A drifting Xbox controller costs £19 to fix on one stick and £24 for both. Replacing the sticks with contactless ones is £34 for the Hall effect upgrade, or £39 for TMR on a Series X|S pad. Those are my prices, they're on the page, and nothing is added afterwards.
That last part is less common than it should be. Plenty of UK repairers who fix controllers won't publish a figure at all — you send an enquiry, post the pad, and find out what it costs once someone has opened it. The ones who do publish tend to sit somewhere between £20 and £35 for a standard stick replacement, usually with a three or six month warranty rather than twelve.
What you're actually paying for
Drift is wear inside the analogue stick module. The stick works by sweeping a contact arm across a resistive track — a potentiometer — and that track wears down with use. Once there's a worn patch, the controller reads movement while the stick is sitting still. No amount of cleaning or recalibrating fixes a worn track, because the fault is physical.
The repair means desoldering the old module from the board, clearing every hole properly, fitting a new one and calibrating it. Fourteen joints per module, on a board that doesn't forgive a hot iron sitting too long. That's why it costs more than the couple of pounds the module itself is worth — you're paying for the bench time and for it coming back working rather than worse.
Why one stick costs less than two
Most drifting pads only drift on one stick, usually the left, because that's the one doing the work in most games.
If only one side is wandering, there's no reason to pay to replace the other. Book the single-stick repair at £19 if you know which one it is, or £24 if both are going. If you're not sure, send it in and I'll tell you — I'd rather do the £19 job than sell you the £24 one you didn't need.
The two upgrade options
A standard repair puts the controller back how it was, with a new potentiometer module that will eventually wear the same way. The upgrades replace the sticks with contactless magnetic ones instead, so there's no contact track to wear down.
Hall effect, £34. Both sticks, fitted as a matched pair. Covers Series X|S and Xbox One controllers.
TMR, £39. Also both sticks. TMR reads the stick's position at a finer resolution and draws less power, closer to the original sticks, which matters on a wireless pad. Series X|S controllers only — I don't offer it on Xbox One, because there's no reliable way to recalibrate those afterwards.
Both cost more than the standard repair and neither is necessary to get a drifting pad working again. There's a full breakdown of the difference in Hall effect vs TMR for Xbox controllers, and every stick repair page has a table comparing all three side by side.
What about a new controller?
A new Xbox Wireless Controller is around £55. So the £19 repair is roughly a third of the price, and even the TMR upgrade comes in well under — and leaves you with a pad whose sticks don't wear the way the originals do. A new controller has exactly the same sticks in it that just failed you.
The gap is wider still on an Elite Series 2, which runs to around £160. At that price a £39 upgrade isn't really a decision.
What's included
Every price on this site covers parts, labour and tracked return postage. There's a 12-month warranty on the work, and no fix, no fee — if I can't fix it, you don't pay for the repair and I refund what you paid, less £4.99 return postage.
No diagnosis fee, and no revised quote once it's open. The price you book is the price.
The warranty is part of the price
Twelve months on the work, which is worth checking against anyone else you're considering. Most UK repairers who publish a warranty on controller work offer three or six months. That gap matters more than a couple of pounds on the headline price, because a stick module that was going to fail early tends to do it inside the first few months.
If something I've fitted fails inside that year, it comes back to me and I sort it.
What happens if I can't fix it
Occasionally a pad isn't worth saving — someone has flooded it with contact cleaner and the board has corroded, or a previous attempt has taken a pad off a trace.
If that's yours, there's no repair fee: I refund what you paid, less £4.99 return postage. And I'll tell you what I actually found rather than just posting it back. Most of the time there's still something to be done — a lifted pad is a jumper wire, not a write-off — but when it genuinely isn't worth it, I'd rather say so than take the money.
Before you book
If the drift has only just started, it's worth ruling out the free fixes first. Microsoft publishes a calibration tool for Xbox controllers, and unlike on other consoles it genuinely resolves some drift. What to try first walks through it, and more usefully tells you the point where it stops being worth your time.
If you've already tried and the drift came back within days, the stick is worn and nothing external will change that.
Not sure the problem is even the sticks? Xbox controller moving on its own sets out what each symptom actually means.
If it's worn, book the repair and tell me which stick and which direction when you send it in — it saves me diagnosing what you already know.
The Repair Works is an independent UK repair service, run by me, Paul — 25 years of hands-on repair experience, working by post for customers across the whole country. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
