Doors take more daily punishment than almost anything else in a house. They get slammed, leaned on, kicked open, dragged across uneven floors, and expected to seal perfectly against weather and sound for decades. When something goes wrong, the instinct is often to replace — but the honest answer is that most door problems are repair jobs, and the ones that aren't tend to be obvious once you know what to look for.
This is the problem-by-problem breakdown of when to fix a door and when to buy new, written for both homeowners and landlords. If you want the general framework behind repair-versus-replace decisions on anything in the house, our separate guide on that covers the full logic.
The three questions that decide it
Before working through the specifics, three questions set the direction:
1. Is the damage structural or cosmetic?
Surface marks, loose fittings, sticking edges and worn seals are cosmetic — nearly always repairs. Twisted cores, cracked-through hollow doors and rot that's reached the structural timber are structural — usually replacements.
2. Does the door still meet its job?
External doors need to seal, insulate and resist forced entry. Fire doors need to actually resist fire. Interior doors need to close, latch and swing cleanly. A door that no longer meets its functional job isn't repairable even if the timber looks sound.
3. Is the frame doing its share?
A new door hung on a dropped or rotten frame won't fix anything. Sometimes the “door problem” is really a frame problem, and the right call is to repair or re-line the frame and keep the door.
When to repair — the common cases
The classic. The door drags on the carpet when you open it, or binds on the frame as it closes. Causes are seasonal (timber swells in humid weather), structural (the house has settled slightly), or practical (recent painting added just enough thickness to catch).
Repair. A planer takes a few millimetres off the leading edge or the bottom in about thirty minutes. For hinge-side binding, the fix is often tightening or re-packing the hinge screws rather than touching the door itself. If recent painting is the cause, the simplest answer is sometimes to let it finish curing and see whether the issue settles.
Handle wobbles in your hand; latch won't catch unless you lift or push the door; door swings open on its own. The culprit is almost always worn hardware, enlarged screw holes, or a strike plate that's drifted out of alignment as the frame has moved.
The photo above shows the single most common version of this problem — an enlarged hinge screw hole where someone's shoved a plastic wall plug in as a quick fix. It'll hold for a few weeks before working loose again, and every time the door swings the hole gets a little bigger. The proper repair is to pack the hole with a glued wooden plug or matchstick cuts, let it set, re-drill a pilot hole, and seat the screw back into sound timber.
Repair. Replacing the internal latch mechanism is a cheap part and a thirty-minute job. Enlarged screw holes get packed with wooden matchsticks or plug cuts and re-drilled. A misaligned strike plate gets moved a few millimetres or filed to accept the latch at its new position. New hardware top to bottom is still a repair, not a replacement.
You can feel cold air past the door with it closed, or see daylight at the edges. The door itself is fine — the seals and the threshold have worn.
Repair. Replace the brush strip or compression seals around the frame and refit a draught-excluder threshold at the bottom. Takes an hour, costs under £40 in parts, and makes an immediate difference to the heating bill. Covered in more detail in our pre-winter maintenance checklist.
Soft spots or flaking paint near the bottom corners of an external door or a garage side door, where water has sat against the timber over several winters.
Repair, if caught early. Cut back to sound timber, treat the surrounding wood with a hardener, fill the void with a two-part epoxy wood resin, sand smooth and repaint with a proper exterior system. Done properly, this is good for another ten years. The trap is that rot you can see is rarely the full extent of rot that's there — if the resin filling goes deep, or if you find a second patch while fixing the first, the whole bottom rail is likely compromised and you've moved into replacement territory.
Doors that just look tired.
Repair. Strip, fill, sand, prime and repaint. A proper refurbishment on an interior door costs a fraction of a replacement and often looks better afterwards than a cheap new door would. The photo at the top of this guide shows exactly this stage — a period four-panel door stripped back to bare timber, with dents and old handle holes filled flush and sanded smooth, ready for primer and two coats of a quick-dry satinwood (we use Dulux Quick Dry Satinwood or similar — satinwood is the right finish for interior doors because it stays wipeable and doesn't yellow the way old oil-based gloss does).
For a period property, this approach is almost always the right call: you keep the character, the mass, and the timber quality of the original door, and spend a quarter of what a decent replacement would cost.
When to replace
Doors warp when they absorb moisture unevenly — commonly bathroom doors, external doors with failed finishes, or doors stored flat on a damp floor before fitting. Once a door has twisted enough that it no longer sits flat in the frame, no amount of planing recovers it.
Replace. A twisted door is beyond adjustment. The replacement itself is straightforward; the frame usually survives if the warp was limited to the door.
Most modern interior doors are hollow-core: timber frame around the edges, lightweight infill between, veneer on both sides. When they split through the face (from a slam, a kick, a dropped item), the structural timber inside is often damaged too, and filler never restores the strength.
Replace. Cheap to buy, straightforward to hang. Don't throw good labour at filling a hollow-core door that's cracked through — the finish never hides the repair for long.
Modern external doors are built to defined security standards — the Secured by Design scheme, the police-preferred specification used by many insurers, references PAS 24 for door sets. An older timber door with a single mortice lock, a thin frame, and sixty years of weather in it isn't going to meet those standards no matter what you spend on repairs.
Replace. This matters especially for landlords, where insurance claims after a break-in often turn on whether the door met minimum security standards. If you're not sure, the lock quality (BS 3621 or equivalent), the frame construction, and the hinges are the three places to look.
Replacement external doors in England and Wales must meet the thermal performance set in Approved Document L of the Building Regulations — currently a U-value of 1.4 W/m²K or better. An old single-skin timber door with no insulation is losing meaningful amounts of heat compared with a modern insulated composite or well-made contemporary timber door.
Replace when you're already upgrading, when heating costs are a priority, or when the door is reaching end of life anyway.
Fire doors — in HMOs, blocks of flats, and some commercial settings — have statutory functions. They have intumescent strips, specific hinge counts, controlled gap tolerances and a certified construction that resists fire for a defined time (FD30, FD60). Damage that would be cosmetic on a normal interior door — a crack through, a hole, a broken intumescent seal — can take a fire door out of compliance.
Replace any fire door that's been damaged in a way that affects its rating. Repair is possible in principle but needs to be done by someone qualified to re-certify, and in practice replacement is usually faster, cheaper and more defensible. For landlords in HMOs, this is a legal exposure, not a style question — check with your local fire officer if in doubt.
The frame question
Sometimes the frame is the real problem. A door that drops on its hinges once a year is usually a frame that's rotted at the base or come loose from the wall. A door that binds in a new place every season is a frame that's moving.
Frames are repairable (packing hinges, splice-repairing rotten sections, re-fixing to the wall) and replaceable (full re-line with new linings and architraves) independently of the door. A tradesman diagnosing a door problem should always look at the frame too — if the quote only mentions the door, ask about the frame.
Period and listed properties
Old doors in old houses are worth preserving. Period doors — Georgian six-panel, Victorian four-panel, Edwardian half-glazed — are often made from timber that's denser and more stable than anything you can buy new today, and they're part of what gives a period property its character. Replacement cheap doors from a DIY shed almost always look wrong.
For listed buildings, there's an additional layer: replacing original doors (and sometimes significantly altering them) requires Listed Building Consent from the local authority. Doing it without consent is a criminal offence, even on your own property.
The default for period and listed properties should always be repair first.
Quick decision table
| Problem | Verdict | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Sticking or rubbing | Repair | Plane edge or adjust hinges |
| Loose handle or failing latch | Repair | Replace mechanism, re-seat screws |
| Draughts around external door | Repair | New seals and threshold |
| Small localised rot | Repair (if caught early) | Cut back, treat, resin fill, repaint |
| Dents and cosmetic damage | Repair | Strip, fill, sand, repaint |
| Twisted or warped beyond adjustment | Replace | New door, keep frame |
| Hollow-core cracked through | Replace | New door, straightforward hang |
| External door failing security standards | Replace | New certified door and frame |
| External door failing energy standards | Replace (when upgrading) | Modern insulated external door |
| Damaged fire door | Replace | New certified FD30/FD60 door |
| Rotten or dropped frame | Repair or replace frame | Splice repair or full re-line |
| Original door in listed property | Repair first, always | Specialist timber repair |
Frequently asked
How much does it cost to repair a door versus replace it?
A typical repair (planing, hinge adjustment, latch replacement, draught sealing) sits in the £60–£150 range. Resin-based rot repair runs £120–£300 depending on area. A replacement interior door hung and finished typically costs £180–£400; a replacement external door £600–£2,000+ depending on specification. See our general repair-or-replace framework for how to weigh these against each other.
Can a sticking door fix itself after the weather changes?
Sometimes — if the cause is seasonal timber swelling. Give it a week of dry weather first before planing. If it still sticks, the cause is structural, not atmospheric.
Who do I call to hang a new door — a carpenter or a handyman?
Either, for standard interior and most external doors. A handyman with carpentry experience handles door hanging as routine work. Specialist jobs — bespoke timber doors in period properties, certified fire doors in HMOs — are worth going to a dedicated carpenter or joiner for.
Do I need Building Regulations approval to replace an external door?
In England and Wales, replacement external doors must meet the thermal and security requirements of the Building Regulations. If you use a competent-person-registered installer (FENSA or Certass for glazed doors), they self-certify compliance. If you fit it yourself or use a non-registered installer, you need to notify Building Control.
What's the difference between a fire door and a normal door?
A fire door is a certified assembly — door, frame, hinges, closer, seals, intumescent strips — rated to resist fire for a defined period (typically 30 or 60 minutes). It's heavier, has more hinges, and must be fitted with specific gap tolerances. Required in HMOs, blocks of flats, and anywhere Building Regulations call for fire separation. Not something to swap casually.
My door keeps dropping on its hinges — is the door the problem?
Usually not. Repeated hinge drop is almost always a frame or wall-fixing issue, not a door issue. The right fix is to repack the hinge screws into sound timber, re-fix the frame to the wall, or in bad cases splice-repair the frame itself.
Can I repair a warped external door?
Minor warping (a few millimetres) can sometimes be corrected with careful planing and adjustment. Anything beyond that is a replacement — once timber has twisted, it won't un-twist, and forcing it into the frame will damage the frame too.