The short answer
To match a roof tile you need four things right: the material, the profile, the size and the colour once weathered. A spare from the loft or a tile taken from a hidden slope is the best match. Reclaimed tiles come next, then new tiles in a close profile. When nothing matches well, re-tiling the whole slope can look better and cost less than a patchwork.
Four things to match
Start by identifying what is on the roof. The material comes first: clay, concrete, natural slate or fibre cement. They look alike from the pavement and behave differently on the roof.
The profile is next. A plain tile is flat with a slight curve, a pantile is a wave and a Double Roman has two rolls with a flat between. Each profile has its own way of locking or overlapping, and a tile of the wrong profile will not sit flat or shed water properly.
Size follows. Tiles come in set dimensions, and a replacement that is a few millimetres off will not line up with the courses, leaving gaps or lifting its neighbours. The gauge, which is the spacing of the battens, depends on the tile length, so the wrong size throws that out too.
Colour and texture come last. Tiles left outdoors for decades fade, pick up moss and lose their sheen. A new tile of the same nominal colour will still look bright beside it, which is why weathering counts as much as shade.
To identify a tile, photograph its top face and edge, and measure its length and width. A maker's mark on the underside helps. Send that with your enquiry, and the roofer can start narrowing the options.
Reclaimed or new
Reclaimed tiles are old tiles taken from other roofs, cleaned and sold on. For an older roof, they are often the best match, because they carry the same weathering and the same texture. A reclaimed clay tile set beside a century-old one blends in.
They come with limits. Supply is uncertain, the quantity may be short and the quality varies. Each tile should be checked for cracks and frost damage before it is used, because a reclaimed tile that fails soon puts you back where you started. A reclaimed tile has also had part of its life already, a point HomeBuilding & Renovating (Sep 2025) makes by giving reclaimed Welsh slate "50-80 years" against "100+ years" for new.
New tiles give a dependable supply and a known specification. They suit newer roofs, where the covering is not yet weathered, and any roof where you want the repair to last as long as possible. A new tile can be given a head start by being placed among older ones in a low-visibility spot, or by being left outdoors to weather before use, though neither works miracles.
A practical trick is to move sound tiles from a hidden slope to the visible one, and put the new tiles where nobody looks. We often propose this, and it works well on a rear slope.
Our page on repairing a clay tile roof covers the same choice for clay.
Discontinued profiles
Tile makers drop ranges from time to time. A concrete profile fitted in the 1970s or 1980s may no longer be made, and the nearest current tile may differ in length, depth or the shape of its rolls. The same is true of some clay and fibre cement lines.
A close substitute can work if the differences are small and the tile is laid where it will not draw the eye. Where the profile is very different, the new tile sits proud or low, leaves a gap along its side or does not interlock.
The way to check is to lay one on the roof beside the old tiles and look at the joint. We would do this before ordering a batch, not after.
Where a tile is truly unobtainable, the choices are a reclaimed supply, a custom run from a manufacturer, which is costly for small quantities, or re-covering the slope. Our page on changing to a different type of roof tile explains the checks that come with a whole-slope change, including weight and any Article 4 direction.
Do not buy tiles before the roofer has seen the roof. The wrong order wastes money and time.
When matching fails
Sometimes there is no good match, or the roof is failing in so many places that the matching question is the wrong one. Many tiles slipping, flaking or cracked across a slope show that the covering itself is tiring, and a patchwork of mismatched repairs costs more over time.
At that point, re-tiling the slope is worth discussing. If the existing tiles are sound, they can be lifted, graded and re-laid on new battens and underlay, with new tiles used only to fill gaps on the back slope. If they are not sound, a new covering is the right answer.
The decision turns on what the roof shows. We measure and photograph the slope, identify the tile, check the loft side, and tell you whether a matched repair will look and last right. If it will, we do that. If not, we say which slope to re-cover and why.
The written quote is one total for the route we recommend. Our pitched roofing hub covers the full list of coverings and repairs we handle, from single tiles to complete re-roofs around Farnborough and Fleet.
