field of a roof.
- Rooflights. Condition, age, cracking and whether they are protected. These deserve their own line for a reason covered below.
- Drainage. Gutters, outlets, downpipes, ponding and evidence of standing water.
- Penetrations. Vents, flues, cable and pipe entries, plinths, solar mountings.
- Rooftop plant. Air handling units, condensers, their fixings, and whether servicing traffic is damaging the covering around them.
- The roof as a workplace. Edge protection, walkways, anchor points, hatches and ladders, plus their inspection records.
When is a roof inspection carried out?
- On a planned cycle. Commonly annually, or twice a year on larger flat roofs, timed around autumn leaf fall and after winter.
- After weather. Storms, hail, heavy snow loading or high winds that could have lifted sheets.
- After a leak is reported. Water tracks, so the internal stain is rarely below the defect.
- Before work. Ahead of installing plant or solar, to establish condition and remaining life before someone else puts load on it.
- At lease and transaction events. Feeding a building survey or a dilapidations assessment, where the roof is often the largest single line.
Why roof access is the highest consequence part of the job
HSE states plainly that almost one in five deaths in construction work involve roof work, and that the dead include people who were only maintaining or cleaning a roof, not roofers. In its provisional figures for Great Britain in 2025/26, 126 workers were killed in work related accidents, and falls from a height accounted for 31 of them, the single largest cause.
Two rules follow from that, and they are the ones facilities teams most often get wrong:
- Assume fragility. HSE's position is that all roofs should be treated as fragile until a competent person has confirmed they are not. That covers ridges and purlins on sheeted roofs, whatever the material.
- Rooflights are the trap. They can be hard to see in some light, or hidden under paint and dirt. HSE requires them to be barriered, or covered and labelled.
In Great Britain the governing law is the Work at Height Regulations 2005, whose hierarchy is to avoid work at height where reasonably practicable, then prevent falls, then minimise the distance and consequences of a fall. These duties are jurisdictional, not universal. Other countries regulate roof work under their own rules, so check the local regime rather than exporting one.
Roof inspection in practice: a worked example
A ceiling stain appears in a warehouse office. Instead of sending someone straight onto a profiled metal roof to hunt for it, the facilities manager commissions a drone survey, which narrows the suspect area to a lifted sheet lap next to a rainwater outlet about eight metres from the stain. One planned access visit then does the repair, with a permit, a roof rated access plan and a rescue arrangement in place, rather than three exploratory trips onto a fragile roof.
Can a roof inspection be done without going onto the roof?
Partly, and that is worth taking seriously. Drones, pole cameras, views from an adjacent higher building and structured photo capture by someone already on site can answer a lot of questions: is the sheet lifted, is the outlet blocked, has the flashing pulled away, has anything changed since the last visit.
Be honest about what remote looking does not do. It does not sound a fixing, lift a lap, or test whether a rooflight would take a person's weight. It does not remove a legal duty, and it does not replace a competent person's assessment: the judgement about condition, safety and remaining life stays with the qualified individual, who now has better information to work from. What it changes is exposure. The safest roof inspection is the one nobody had to climb for, and if a remote look answers the question outright, or turns three speculative access visits into one planned and better prepared one, that is a real reduction in time spent on a fragile surface.
Where the person on site is a contractor, a caretaker or an engineer already up there for something else, that capture can be guided rather than left to chance. Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, sends a link that walks the person through exactly which shots the surveyor needs and in what order, and returns the result as a timestamped, structured evidence package for the reviewer, alongside a health and safety inspection record or a working at height inspection file. The decision about the roof still belongs to the competent person.
