Chancel repair liability is a legal obligation on a small number of property owners in England and Wales to pay for certain repairs to a church, often the local parish church.

Where people purchase property within land that was once rectorial (part of a rectory or glebe), they may acquire a responsibility to fund repairs to the chancel of the medieval-founded Church of England parish church or Church in Wales church which that glebe land supported. This can still be invoked by the church council of some parishes.

It is common practice for purchasers of land to check whether the local parish includes a church where such a liability may apply, and if so to take out chancel liability insurance.

From pre-Reformation times, churches in England and Wales have been ministered by either a vicar, who received a stipend (salary), or a rector or parson who received tithes from the parish. The rectors (of around 5,200 churches) were responsible for the repairs of the chancel of their church, while the parish members were responsible for the rest of the building. Monasteries and Oxford and Cambridge colleges could buy or receive rectorships, and thus become liable for chancel repairs. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold their rectory (with land), or the relevant university college sold this, the chancel repair liability passed with that land and persists today, even after subdivision. The owners of such land are thus equally called lay impropriators or lay rectors.

As far as spiritual rectors are concerned, their liability transferred to parochial church councils by the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure 1923.

The recovery of funds from lay rectors is governed by the Chancel Repairs Act 1932.

In concept, to be a lay rector is now entirely a burden for having taken rights over land such as impropriated glebe (the vast majority of glebe formerly held by a vicar or clerical rector has no liability) or abbey lands, and therefore being exempt from paying the tithes that other parts of that parish paid, as the agricultural produce or (after 1836) rentcharges the landowner used to receive no longer apply. Lay rectors would usually be wealthy landowners owning a substantial amount of property in the parish. Tithes have been terminated or commuted for centuries and en masse since the Tithe Commutation Act 1836, the remaining ones terminating under the Finance Act 1977, so it is sometimes possible to discover definitively from any free source whether a given piece of land is still glebe in a present parish that must have had a rector but no longer does; maps and records held by the National Archives can be consulted. Also, in some cases it is possible to see which plots of land fall under headings c) and d) of apportionment of chancel liability, from the church website itself. If a parish's liability only falls under headings a) or b) then those persons (a corporate/charitable body or private individual) are liable only; however, some geographically diverse parishes had extraneous tithings and in a few cases in the 19th century a merger of the rectory/rectorial land and tithes into one piece of land as a whole took place, such as in Aston Cantlow, Warwickshire.

The liability can be compounded (bought out) by a procedure introduced by the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure 1923 (14 & 15 Geo. 5. No. 3).