How to Read a RICS Survey Report, and What Happens After the Survey

The report arrives as a PDF. It might be forty pages long, or ninety. It is full of amber and red boxes, and phrases like "further investigation is recommended" and "evidence of historic movement". What it almost never contains is a price, or a straight answer to the two questions you actually have: how much of this matters, and what is it going to cost me?

That isn't the surveyor being unhelpful. A RICS survey is written to be careful. The surveyor records everything they saw, flags everything they couldn't see, and recommends a specialist wherever there is doubt. Pricing the repairs isn't part of their job, and the report usually says so.

This guide is how I read one as a builder: how the report is laid out, which parts deserve your attention and which you can safely put to one side, how to turn it into a plan, and what happens between the survey and getting the keys. If you would rather not learn all of this in the next 48 hours, there is a shortcut at the end.

What a RICS survey report is, and what it isn't

Before you read a line, it helps to know what kind of document you are holding.

• It is a record of condition on the day. The surveyor walks the property, looks at what they can see and reach, and reports on it. It is a visual inspection. Floors aren't lifted and walls aren't opened up.
• It isn't your mortgage valuation. The lender's valuation is a separate report for the lender, and it can come back with its own surprises. More on that below.
• It doesn't price the repairs. The RICS standard tells you to get quotes and further investigations done before you make a legal commitment to buy. The report tells you what is wrong. It is left to you to find out what that costs.
• It isn't a to-do list for next week. Most of a normal report describes a normal house of that age. The length of the list tells you how thorough the surveyor was, not how bad the house is.

If you haven't booked your survey yet, the Level 2 or Level 3 checker will tell you which one fits the property.

How the report is laid out

Every RICS Home Survey, Level 2 or Level 3, follows the same order of sections. The section letters shift slightly between versions, so go by the headings:

• About the inspection. The date, the weather, and what the surveyor couldn't get to. Read the limitations properly. A loft with no access, a floor covered in fitted carpet or a cellar full of boxes all mean "I don't know", not "it's fine".
• Overall opinion. The summary, and the most important two pages in the report. It gives the surveyor's overall view and pulls together the urgent items and the further investigations. Read this first.
• About the property. Type, age, construction and energy rating. Check that it matches what you were told. A house described as timber-framed or of non-standard construction can affect your mortgage and insurance.
• Outside the property. Chimneys, roof coverings, gutters and downpipes, main walls, windows and doors. This is where most of the expensive findings live.
• Inside the property. The roof space, ceilings, walls, floors, fireplaces, kitchen, bathroom and joinery. Damp, rot and woodworm usually show up here.
• Services. Electrics, gas, water, heating and drainage. Surveyors don't test services, so a recommendation for an electrical or gas safety check is routine rather than alarming.
• Grounds. Garages, outbuildings, boundaries, trees near the house and invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed.
• Issues for your legal advisers. Missing building regulations or planning approval for alterations, guarantees, rights of way, boundaries and shared drives. Send this section straight to your solicitor.
• Risks. A roll-up of risks to the building, the grounds and the people living there, such as asbestos, flood risk, radon or no working smoke alarms.
• What to do now. The standard advice on getting quotes and further investigations before you commit. On a Level 2 with valuation, there is also a valuation section.

A Level 3 covers the same ground in more depth, and it often adds repair advice and rough timescales. If your report is from a surveyor who isn't RICS-regulated, read it the same way: find the summary, the urgent items, the things they couldn't inspect and the legal section.

The condition ratings, and what they don't tell you

On a Level 2 and most Level 3s, every part of the house gets a rating:

• Condition Rating 1 (green): no repair is currently needed.
• Condition Rating 2 (amber): defects that need repairing or replacing, but are not serious or urgent.
• Condition Rating 3 (red): defects that are serious, or need to be repaired, replaced or investigated urgently.
• NI: not inspected.

The ratings are useful, but they have one big blind spot: they say nothing about cost. A blocked gutter and a roof at the end of its life can both be a 3. One is a few hundred pounds. The other is £8,000–£18,000 with scaffolding. That is why a report full of red can describe a perfectly sound house, and a report with one red box can hide the biggest bill. There is a fuller explanation in what a Condition Rating 3 actually means.

What's important, and what's less important

This is the part that takes experience, and the part most buyers find hardest. Here is how a builder sorts a report.

Read these closely

• Every Condition Rating 3. Write each one down with its section, in the surveyor's words.
• Every "further investigation" note, whatever the rating. These are unknowns. Until someone has looked, nobody can tell you whether it is £300 or £30,000. The common investigations and their costs are in further investigation recommended.
• Anything not inspected on an expensive element. A roof space, a sub-floor void or a cellar marked NI on an old house is a gap in what you know, not a clean bill of health.
• Anything about water getting in. Roofs, flashings, gutters, downpipes, damp. Water is what turns a small repair into a big one, so these jump the queue even when they are cheap to fix.
• Movement and cracking. The difference between "historic" and "ongoing" or "progressive" matters more than the size of the crack. See cracks in a RICS survey.
• Alterations. Extensions, loft rooms, removed walls and replacement windows, and whether there is paperwork for them. See no building regulations sign-off.
• Safety. Electrics, gas, and asbestos in places you plan to disturb.

Note it, budget for it, move on

• Condition Rating 2 items. This is what a lived-in house looks like. Spread them across the next few years of maintenance.
• Anything you could see at the viewing. A dated kitchen or tired decoration is already in the price you offered.
• The standard caveats. "Services were not tested" and "floor coverings were not lifted" appear in nearly every report. They only matter when they hide something expensive.
• Routine recommendations. A gas safety check or an electrical test before you move in is good practice. It isn't a sign that something is wrong.

Phrases that sound worse, and phrases that sound milder, than they are

Some wording reads as alarming and usually isn't:

• "Evidence of historic movement." The house moved at some point and has very probably stopped. Normal for older housing.
• "The electrical installation appears dated." Often the wiring is fine behind an old fuse board. An electrical test (EICR) costs £180–£350 and tells you.
• "Damp readings were recorded." Damp needs a cause, and the cause is often outside: a gutter, a path built up against the wall or a bridged damp-proof course. Lowering the ground level typically costs £600–£3,000, far less than the injected damp-proofing you might get sold.

And some wording reads as mild and can be expensive:

• "The roof covering is nearing the end of its serviceable life." It can mean a few slipped slates, or a full strip and re-cover. A roofer's look will tell you which.
• "Further investigation is recommended" next to cracking or drainage. The cost is unknown until someone looks.
• "We could not find evidence of building regulations approval." That is a legal question and a practical one, and it belongs with your solicitor.

If it's the wording itself that's the problem, the RICS survey jargon decoder translates over 90 survey phrases into plain English.

Turning the report into a plan: cost, timing and trades

A survey is sorted by part of the house: roof, walls, windows, services. That makes sense for an inspection, but it isn't how you'll pay for the work or get it done. What you need is the same list sorted by money and by time.

Sort every item that matters into one of four groups:

• Before exchange. Further investigations, and anything that could change whether you buy at all.
• Before you move in, or straight after. Safety items and anything letting water in.
• The first couple of months. Work that is easier with the house empty, such as electrics before you decorate, or a damp fix before you replaster.
• Over the next few years. The amber items. Plan for them and budget for them, but don't let them drive the purchase.

Then group the work by trade. A roofer can deal with slipped slates, a failed flashing and a leaking gutter on one visit, under one set of scaffolding. The electrician should go in before the plasterer, and the plasterer before the decorator. Grouping like this means fewer call-out charges and less disruption, and you are less likely to pay for the same scaffold twice. It is also what makes the list feel manageable.

"Ben was very quick to reply and went above and beyond in his analysis of my survey report. It was so clear that I only had one question left for him! The most useful part was about grouping jobs together by tradesperson. I definitely recommend for nervous buyers, money well-spent."

— Alexis P., Google review

For a first pass at the numbers, the RICS survey repair cost calculator prices the most common survey findings at 2026 rates and sorts them by urgency. For what the big items really involve, see what RICS survey findings actually cost to fix.

What happens after the survey

This is the usual sequence in England and Wales once the report is in your hands. Some steps run at the same time.

1. Read it and sort it. Give yourself a day or two. Don't ring the agent in a panic: one calm conversation with numbers beats four worried ones. The order to work through in the first week is in your RICS survey came back: what to do, in order.
2. Book any further investigations. Typical costs are £500–£1,200 for a structural engineer's report, £200–£400 for a CCTV drain survey and £180–£350 for an electrical test. You'll need the seller's permission for access, so arrange it through the agent.
3. Send the legal issues to your solicitor. They raise enquiries with the seller's solicitor about building regulations certificates, window certificates, guarantees and boundaries.
4. The lender's valuation runs separately. It can come back with a retention, where part of the mortgage is held back until work is done, or a down-valuation. They are different problems. See mortgage retention on a valuation.
5. Get the important items costed. Ranges first, then quotes for the big items before you commit.
6. Go back to the seller if the costs justify it. Ask for a price reduction, ask for agreed work to be done before exchange, or ask for money to be held back until it is. Walking away is a fair outcome too. Should I pull out after a survey? helps with that decision.
7. Searches, enquiries and your mortgage offer come together. If you are waiting on searches, use that time to plan the works.
8. Exchange of contracts. This is the point of no return. Up to exchange you can renegotiate or walk away. After it, you are legally committed, and pulling out normally means losing your deposit, and possibly more. Many lenders and contracts expect you to have buildings insurance in place from exchange, so ask your solicitor when it needs to start.
9. Completion and moving in. The survey becomes your maintenance plan. The first-home checklist covers the first weeks.

How long all of this takes depends on the chain, the searches and the lender. Your solicitor can tell you where the real deadline is.

In Scotland the order is different. The Home Report is ready before you offer, and concluded missives are binding. So the reading, sorting and costing has to happen before you put in an offer, not after.

Using the survey to renegotiate the price

A survey gives you leverage only once you've put numbers on it. A few rules hold for almost every sale:

• Negotiate on what you couldn't have known at the viewing, mainly the Condition Rating 3 items and anything the investigations turn up. Asking for money off a dated kitchen undermines the points that are real.
• Send a costed list, not the report. Forwarding the whole survey invites the seller to argue with the surveyor's wording instead of your figures.
• Give one number with a reason behind it. "These four items total £X, and we'd like the price adjusted to reflect them" is a proposal. "We're a bit worried about the survey" isn't.

The survey renegotiation calculator helps you work out a fair figure from your agreed price and the costed repairs. How much you can negotiate off after a survey covers how sellers tend to respond, and the wording that works.

Sometimes the honest numbers tell you not to buy. That isn't a failed purchase. It's the survey doing its job:

"Ben translated a RICS 3 survey for an ex-buy-to-let into cost estimates and timeframes for the various issues. Once I had that info it was obvious that the house wasn’t for me, and having someone friendly and knowledgeable on my side took so much of the pressure off."

— Elisabeth, Google review

The shortcut: let a builder read it for you

You can learn all of the above, and plenty of people do. But you are learning it in the most stressful week of the purchase, with an agent ringing, a solicitor billing and a deadline you can't quite see. The hard part isn't the vocabulary. It's knowing, from experience, which findings matter on this house at this price.

I set Chat to Your Builder up for exactly that moment. I'm a builder, carpenter by trade, and I read the survey myself. Here is what you get back:

• Every finding in plain English, sorted into what's urgent, what can wait and what's normal for a house of that age.
• Realistic cost ranges for each item, so you know the total you're facing.
• What needs doing when: before exchange, before you move in, in the first couple of months, or over the next few years. Where it helps, I group the work by trade.
• The questions to raise with the seller, your surveyor or a specialist.
• The numbers you need to renegotiate, if the survey justifies it.
• A written review and a one-to-one call within 24 hours, for £59.

I don't quote for the work I review, and I take no referral fees, so there's no reason for me to make anything sound worse than it is. If what comes back doesn't give you a clear answer, you get every penny back.

"If like me, you are overwhelmed by a 90+ pages survey report and need a professional to help you make sense of it, Ben is your man! Quick, helpful and friendly."

— P K, Google review

"Ben was really knowledgeable and a great help with answering our concerns following a RICS survey. This has enabled us to move forward with piece of mind and a fuller understanding of the property we are purchasing."

— Darren McMahon, Google review

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