Skylight leak check
Annual · typically May
Why it matters
If your house has no skylights, close this card and enjoy your extra five minutes — this one's not for you.
For everyone else: skylights are holes in your roof, engineered to stay sealed. Good ones do, for decades — but the failure points are predictable, and they announce themselves quietly. The flashing around the curb ages, the factory seal between glass and frame gives up (fogging between panes is the tell), and debris packs against the uphill side and dams water.
Freeze weather works skylight seals hard — ice forming in packed debris around the curb pries at exactly the joint you need tight.
What skipping it costs
$500–$8,000
A skylight leak drips inside a wall or ceiling cavity long before it shows on the drywall. By the time the stain ring appears, the framing around the curb has been wet for months. A $200 flashing repair versus $3,000–$8,000 of ceiling, insulation, and rot repair — on a fixture whose whole job was letting light in.
Two ways to get it done
Do it yourself
You'll need: Binoculars, Flashlight.
- Inside, on a bright day, look at the ceiling and walls of each skylight well: stain rings, bubbling paint, or dark corners. Run a flashlight around the frame — discoloration in the well shows up before the ceiling stains.
- Fogging or moisture between the glass panes = the factory seal is done. It won't leak water tomorrow, but it's on the replacement list now.
- Outside with binoculars: check the uphill side for packed leaves and debris, and eyeball the flashing for lifted edges or rust streaks.
- After the next hard rain, take ten seconds to glance up at each well. Rain is the only honest test there is, and it's free.
- Don't get on the roof, and don't caulk anything from a ladder — see below for why.
Hire it out
$150–$400National fair range — local labor moves this number.
A skylight inspection-and-reflash visit runs $150–$400. The trade's dirty secret is that most "skylight repairs" are a bead of caulk that buys one dry season and a callback fee — real repairs re-do the flashing, which means lifting the surrounding shingles and doing it in the right order.
Two timing honesties: if a reroof is within a few years, a failing skylight can often wait and be replaced properly during it for a fraction of the standalone cost. And if one skylight of several is leaking, fix one — matched failures only happen when a bad install went in as a set.
Ask the tech
- Is this a flashing problem or a seal problem — and can you photograph what you're seeing up there?
- How old is this skylight, and does the model have a known seal-failure history?
- If we're within a few years of a reroof, should this repair wait and be done right during it?
Red flags you're being upsold
- A caulk gun as the whole repair. Caulk on a leaking skylight is a season of dryness, not a fix — flashing is the fix, and it costs more because it works.
- 'Replace all your skylights' from a leak on one. They fail individually unless they went in together on a bad install.
- A repair quote that doesn't distinguish condensation from leakage — half of winter 'skylight leaks' are indoor humidity crying on cold glass.
Second opinion time: Any skylight replacement quote over $2,500, or any leak diagnosis made from the ground.
The call
No skylights? Skip this card entirely. Have them? Five minutes of looking up, once a year, and hire anything that involves actually touching them.