Should You Replace Your Gutters When You Replace Your Roof?

Quick Answer: If your gutters are more than 15 to 20 years old, sagging, leaking at the seams, or hung with old spike-and-ferrule fasteners, replace them with your roof — you’ll get a cleaner drip edge integration and a better combined price than doing the jobs separately. If your gutters are newer and draining properly, keep them. A roof replacement does not require new gutters.

Every week someone asks us this during an inspection, and the honest answer is: it depends on the gutters, not the roof. Here’s how to think it through.

What Happens to Your Gutters During a Roof Replacement

Your gutters stay on the house during a normal roof replacement. The crew tears off the old shingles above them, protects the gutter run while debris comes down, cleans them out at the end, and installs new drip edge — the metal flashing that directs water off the roof edge and into the gutter.

That drip edge is the reason this question matters more than most homeowners realize. Drip edge gets installed with the roof, and it has to lap correctly with the gutter behind it. When roof and gutters are done together, that transition is built as one system. When gutters get replaced a year or two later, the installer is working around flashing that’s already nailed down.

It’s not a dealbreaker to do them separately. It’s just cleaner to do them together.

When Replacing Gutters With the Roof Makes Sense

They’re old enough to be near the end anyway. Aluminum gutters last roughly 20 to 25 years. If yours went up with the roof you’re now replacing, they’ve lived the same life the shingles have.

They’re hung with spikes and ferrules. Those are the long nails you can see backing out of the gutter face on older homes. Modern gutters use hidden hangers screwed into the fascia, which hold better under Utah snow load. If your gutters are spiked on, they’re old enough to replace.

The pitch is wrong. Gutters need a slight fall toward the downspouts. If water stands in the run after a storm, they’re not draining — and standing water plus freeze-thaw is how seams fail and fascia rots.

You can see the failure. Rust, separated seams, sections pulling off the fascia, water sheeting over the front edge during storms, paint peeling on the fascia behind them. Any of those, and you’re buying new gutters soon regardless — cheaper to do it now.

Ice dams have been a problem. Gutters don’t cause ice dams — attic heat loss does — but failed, overflowing gutters make the mess at the eave worse. If you’re re-roofing partly because of winter problems, sort the whole eave out at once: ice barrier, drip edge, gutters.

When to Keep Your Existing Gutters

If your gutters are under 10 to 15 years old, hung with hidden hangers, draining fully, and not leaking at the seams — keep them. Spending money replacing working gutters doesn’t make your roof better. We’ll tell you that during the inspection, because talking a homeowner into gutters they don’t need is exactly the kind of thing that gives roofers a bad name.

One honest middle path: sometimes the gutters are fine but a section or two of fascia behind them is soft. In that case we replace the bad fascia during the roof job and re-hang the existing gutters on it. That’s a repair, not a replacement, and it costs a fraction as much.

What Do New Gutters Cost With a Roof Replacement?

Gutter pricing depends on linear footage, material, and how many stories the crew is working on. As a rough calibration for a typical Utah single-family home, seamless aluminum gutters usually land in the four figures — a small add relative to a roof replacement that runs $8,500 to $18,000 for most homes in our service area.

Doing both at once typically saves money for three reasons:

• One mobilization. The crew, the trailer, the dump run — you pay for that once, not twice.
• Shared access. Fascia and eave work is already happening. Adding gutters to open eaves is faster than retrofitting later.
• One integrated flashing detail. Drip edge and gutter go in as a system, with nothing done twice.

Ask for the gutter line item in your written estimate. If a contractor won’t itemize it, that tells you something — see why roofing quotes vary.

What About Gutter Guards?

If you’re under mature trees — common in older neighborhoods like Bountiful and East Bench Ogden — guards can be worth it to keep needles and leaves out. If your lot has no tree cover, they’re usually money you don’t need to spend. Same rule as everything else on this page: buy what your house needs, not what a salesman needs to sell.

The Short Version

New roof doesn’t automatically mean new gutters. Replace them together when the gutters are 15–20+ years old, spiked on, mispitched, or visibly failing — you’ll get better pricing and a cleaner drip-edge integration. Keep them when they’re newer and working. We look at gutters as part of every free roof inspection and put both numbers in writing so you can decide once, with no pressure either way.