How to replace a headliner for less than $50

By Tim Suddard
Sep 20, 2025
Everyone has experienced this scenario: You’re driving along, enjoying the fresh air when–what’s that flapping around behind your head? You, kind person, have a disintegrating headliner.Headliners weren’t always made from fabric glued to a thin sheet of foam–the kind found in most cars built since the ’70s and ’80s. When closed cars came into fashion around 1910, headliners were originally complicated cloth affairs featuring multiple layers and wooden bows.

By the ’50s, headliners were generally made from a single layer of vinyl that hung from steel rods via sewn-in loops.

Today’s modern headliners feature a molded fiberboard wrapped in a thin sheet of cloth that’s backed with about 1/8 inch of foam rubber sheet. It’s fairly quick and easy for the factories to assemble: This foam-and-cloth combo is simply glued around a piece of fiberboard and then pressed into place with clips and/or a few screws.

The problem with modern headliners is that after 10 or 20 years, the constant heat and wind–curse you, open windows on a spring day–causes the foam to disintegrate and delaminate itself from the cloth headliner.



The thin cloth loses its support and falls down on your head. Could a little squirt of contact cement reattach the fabric? Without the foam backing, that’s not likely to work. It’s time to rebuild the headliner–but don’t worry, this won’t cost much.

Step 1: Removing the Old Headliner (the Hard Part)

The hardest part of headliner repair is removing the headliner assembly from the car itself. There’s no magic trick here, and the difficulty depends on both the car and your physical dexterity. To put it bluntly, headliner removal kind of sucks.

First remove any dome lights, sun visors, sunroof moldings and other obstructions. Carefully unscrew any hardware and then gently pull the assembly off its clips. Rotate the assembly so that you don’t bend or break it, and carefully feed it through an open door.

 

Cleaning It Off

Once off the car and on your workbench or, preferably, a large table, you can carefully remove the headliner cloth from the fiberboard backing. Now you’ll see the actual problem: old, dried foam dust. And yes, it wants to go everywhere.

We find that a large wire brush does a great job of removal. Gently vacuum and brush up the remaining foam dust from the fiberboard backing.

Installing the New Headliner Material

Headliner material is nothing exotic. Every sizable city has a trimming or upholstery supply store. Take your old headliner–the cloth part, not the fiberboard–to that store and buy a yard or two in the closest color you can find. While there, consider grabbing a good pair of sewing shears, some razor blades and some chalk to mark your centers.

You’ll need cement, too. The best and strongest solution is a cheap spray gun (Harbor Freight has them starting at less than $20) and glue bought in bulk. Again, any supply store will sell you the glue by the half gallon–and you’ll need that much to do a headliner for the typical sedan. This commercial contact cement is considered the strongest type of glue you can use.



You can also paint on contact cement with a brush or use spray bottles. Make sure you opt for high-heat versions of any cement you use. Also, use a respirator when spraying anything but water.When cutting out a new headliner, use the fiberboard as your template; we generally leave the material about 6 inches larger than it needs to be. We only make cutouts for sun visors, rearview mirrors and the like once the new headliner is back on the fiberboard.

 

Why? The larger cloth area gives you some runoff area for your spray glue without getting it all over your table and shop. And if you cut every detail ahead of time and then miss your mark when gluing down the cloth, you’ll be sorry when you have holes where you don’t want them.

When gluing down the new material, work from the center and press your new headliner material into place. Having a second or even a third person around to hold the headliner material above the board until you are ready to stick it down will help a lot.



Once the cement dries, it’s very difficult to pull the material back up should you have a wrinkle or other issue that needs to be fixed. Fortunately, headline material only costs about $15 per yard, and you’ll need less than 2 yards. So if you ruin some and have to start over, it’s not a financial disaster. Ask us how we know this.

One thing that would be a disaster is to bend or tear the fiberboard backing. The solution there would most likely involve heading to your nearest salvage yard.

Reinstalling the Freshened Headliner

As the shop manuals so famously and annoyingly tell us, installation is the reverse procedure of removal. Generally, this is easier with a helper to hold the headliner up in place while you find and attach clips and screws and reinstall your sun visors, coat hooks, etc.

 

Virtually all modern cars, from the A1 Volkswagen Rabbit on, use some variation of this style of headliner. The process of fixing a headliner is a bit like learning how to play chess: We can tell you how it’s done, but the more times you do it, the better you’ll get. The good news is that it can be done in an afternoon and, all in, costs less than $50.