How Can You Stop Squirrels Getting Back Into Your Loft?

First, Confirm the Loft Is Empty

Not "the noise has stopped" — an actual check, after the trapping is complete. Sealing a roof with an animal inside produces escalating damage and, eventually, a dead squirrel in your ceiling void.

This matters especially around the two breeding periods, late winter and midsummer, when dependent young may be in a drey while the adult is outside. That timing judgement is part of the £280 trapping service rather than an afterthought.

Close the Openings, Properly

Squirrels chew, so a repair has to be something they cannot work on. Metal mesh or plate at eaves gaps and soffit joints. Sound timber, not soft or rotten boards, at fascia and bargeboards. Tiles re-bedded rather than pushed back. Mesh over vents that keeps the airflow.

Prioritise the junction where an extension, bay or porch roof meets the main wall — it is the commonest entry point we find and the one most often missed on a repair.

Know Which Trade Does What

Rodent proofing at £180 for up to an hour covers the closeable openings: a soffit joint, a small eaves gap, a vent, a gap at a bay or extension junction. That work holds.

What it does not cover, and should not be sold as covering: a whole eaves course that has failed, rotten fascia and soffit boards needing replacement, slipped tiles needing re-bedding, or a roofline that has moved. Those are a roofer, and proofing them would be charging you for something that reopens.

Then Remove the Routes Up

This is the half that gets skipped. Cut branches back so nothing overhangs or comes within a couple of metres of the roof, remembering they will jump downwards considerably further than they jump across.

Then look at the other routes: a downpipe, a trellis or climbing plant, ivy on a wall, a boundary fence running to the building, and a neighbouring roof at a different height. Metal guards on downpipes and clearing wall growth both help.

Then Check It Annually

Once a year, ideally in late summer, look along the roofline with binoculars from the ground. You are looking for fresh gnawing showing pale timber, felt hanging below the eaves, a lifted tile, a soffit joint that has opened, and new branch growth reaching towards the roof.

Twenty minutes a year. Repeat entry is common in properties with mature trees close by, and catching a new opening before it is used is the difference between a proofing hour and another trapping job.