Laptop Screen Replacement Cost, by Panel Type

Ring three repair shops about a cracked 15.6-inch screen and you will get three prices that do not look like they describe the same job. One says £110. One says £190. One says £340. None of them is necessarily lying, and the honest one is often the most expensive.

The reason is that "a 15.6-inch laptop screen" is not a part. It is a category containing at least six genuinely different components, and the cheapest one costs about a third of what the dearest one costs before anyone has picked up a screwdriver.

A laptop display is an assembly, not a part

Open the lid and you are looking at one surface, so it is reasonable to assume one component. What is actually in there:

• The panel. The LCD or OLED itself, which determines resolution, refresh rate, brightness and colour gamut.
• The backlight. An LED array plus the circuit that drives it. On an OLED there is no backlight, which is why a dead OLED goes truly black rather than dim.
• The display cable. An eDP or LVDS ribbon running through a hinge channel, which is exactly where cables chafe.
• The bezel and lid. Plastic or aluminium, often glued rather than clipped on thin machines.
• The hinges and their mounts. The mechanical part that usually caused the damage in the first place.
• A digitiser, on touch machines. A glass touch layer optically bonded to the panel, which means the two cannot be separated.

A quote of £110 is usually a bare budget panel swapped into an intact lid. A quote of £340 might be a bonded touch assembly with a new hinge mount. Both can be fair. What is not fair is being quoted for the first and invoiced for the second.

Screen replacement price, by panel type

These are the fitted prices we actually invoice, including the part, the labour and VAT. They are typical ranges rather than quotations — your written quote comes after we have identified the exact panel in your machine.

Two things move a price inside those bands. Availability — a panel from a short production run costs what the market asks for it. And prior work — a lid someone has already levered open takes longer and sometimes needs a bezel too. You can see how this sits against every other repair on our full price list.

How to find your own panel part number

You can check a quote yourself, and it takes five minutes. Every panel carries a model string on a sticker on its back — something in the shape of NV156FHM-N4G, LP156WFC-SPD1 or B140HAN06.9. The prefix tells you the manufacturer (BOE, LG Display, AUO, Samsung), and the rest encodes size, resolution and revision.

You can get at it three ways, easiest first:

1. Ask the operating system. On Windows, open PowerShell and run Get-WmiObject WmiMonitorID -Namespace root\wmi. The UserFriendlyName and ProductCodeID fields decode to the panel model on most machines.
2. Look up your exact service tag or serial. Manufacturer support sites list the panels shipped against each configuration. Dell, HP and Lenovo all publish parts lists this way.
3. Read the sticker. Reliable, but it means removing the bezel, which is a workshop job on a bonded lid.

Why bother? Because a panel that physically fits is not necessarily the right panel. Fit a 45% NTSC panel where a 100% sRGB one used to be and colours go flat. Fit a 250-nit panel where a 400-nit one used to be and the machine is unusable outdoors. Fit a 60Hz panel into a gaming laptop and the 144Hz you paid for is gone, silently — Windows will simply never offer the option again.

Connector pin count matters too. Panels of the same size ship with 30-pin and 40-pin eDP connectors, and the 40-pin variants often carry the extra lanes a high-refresh or high-resolution panel needs. A mismatch here produces a display that works at reduced capability, or flickers, or does not light at all. We match by part number for exactly this reason — it is described in more detail on our screen replacement service page.

Panel-only or whole assembly?

Where the panel is a separate component held in a bezel, we replace the panel alone. It is cheaper, it keeps your original lid, hinges and webcam, and it is the right answer on most Windows laptops.

Where the glass is optically bonded to the panel — every touchscreen, every 2-in-1, and all modern MacBooks — the two cannot be separated economically. Splitting a bonded assembly requires heat, a wire and a very good day, and the failure rate is high enough that no honest shop will quote it as routine. On those machines the quote is for a complete assembly, which is why touch machines and MacBooks sit at the top of the table.

One practical consequence: if your machine has a touchscreen you never use, say so. On a handful of models a non-touch assembly is available and considerably cheaper. You lose touch permanently, but if you have never used it, that is £120 saved.

When the broken screen is not the screen

Roughly one display fault in six that reaches our bench is not a panel fault at all. Fitting a new panel would have cost the customer £150 and changed nothing.

The test that separates them is free and takes two minutes. Plug the laptop into an external monitor or a TV over HDMI or USB-C and press the display-switch key. What you see decides it:

• External display is perfect, internal is broken. The fault is in the panel, the cable or the backlight circuit. A panel replacement is likely to be the answer.
• External display shows the same artefacts — lines, tearing, colour blocks, corruption. The fault is the GPU or the board. A new panel fixes nothing. That is board-level work.
• Nothing on either display. You may not have a display fault at all. Work through the no-power triage guide first.

Three specific faults that impersonate a broken screen:

• A failed backlight circuit. The image is still there — shine a torch at a steep angle onto the screen and you will see a faint desktop. That is a board-level repair, not a panel.
• A chafed display cable. The picture flickers, changes with lid angle, or dies at a certain point in the hinge travel. A cable is a fraction of a panel's cost.
• Dead GPU solder joints. Artefacts on both displays, usually worse when the machine is hot. Reballing or GPU replacement, priced from £199.

Why the hinge matters more than the screen

If you did not drop the laptop, ask why the screen broke. The usual answer is the hinge.

Hinge mounts are threaded inserts set into the plastic or magnesium of the lid. Over thousands of open-and-close cycles they work loose, then tear out. Once the mount has failed, the hinge stops rotating freely and starts levering — and every time the lid closes, that force goes into the panel and the corner of the chassis. The screen is the symptom.

Fit a new panel into a lid with a failed hinge mount and you have bought yourself a few months. We inspect and rebuild the mount as part of every screen job for this reason; it is covered under hinge and chassis repair, £89 – £199 where a rebuild is needed.

The warning signs, in order of how long you have: the lid feels stiff or notchy; it no longer stays at the angle you set it; a gap opens between the bezel and the lid at one corner; the plastic near the hinge cracks. At the first sign, stop opening it more than you must and get it looked at. At the last sign, you are usually buying a panel as well.

Is a new screen worth it?

Nearly always, and more often than for almost any other repair. A screen has no effect on the rest of the machine's life expectancy, the part is new, and a laptop with a cracked display is worth very close to nothing second-hand — so the repair typically adds more to the resale value than it costs.

The exception is the usual one: a £280 bonded assembly on a six-year-old machine worth £180 fails the 50% test comfortably. Our repair or replace guide walks that calculation properly, including the cases where it flips.

One thing worth doing either way: if the glass is cracked, stop using the machine with the lid open and closed repeatedly. Cracks propagate, a panel that is merely cracked can become a panel that is also delaminating, and loose glass splinters find fingers. Tape over the crack, keep the lid shut, and use an external monitor until it is booked in.

Related guides

• How Much Does Laptop Repair Cost in 2026? — every common fault priced, and how to read a quote before you approve it.
• Repair or Replace? How to Decide Honestly — the 50% rule and the three exceptions where repairing an older machine still wins.
• Laptop Won’t Turn On? Work Through This First — if nothing appears on an external display either, start here instead.

Get it looked at properly

A screen quote is only as good as the panel identification behind it. Our £29 bench diagnosis reads the exact panel part number from your machine, tests the display on an external output to confirm the fault is really the panel, and checks the hinge mounts that usually caused it. The fee comes off the repair in full, so an accurate answer costs you nothing if you go ahead.

You then get one fixed price covering the correct panel, the labour and VAT, with 12 months of parts-and-labour warranty. No fix, no fee — and free tracked return postage if you decide against it. Send us the model and a photo of the damage and an engineer will come back with a bracket, usually within two working hours, or read the full price list first.