The UK Home MOT — Your Complete Annual Maintenance Calendar
Your car gets an MOT once a year. Your home doesn't — and that's where the trouble starts. This is the UK homeowner's complete annual maintenance calendar: what to check every month, what to schedule once a year, and what most homeowners quietly forget until it costs them. Use it as a reference, print the Home+ MOT checklist (free, no email needed), or set it all up as reminders inside Home+ and forget you ever read this.
If you're short on time, the rule of thumb is simple: once a month, spend 30 minutes. Once a quarter, a couple of hours. Once a year, book three tradespeople (gas, electrics, chimney if applicable). That's the full MOT. Everything below is the detail.
What a Home MOT Actually Is
A Home MOT isn't an official inspection — there's no government body, no certificate. It's a label the property industry has borrowed from the car world because it captures something UK homeowners instinctively get: an annual health-check by someone who knows what they're looking at, combined with a regular rhythm of small jobs that stop small problems becoming catastrophes.
Two things make the metaphor work. First, UK homes are old. Roughly 20% of the housing stock was built before 1919, and nearly 40% before 1965. Old homes move, breathe, leak, and reward attention. Second, UK weather is consistently damp and seasonally cold, which means small problems — a blocked gutter, a slow leak, an unserviced boiler — compound quickly. A Home MOT is the discipline of catching them early.
Why UK Homes Need a Maintenance Calendar
The typical UK homeowner doesn't have a maintenance problem. They have a memory problem. Boilers get serviced when they break, gutters get cleaned when they overflow, smoke alarms get changed when they start chirping at 3am. In a 1930s semi, that reactive approach might cost you £200 this year and £3,000 next year when the blocked gutter you ignored lets water into the brickwork.
A calendar fixes this. Not because homeowners suddenly become diligent — they don't — but because the decision to do a task gets moved out of your head and onto a page, an app, or a reminder. You don't choose to service your boiler in October; it's just on the list. This is exactly what Home+ was built to do, but the principle works on a printed sheet taped to the back of a cupboard door too.
The Monthly Rhythm: 30 Minutes, Same Day Every Month
Pick a day — the first Saturday of the month works for most people — and spend 30 minutes doing the following. Every single month.
Test the smoke alarms and CO detectors. Press and hold the test button until it beeps. If it doesn't, change the battery. If the unit is more than ten years old, replace it. Fire kills hundreds of people a year in the UK; the majority of those homes had a non-working alarm.
Check under sinks and around appliances. Look for damp patches, corrosion, or drips. A slow leak under a kitchen sink that runs for a year will cost more to fix than the whole kitchen.
Look at the ceiling in every room. Stains, discolouration, hairline cracks in new places. Most roof leaks show up on a ceiling before they show up outside.
Run every tap and flush every toilet. This sounds silly. It matters in a downstairs cloakroom you haven't used in three weeks — standing water in traps lets sewer gas and mould in.
Check the stopcock. It's usually under the kitchen sink. Turn it a quarter turn to make sure it still moves. A stopcock that hasn't been turned in ten years seizes, and the moment you need it — a burst pipe at 11pm on Christmas Eve — is not the moment to find out.
Bleed any radiator that felt cold at the top last time you used the heating.
Takes a cup of tea to get through if nothing's wrong. Catches the things that are.
The Quarterly Rhythm: Two Hours, Once a Season
Quarterly tasks are the ones that don't need doing every month but absolutely need doing sometime.
🌱 Spring (March/April)
Clean the gutters. Or pay someone. Pollen, leaves and silt accumulate through winter. Blocked gutters are the single most common cause of damp in UK terraces and semis.
Inspect the roof from ground level with binoculars. Look for slipped or missing tiles, flashing gaps around the chimney, cracked pointing. Don't climb up; binoculars catch 90% of what matters.
Check the loft. Look for daylight coming through the roof, damp patches on the insulation, pest droppings, or nests.
Service the boiler. Spring is a better time than autumn because Gas Safe engineers are less busy and more available. Expect to pay £80–£150 typically.
Clean the tumble dryer vent and washing machine filter. Lint is a genuine fire risk.
☀️ Summer (June/July)
Paintwork check. Look at window frames, doors, fascias, soffits. UK weather eats external wood and metal. Touching up a small patch of flaking paint in summer prevents rot you'd pay a carpenter to fix.
Brickwork and pointing. Walk the perimeter. Cracked mortar, loose bricks, efflorescence (white staining) all need attention before winter freezes water inside them.
Driveway and paths. Reseal block paving, clear moss, fix trip hazards.
Garden irrigation and outdoor taps. Make sure outside taps work and aren't leaking. Insulate any pipe that will see a winter freeze later in the year.
🍂 Autumn (September/October)
Gutters again. Leaves. Yes, you did them in spring. Do them again.
Heating system test. Turn the heating on before the first proper cold snap, not during it. A system that sat unused all summer often needs bleeding and sometimes a new part — much easier to find a plumber in September than in January.
Check insulation. Top up loft insulation if it's less than 270mm deep. Check that pipe lagging is intact, particularly in lofts and under suspended floors.
Weatherproofing. Replace any perished door or window seals. Clear drains.
Book a chimney sweep if you have an open fire or wood-burner — at minimum once a year, more if used heavily (per HETAS guidance).
❄️ Winter (December/January)
Frost protection. Know where the stopcock is. Leave heating on low overnight during cold snaps. If you're going away, set the thermostat to at least 10°C or drain the system.
Condensation and ventilation. UK homes get humid in winter because windows are shut. Open windows for 15 minutes daily. Use extractor fans. Wipe condensation off sills.
Drain tests. When rain is heavy, walk outside and watch where water goes. Anywhere it pools, splashes the wall, or runs toward the house is a drainage problem you'll fix cheaper in February than November.
The Annual MOT: The Three Trades Every UK Homeowner Should Book
Once a year, the same three appointments.
1. Gas Safe Boiler Service
Your boiler needs an annual service by a Gas Safe registered engineer. Most manufacturer warranties require it — miss a year and you can void the warranty on a £3,000 appliance. Cost typically £80–£150. Ask for a written report, and file it in Home+ (or a folder) against the boiler's make and model.
2. Electrical Check — Every 10 Years, Not Every Year
Unlike landlords (who need an EICR every 5 years), homeowners don't have a legal requirement. But the Electrical Safety Council and most surveyors recommend an EICR every 10 years, or when you buy a property. Cost is typically £150–£300 for a typical 3-bed.
3. Chimney Sweep — If Applicable
If you have any open fire, wood-burner, or stove, book a chimney sweep annually at minimum. HETAS-registered sweeps will give you a certificate that satisfies your home insurance in the event of a chimney fire. Typical cost: £60–£90.
The Big Four Every Homeowner Should Know by Heart
There are four things every UK homeowner should know, learn, and be able to do without thinking. Most can't. Change that.
Where the stopcock is — and that it still turns. In a burst pipe, you have minutes.
Where the consumer unit is (fuse board), and which breaker controls what. If you can't label them on a Saturday afternoon, you won't find the right one at 2am.
Where the gas shut-off valve is. Usually next to the meter. Know it, check it turns, never need it.
How to bleed a radiator. Two-minute job, saves a plumber callout.
Take photos of all four and save them in Home+. Future you will thank present you.
The Things Most Homeowners Forget
A maintenance calendar is only useful if it catches the things people don't naturally remember. These are the jobs most UK homeowners skip — and regret skipping.
Ventilation filters in bathroom and kitchen extractors. Should be cleaned annually; most never are. A clogged extractor is why your bathroom has mould.
Loft insulation coverage around the hatch and pipework. Heat loss here is silent and expensive.
Silicone sealant around baths and showers. Discoloured, cracked silicone is leaking water into the floor or wall below. Replace every 3–5 years.
Washing machine drain hose. Pulls out over time. Leaks go behind the unit and into the floor.
External wall vents. Get blocked by debris, spider webs, or well-meaning repointing. A blocked vent is often why there's damp in a ground-floor room you can't explain.
Fire door self-closers (if your home has fire doors — terraces with stairs to a loft conversion often do). They fail silently and invisibly.
Attic storage weight. UK lofts are not designed as primary storage. If yours is full of boxes, get a structural engineer to look before you store more.
What a Home MOT Is Not
Two deliberate exclusions, because you'll see other sites include them.
It's not a gas safety check for homeowners. If you own and live in your home, you are not legally required to have an annual CP12 — that's a landlord obligation. Booking a boiler service covers almost everything you'd want from a gas safety standpoint.
It's not an energy survey. Improving your EPC rating is worth doing and worth a separate plan, but it's slower-moving and more expensive than the work in this calendar.
How Home+ Handles This for You
Home+ is built to turn this entire calendar into reminders that fire on the right day for your property. You tell it your boiler make, model, and last service date — it reminds you when the next one's due. You upload the EICR — it tells you when the 10-year window is up. You log that your gutters were cleaned — it nudges you in six months. Everything in one place, no spreadsheet, no diary, no forgotten £3,000 repair.
If you want to build the same thing yourself on paper, the calendar above works. If you'd rather it ran itself in the background, sign up to Home+ free — takes 30 seconds.
