Repairs could be made in a number of ways, depending on the extent of the damage, the time pressure on the repair and the facilities available. Generally speaking, prefabricated parts were rare. Instead, repair crews would fabricate new pieces, or patch damaged plates.

The first, and most immediate, set of repairs that were carried out were carried out by the crew of the damaged ship. 'Damage control', the naval equivalent of first aid, would be carried out immediately upon a ship being damaged. This included shoring up damaged bulkheads, fighting fires, and pumping out flooded compartments. It might also include 'counterflooding', flooding empty compartments on the far side of a ship from damage to keep in on an even keel. Damage control would bring a ship out of immediate danger from the damage. After it, some action could be taken to return a ship to action. Ships carried stores of steel sheeting, wood, and other useful materials, with which to extemporise repairs. As an example of this, on the 4th May 1945, the British carrier Formidable was struck by a Japanese kamikaze aircraft carrying a 250kg bomb. The impact blew a two square foot hole in the flight deck, surrounded by a 24' by 20' dent. The hole and dent were filled in by a mixture of cement and wood, and then plated over with steel sheet, which was tack-welded in place. This was a temporary repair, letting Formidable continue to operate aircraft until more permanent repairs could be made in Australia.

Longer-lasting repairs could only really be made once a ship had returned to a safe anchorage. At forward bases, repair ships and floating docks allowed repairs to be made, without access to the full resources of a shore dockyard. Repair ships had large workshops for fabricating new parts, as well as the heavy cranes needed to move them into place. Hobbs describes the facilities available to the repair ships Resource and Artifex, which accompanied the British Pacific Fleet as being 'foundries, coppersmith's, plumbers' and carpenters' workshops, heavy and light machine shops, milling and grinding machines, and electrical repair facilities', while the destroyer tender Tyne had two large furnaces, capable of melting and casting up to 500lb of steel. With these facilities, most necessary parts could be made, using only supplies on hand. Damage to the flight deck of Indefatigable, caused by a minor kamikaze hit on April 1st 1945, was repaired by men from Resource and Artifex. They removed the damaged plates, fabricated new ones, and put the new ones into place, in just six days. Floating docks, meanwhile, allowed access to the bottoms of ships. They were typically provided with the same variety of workshops as the repair ships, and worked in similar ways; fabricating parts and plates to replace damaged ones. They were not without danger, though, with HMS Valiant being heavily damaged when a floating dock collapsed on the 8th August 1944, damaging three of her propellers. This damage ultimately led to her removal from service.

At home dockyards, more extensive repairs could be made. This could be quite involved, and effectively take the form of a refit or complete rebuild. After HMS Belfast was mined in 1939, her repairs took three years. As the mine explosion had broken her back, large blisters were constructed along either side of the hull. These added extra strength to the hull, and extra buoyancy, but, as they had to be newly built, greatly extended the length of the repair. In other cases, large parts of the ship had to be rebuilt. HMS Liverpool had her bow blown off by an Italian torpedo in the Mediterranean. A false bow was constructed in Alexandria, allowing her to steam to Mare Island in the USA for repairs. There, her bow was rebuilt from scratch. Replacements for her British-manufactured equipment that could not be sourced in America were shipped over from the UK, across the Atlantic. Other repairs might involve patching or reworking damaged or dented plates. After Jutland, some damage to the German battlecruiser Seydlitz was patched using concrete. In May-June 1945, Formidable went into the Garden Island Dockyard, in Sydney, Australia, for repairs to the kamikaze damage described above, as well as damage from a later hit on the 9th. The kamikaze damage had damaged three of the armour plates that made up the deck. They were unbolted from the deck, and examined. Two were easily repaired, being straightened using a hydraulic press. The third was impossible to repair and had to be replaced. However, armour plate of the necessary thickness was not available in Australia. Instead, the repair was extemporised using two thinner sheets of steel. The deck girder these plates bolted to had also been bent. It was cut away and replaced with a newly fabricated one. Several steel plates on the island were also newly replaced.