Fixing Doors That Stick or Drop

A door that drags, binds, or refuses to latch properly is one of the most common household irritants, and also one of the most useful early warnings of something more serious. Most sticking doors have a mundane explanation: a dropped hinge, years of paint accumulation, or timber that has swelled in a damp summer. A small number point to structural movement that should not be ignored. Knowing which you are dealing with shapes whether you reach for a screwdriver or a structural engineer.

This guide walks through the common causes, how to diagnose each one, the appropriate fix, and when to call in a professional.

Diagnostic Table

Start by observing exactly where and how the door is catching.

Cause 1: Dropped or Loose Hinges

The most common cause of a sticking door, particularly on heavier solid-panel or fire-rated doors. Over time, hinge screws work loose in the timber, especially if the door was hung with screws that were too short, into timber that has since dried and shrunk. The door sags at the latch side, dragging on the floor or frame rebate.

Diagnosis: Open the door to 90° and check each hinge. Push the door up gently, if it lifts, the hinges are loose. Feel for any movement at the hinge leaves.

Fix:

1. Tighten all hinge screws. If screws spin freely (the hole is stripped), remove them and push a length of timber glued with PVA into the hole, let it cure, and re-drill.
2. Replace short screws with longer ones on the frame side of each hinge, long enough to pass through the lining into solid timber behind; on heavy internal doors, one longer screw per hinge often cures the sag.
3. If the hinge recesses have been cut too deep (causing the hinge barrel to protrude and bind), pack the recess with a card shim before re-fixing.

This fix costs nothing beyond a packet of screws and half an hour.

Cause 2: Paint Build-Up

On older properties where doors have been repainted many times without stripping, paint accumulates in the frame rebate and on the door edge until the clearance disappears. The sticking typically runs along a straight line that corresponds with an old paint brush edge.

Diagnosis: Look for a visible paint line on the door edge or in the rebate. Hold a thin card against the clearance gap, if it will not pass through, paint build-up is likely.

Fix: Sand the affected edge of the door with 80-grit paper, or use a heat gun and shavehook to strip back the frame rebate. Work carefully to avoid removing so much material that the door no longer seals against the rebate. Repriming bare timber before repainting prevents moisture uptake that causes further swelling. Lead pigments were widely used in house paint until the 1960s, so treat original paint on older doors and frames as possibly leaded.¹ In that case, do not dry-sand: use a liquid stripper, or a hot-air gun set below 450°C, and finish with waterproof abrasive paper on a damp surface.²

Cause 3: Seasonal Wood Movement

Timber swells in high humidity (typically summer and autumn in the UK) and contracts in dry conditions (winter, with central heating). Older solid-timber doors, and some engineered ones, can swell by a few millimetres across a damp season, enough to bind in the frame.

Diagnosis: If the sticking started or worsened in wet weather and eases in winter, seasonal movement is the cause. The door will typically bind at a single point on the latch edge.

Fix: Wait until a dry period and plane the sticking edge with a bench plane or power plane. Remove only as much material as needed, over-planing in summer creates a rattling gap in winter. Sealing all six faces of a door with primer or paint before hanging prevents uneven moisture uptake and reduces movement long term.

Cause 4: Warped Door

A door that bows or twists along its length will not close flush against the stop. A gentle bow can sometimes be corrected by wedging the door flat under weight for several weeks. A severe warp, or one on an older door left unprimed, is unlikely to resolve and the door usually needs replacing.

Diagnosis: Hold a long straightedge or spirit level against the face of the door.

Fix: For minor cases, adjusting hinge depths to compensate for a bow can sometimes help a door engage the stop correctly. For significant warps, replacement is more cost-effective than repeated remedial work.

Cause 5: Out-of-Square Frame

Older houses settle over time, and frames that were plumb when installed may have racked slightly. The frame itself may be out of square even if structurally sound, this is common in Victorian and Edwardian terraces where lime-mortar construction allows a degree of ongoing movement.

Diagnosis: Use a spirit level on both jambs and the head of the frame. Hold a large set square in each corner.

Fix: If the movement is old and stable (no fresh cracks, consistent over many years), the door can be planed to the new geometry. Mark the sticking points with chalk or a pencil as you test-fit the door, then plane to those marks. This is fine for a standard door.

Fire Door Implications

If the door is a fire door (FD30 or FD60), the rules change significantly.

Fire doorsets are rated by fire testing to BS 476-22 or BS EN 1634-1, such as FD 30 for 30 minutes’ integrity.³ The rating applies to the complete installed assembly of door, frame, seals and ironmongery, and small differences in detail can affect it.³ Planing a fire door:

• Removes or compromises intumescent edge seals, which are embedded in or applied to the door edge and expand in a fire to seal the gap between door and frame.
• Reduces door thickness if material is removed from the face.
• May invalidate the door’s certification under the manufacturer’s specification.

Before planing any door, check whether it is fire-rated. Signs include a certification label or plug in the top edge, strip seals around the edge, and usually a 44 mm (rather than standard 35 mm) door thickness. Thickness alone is not proof, because some FD30 doors are made 35 mm thick to fit standard frames.⁴ Makers also limit trimming: one 35 mm FD30 door allows no more than 6 mm off the bottom and 4 mm off each vertical edge, and nothing off the top, where the certification label sits.⁴ If you have a fire door that sticks, the first step is to establish whether the cause is a dropped hinge (fix the hinge, not the door) and call a specialist if any modification to the door leaf itself is required. In a house, a fire door fitted under Building Regulations Part B, such as one onto a loft-conversion stair, should be kept closing and sealing as designed. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 add formal checks only in buildings with two or more flats: where such a building is above 11 m, the responsible person must check communal fire doors at least every 3 months and try to check flat entrance doors every 12 months.⁵

When Sticking Indicates Structural Movement

A single door sticking in isolation, without any cracks or other symptoms, is almost always a benign cause. But certain combinations of symptoms should prompt professional investigation:

• Multiple doors sticking or dropping simultaneously, particularly across different floors or parts of the house
• Stepped diagonal cracks in plasterwork or brickwork near corners of openings, a classic subsidence or lintel failure pattern
• Cracks that have grown since you last noticed them, or that have been previously filled and reopened
• Sloping floors in the same part of the house
• New gaps at the top of window or door frames combined with sticking

If you see two or more of these together, do not plane the door, it is a symptom of a structural problem, not the problem itself. Consult a structural engineer or RICS chartered building surveyor.

Professional Costs (2026)

A RICS Home Survey Level 3 (building survey) starts at about £630 and rises with the value of the property.⁶ Most sticking doors can be diagnosed and fixed in under two hours by a competent carpenter. The key is to diagnose correctly first, planing a door that is sticking because of subsidence, and then ignoring the underlying cause, delays a repair that will only become more expensive.

Check the easy things first

Before calling anyone, open the door and physically test each hinge screw with a screwdriver. A surprising number of sticking doors, including those on heavy doors and fire doors, are caused by nothing more than screws that have worked loose over years of use, solvable in five minutes with no cost at all.