The short answer
- Most laptop repairs cost between £69 and £249 including parts, labour and VAT.
- A fitted screen is £109 – £279, a battery £69 – £159, a cooling service £69 – £119.
- Board-level microsoldering runs £199 – £449, which is where most “new motherboard” quotes should have landed.
- Diagnosis should be a fixed, disclosed fee. Ours is £29 and comes off the invoice in full.
- If the repair costs more than half the machine’s used value and it is over five years old, think hard before spending.
The honest answer is that most laptop repairs in the UK cost between £69 and £249, including parts, labour and VAT. The spread inside that range is not vagueness. It is the difference between a £109 TN panel and a £379 OLED assembly, or between replacing one capacitor and replacing an entire logic board.
What follows is every common fault with a number against it, taken straight from the published LaptopHaber.com price list. Then the part nobody writes down: why the quote you were handed somewhere else was three times higher, and how to tell whether that reflected genuine skill or simply a shop that did not look very hard.
What each repair costs in 2026
These are ranges rather than single figures because a 2016 Inspiron and a 2024 MacBook do not take the same parts and do not take the same time on the bench. Your written quote lands inside the range for your specific model, and never above it.
| Repair | Typical price (inc. VAT) | What moves the price | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laptop screen replacement | £109 – £279 | Panel resolution, refresh rate, touch layer, brand | Often same day |
| Battery replacement | £69 – £159 | Cell chemistry, whether the pack is glued or screwed in | 24 hours |
| Charging port / DC jack repair | £89 – £169 | Port soldered to the board or on a daughterboard | 24 – 48 hours |
| Keyboard or keycap repair | £69 – £189 | Single key, membrane, or full top-case assembly | 24 – 48 hours |
| Hinge repair or rebuild | £89 – £199 | Whether the mount can be rebuilt or the chassis is gone | 2 – 3 days |
| Cooling service and re-paste | £69 – £119 | Fan replacement needed, teardown depth | Same day |
| SSD upgrade with full clone | £79 – £189 | Drive capacity, NVMe or SATA, data volume to clone | Same day |
| Memory upgrade | £59 – £169 | Capacity and whether sockets are accessible | Same day |
| Software rebuild and malware removal | £49 – £99 | Repair in place or full clean re-image | 24 hours |
| Board-level / microsoldering repair | £199 – £449 | Component-level fix versus BGA reball or chip replacement | 3 – 5 days |
| Liquid damage restoration | £149 – £399 | How long since the spill, how far corrosion spread | 2 – 4 days |
| Data recovery (logical) | £199 – £349 | Deleted, formatted, corrupted or encrypted volume | 3 – 5 days |
| Data recovery (physical) | From £449 | Donor parts, controller transplant, NAND work | 5 – 10 days |
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that the cheapest jobs on the list are often the ones that change how the machine feels most: a cooling service at £69 – £119 and an SSD upgrade at £79 – £189 together transform a laptop that its owner had written off.
The second is that board-level work has a floor. Microsoldering needs a microscope, hot air, a bench supply, board schematics and an engineer who can read them. £199 is not a markup, it is what that bench costs to run. You can see the whole service list, with what each one involves, on our repair services page.
Screens, broken down by panel type
Screens are the single most misquoted repair in the trade, because the phrase “a 15.6-inch screen” describes at least six different parts at six different prices. Resolution, refresh rate, brightness, the connector pin count and whether a digitiser is bonded to the glass all change the part number and all change the invoice.
| Panel type | Typical fitted price (inc. VAT) | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| HD (1366×768) TN | £109 – £139 | Budget 14-inch and 15.6-inch Windows laptops |
| Full HD IPS, non-touch | £129 – £179 | The most common replacement we fit |
| Full HD 120–165Hz | £169 – £239 | Gaming machines; refresh rate must match |
| QHD / 2.8K IPS | £189 – £259 | Premium ultrabooks and creator laptops |
| 4K or OLED | £239 – £379 | Colour-critical; panel part number match essential |
| Bonded touch assembly | £219 – £399 | Glass and digitiser fused to the panel |
| MacBook Air / Pro display | £229 – £549 | Model and generation dependent |
If a shop quotes you a screen price before asking for your model number or the panel part number printed on the back of the display, they are guessing. That guess gets corrected later, on the invoice. There is a full walkthrough of reading your own panel label in our guide to laptop screen replacement cost by panel type.
Why two shops quote three times apart for “the same” repair
Four things account for almost all of the gap, and only one of them is greed.
Whole-board swap versus component-level repair
This is the big one. A laptop arrives dead, and a shop without a microsoldering bench has exactly one option: replace the motherboard. The board is the most expensive part in the machine, so the quote comes back at £500 to £700 and gets labelled “motherboard failure”.
That label is a description of the part being replaced, not of the fault. A £590 quote almost never means the board is beyond saving. In practice the machines that reach our bench carrying one have a blown input fuse, a shorted ceramic capacitor on a power rail, a failed charging IC, a dead embedded controller or a cracked solder joint under a BGA. Every one of those is a component-level job inside the £199 – £449 band, and the first three usually sit near the bottom of it.
A shop that can only swap boards is not necessarily dishonest. It is simply quoting the only repair it can perform. The question to ask is which component has failed, and there is more on how that fault-finding actually works in our guide to a laptop that will not turn on, and on the motherboard and board-level repair service page.
OEM-spec panels versus whatever fits the lid
Two screen quotes £90 apart are often two different panels. The cheaper one may be a lower brightness grade, a 45% NTSC panel where the original was 72%, a 60Hz replacement in a machine that shipped at 144Hz, or a matte panel in a glossy lid. It will fit, it will light up, and it will be visibly worse every day for the rest of the laptop’s life.
Diagnostic fees that reappear on the invoice
A £35 diagnostic that is quietly folded back into the repair price is a £35 price rise wearing a different name. The only way to compare two quotes fairly is to ask both shops for the all-in figure: diagnosis, parts, labour, VAT and return postage, as one number.
Labour rates and where the bench sits
A central London high-street unit carries rent that a mail-in workshop does not, and that shows up in the hourly rate. It is a legitimate cost. It is also the reason free tracked mail-in exists, and why a machine posted to LaptopHaber from Leeds is quoted the same as one carried through our door.
The diagnostic fee: what is fair and what is not
Diagnosis is real work. Finding out why a machine will not charge can take twenty minutes or it can take two hours with a schematic, a thermal camera and a bench supply. Charging for it is reasonable. Hiding what it costs is not.
A fair diagnostic fee has four properties. It is a fixed amount quoted before you hand the laptop over. It is credited in full against the repair if you go ahead. It buys you a written report naming the faulty component, which is yours to take elsewhere. And it does not get charged twice by reappearing inside the repair price.
“Free diagnosis” usually hides one of three things. Sometimes the cost is simply baked into an inflated repair price, which you only discover by comparing quotes. Sometimes the diagnosis is not a diagnosis at all but a two-minute triage that produces a board-swap quote. And sometimes there is a “bench fee”, a “reassembly charge” or a “no-repair fee” of £30 to £60 that only appears in the small print once you decline the work.
Ours is £29, disclosed up front, credited in full against any repair you approve, and refunded to nothing if we cannot fix the machine. That is the whole arrangement, and it is written the same way on the pricing page as it is here.
When the maths says stop
The working rule is the 50% test. If the repair costs more than half what the same machine sells for used, and it is more than five years old, replacement usually wins on arithmetic alone. Under that line, repair almost always wins.
A worked example. A 2019 HP Pavilion 15 with a cracked Full HD IPS panel sells used, working, for roughly £180 to £220. The screen is £129 – £179 fitted. That is between 60% and 99% of the machine’s value going into one part on a six-year-old laptop with a mechanical drive and a tired battery. The honest verdict is to stop, unless the data on it matters more than the hardware does.
Change one variable and the answer flips. The same £179 screen on a 2023 ThinkPad worth £850 is 21% of the value, the chassis has years left, and the RAM is soldered so there is no cheap replacement with the same specification. Fit the screen. The full framework, with the three exceptions to the 50% rule and four more worked examples, is in our guide to repairing or replacing a laptop.
Five questions to ask before you hand the machine over
- Is this quote fixed, and does it include VAT, parts, labour and return postage? “From £99” is not a quote. Ask for one number and ask whether it can move.
- Which component are you replacing? If the answer is “the motherboard”, ask what is wrong with the motherboard. A shop that can name the failed part can usually replace just that part.
- Is the panel the same specification as the original? Same resolution, same refresh rate, same brightness grade, same connector, same finish. Ask for the part number.
- What is the warranty, on parts and on labour, and is it in writing? Twelve months is the standard worth holding out for. Ninety days on labour only tells you something.
- What do I pay if you cannot fix it, and do I get my old parts back? The answers should be “nothing” and “yes, if you want them”. Your statutory position on workmanship sits under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, which requires services to be carried out with reasonable care and skill.
The costs that appear after the quote
These are the line items that turn a £149 repair into a £229 invoice. None of them is unusual, and all of them can be asked about in advance.
- Return postage. £12 to £25 for insured, tracked carriage on a laptop, charged separately by plenty of mail-in outfits. Ours is free on approved repairs, and free even if you decline the quote.
- Parts not returned. Your old screen, battery or drive has scrap or refurb value. Some shops keep it as a matter of policy without mentioning it. Ask for it back, or ask for a discount in exchange.
- Data quoted separately. A drive swap includes a clone. Pulling files off a failing or dead disk is a different job with different tooling, which is why data recovery starts at £199 and is quoted on its own rather than folded into a repair.
- Bench and reassembly fees. A charge for putting the machine back together after you decline the work. Perfectly legal if disclosed beforehand. Ask.
- Restocking. If a special-order panel or board has been bought for your job and you change your mind after it arrives, expect to cover part of it. Reasonable, and another argument for a firm quote before anything is ordered.
One cost that is genuinely worth paying is prevention. A £69 cooling service and a backup routine prevent a large share of the expensive jobs on the list above. If you are upgrading rather than repairing, check what your model actually accepts with Crucial’s compatibility tool before buying anything, and see iFixit’s Right to Repair resources for where independent repair currently stands.
Related guides
- Repair or Replace? How to Decide Honestly — the 50% rule in full, its three exceptions, and four worked examples with a verdict for each.
- Laptop Screen Replacement Cost, by Panel Type — how to read your own panel part number before anyone quotes you for a display.
- Laptop Won’t Turn On? Work Through This First — seven safe checks at home, and what an engineer measures on the bench when they do not fix it.
Get it looked at properly
Our 62-point diagnosis covers the power rails under load, battery health and cycle count, storage SMART data, memory, thermals under a sustained stress run, the display panel and its cable, every port, and the board itself under a microscope where the symptoms point that way. You get a written report naming the faulty component, whether or not you have the work done with us.
It is £29, credited in full the moment you approve a repair, and there is no fee at all if we cannot fix the machine. The figure you approve is the figure you are invoiced: if we find a second fault we stop and re-quote rather than adding to the bill. Book a diagnosis or send us the symptoms, or check the numbers first on the full price list.