Labour-Cost Split on Roof Replacement Claims: ROT Guide

The labour-cost split on roof replacement claims is the whole game: Sweden's ROT deduction is worth 30% of the labour cost and nothing else, so on a takomläggning you have to carve the job into hours worked on site (deductible) and everything else — tiles, battens, membrane, flashings, scaffolding hire, skip hire, tip fees, machine hire, travel (not deductible). Put the labour on its own invoice line, priced at your real hourly rate times real hours, keep the material and hire lines separate and itemised, and be able to show Skatteverket the arithmetic that produced the split. Guess it, round it, or bury it in a single "roof, complete" line and the payout request gets rejected — and on a roof, which is often the biggest ROT ticket a homeowner ever buys, the rejection lands on you, not on them.

What ROT is, if you have not met it

ROT (from reparation, ombyggnad, tillbyggnad) is a Swedish tax deduction for work done on someone's own home. It has no direct equivalent in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand or Australia. The closest mental model: imagine HMRC paying you, the roofer, 30% of your labour charge directly, so the homeowner's bill drops by that amount at the point of invoicing.

The mechanics matter because they put the risk on the contractor. Under the fakturamodellen (invoice model) you:

• Invoice the customer the full job, then deduct 30% of the labour cost from what they pay you.
• Collect the remaining 70% of labour, plus 100% of everything else, from the customer.
• Send a payout request (begäran om utbetalning) to Skatteverket for the 30% you discounted.

Two consequences. First, you are out of pocket until Skatteverket pays — and if they refuse, you are chasing a homeowner for money they thought they would never owe. Second, each person has an annual ceiling shared between ROT and RUT, and a roof easily eats all of it. The percentage (30% of labour) is stable. The ceiling amount has moved more than once. Check the current figure and the current rules at skatteverket.se before you quote, every year.

What counts as arbetskostnad on a takomläggning

Arbetskostnad means the cost of work performed at the property, by a person, on the qualifying building. Not the stuff that person installs, not the kit they stand on, not the drive there.

Before any of that, the building has to qualify. The customer must own the home, it must be a house, holiday home or a flat they are responsible for, and very new houses are excluded for a period after completion. Insurance-funded and grant-funded work does not qualify either, so a storm-damage roof paid by the insurer is not a ROT job for the insured portion. Confirm eligibility in writing before you build the price around it.

Scaffolding: the line that gets argued about most

Scaffolding is where roofers lose money, because it is a large number and it is tempting to treat it as part of the work. It is not. The hire of the scaffold, the weekly rate for the steel standing there, is equipment cost and is not deductible. Do not put it in the labour line and do not average it into an hourly rate.

The genuinely contested part is the labour of erecting and dismantling it. Firms take different positions, and this is not a question to answer by copying what a competitor's invoice does. If you intend to claim it, at minimum:

• Buy it from your scaffolder as two lines: hire, and erection labour.
• Pass it through to the customer in the same shape, with the erection hours visible.
• Ask Skatteverket for their position on your specific setup, in writing, before you commit to it in a quote.

If you cannot get a clear answer, the safe play on a big roof is to treat the whole scaffold package as non-deductible in the quote. A customer who was promised a deduction and does not get it will remember. A customer who gets slightly more back than the quote said will not complain.

How to split a fixed price into labour and material

Homeowners want one number. Skatteverket wants two, and wants the split to be defensible. There is no official percentage table for roofing you can point at. No "60% of a roof is labour" rule exists. What is required is that the labour figure reflects reality: your actual hours at your actual rate, or a fixed labour price a stranger could reproduce from your own cost base.

Build the price bottom-up and the split falls out for free. Here is the method on a plain gable, with round numbers chosen to show the arithmetic rather than to be a price list:

• Labour: 2 fitters, 6 days, 8 hours = 96 hours × your hourly rate. This is the only ROT line.
• Material: tiles, membrane, battens, flashings, gutters, fixings, from the supplier price file plus your markup.
• Hire: scaffold for three weeks, one 10 m³ skip, tip fees.
• Travel: mobilisation and mileage.

The deduction is then 30% of the labour line only. If those 96 hours come to a labour cost of 100 000 kr including VAT, the deduction is 30 000 kr, subject to whatever is left of the customer's annual ceiling, which may cap it lower. Material, hire and travel get no relief at all. That is exactly why a roof with expensive tiles and three weeks of scaffold has a far worse net price than the customer is expecting, and why they need to see it before they sign rather than after.

Two failure modes. Do not inflate the labour line by shifting material value into it: that is the first thing a review looks for on a roof, and it turns a rejected claim into something worse than a rejected claim. And do not deflate it out of caution either, because that is your customer's money you are giving away.

How to document the split on the invoice

The invoice is the evidence. It has to stand on its own two years later, when nobody remembers the job.

• Separate lines. Labour, material, hire, disposal, travel. Never one combined line.
• Hours and rate visible. Hours × rate = labour cost including VAT, and state which lines the deduction was calculated on.
• The deduction as its own line. ROT deduction, 30% of labour, the amount, then the sum the customer actually pays.
• Property identification. The fastighetsbeteckning, or for a flat the association's organisation number and the flat's designation. Wrong or missing property details is a common and completely avoidable rejection.
• The customer's personnummer and their share, if two owners are splitting the job across two ceilings.
• Payment date recorded. The payout request deadline is tied to the year the customer paid, not the year you invoiced. Check the current deadline at Skatteverket and do not sit on the request.
• Backing evidence kept. Time records, day sheets, supplier invoices, photos of the strip and of the finished roof.

A geofenced time clock earns its keep here. When the labour line comes off your own timesheet instead of an estimate, the split stops being an opinion and becomes a record, tied to that address, on those dates.

Showing the customer the net price before they sign

Commercially, the whole point of the split is the moment the homeowner sees what they actually pay. Do that in the quote, not the invoice.

Put the gross total, the labour subtotal, the deduction and the net-to-pay on the front page, with a plain sentence: the deduction applies to labour only, materials and scaffolding are not covered, and the amount depends on how much of their annual ceiling is still free, which is between them and Skatteverket and is not something you can look up. Say plainly that if the claim is refused the deducted amount becomes payable by them, and put that in your terms.

This is the part that decides the job. Two quotes at the same total look identical until one of them shows a net price and explains it, and that one gets signed. The honesty pays for itself too: a roofer who says "the scaffold is not deductible, and here is why" reads as someone who has done this before.

If you are doing this weekly, do not do it in a spreadsheet. In OdinTask the ROT deduction is calculated in the quote from the labour lines, the customer signs electronically with a document hash and audit trail, and the Skatteverket husarbete XML for the payout request is generated from the same job. The split the customer approved is the split you claim on, with no retyping in between.

Where roof claims actually get rejected

• One combined line with no labour breakdown.
• A labour share that cannot be reconstructed from hours and a rate.
• Scaffolding or skip hire folded into labour.
• Travel and quoting time claimed as work at the property.
• Wrong fastighetsbeteckning, or a flat claimed with the wrong details.
• The customer's ceiling already used up elsewhere that year.
• A payout request sent after the deadline for the year the customer paid.
• Insurance-funded storm repairs claimed as ROT.

None of these are clever traps. They are all admin, and they all cost the same thing: a payout you have already discounted and now have to ask a homeowner to pay. Get the split right at quote stage and the rest is paperwork that agrees with itself.