Hail on Roofs That Were Never Rated for It

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026 — On the afternoon of May 16, 2024, a line of storms crossed the Houston area with hurricane-force straight-line wind and hail large enough to crater car hoods and blow out windows on downtown towers. CenterPoint's outage map went dark across the region. Insured losses from the outbreak were measured in the billions. A large share of the property damage was hail, on a housing stock whose roofs had been specified, sold, and repaired for hurricanes.

Houston gets hail. What the day exposed was a mismatch that is showing up in more cities every spring. The asphalt on those roofs was often rated for wind uplift. It was rarely an impact-rated product. The local roofers knew ridge vents, hip geometry, and the difference between a lifted shingle and a torn one. Many of them had never been asked to stand on a slope and decide whether a bruise was functional damage. The adjusters deployed in from hail country knew the bruise and did not know the roof. Both of them were about to argue about it in front of a homeowner whose contractor had already signed a contingency agreement on the driveway.

What the shingle was built to do

A typical architectural asphalt shingle in the Southeast is sold on a wind warranty, often 110 or 130 miles per hour, and on a color and a price. Impact resistance is a separate rating. UL 2218 drops steel balls on the shingle in a lab and assigns a class from 1 to 4. Class 4 is what carriers in the hail plains discount, and what a growing number of communities are starting to see in new construction. Most of the existing roofs in a first-time hail market are unrated. They shed rain. They were not designed to take a one-inch stone at terminal velocity and keep their mat intact.

That difference changes the inspection. On a wind claim the adjuster is looking for creased tabs, missing shingles, and a pattern that lines up with the direction of the gust. On a hail claim the damage is often still on the roof, and it is easy to walk past if you are looking for something torn. The National Weather Service treats hail of one inch or larger as the threshold for a severe thunderstorm warning. One inch is also, as a field rule of thumb rather than a policy term, about where asphalt starts to fracture instead of merely marking. Smaller hail dents soft metal and can still bruise a shingle, especially an older one with little granule left. Larger hail, two inches and up, does not require much debate.

What you are looking for on the shingle itself:

• A bruise you can feel. Press the suspected spot. Fractured mat gives under a thumb. A granule scuff on an intact mat does not.

• A dark spot where granules are gone and the asphalt is exposed, in a roughly circular pattern, often with the granules still sitting in the gutter or at the bottom of the downspout.

• A fracture that shows on the back of the shingle if you can lift a tab without damaging it further. Random crazing across the whole slope, with no corresponding marks on the metals, is usually weathering.

• Collateral on the things that mark more easily than asphalt. Gutters, downspouts, flue caps, box vents, air-conditioner fins, and the aluminum wrap on a satellite dish. If the soft metals are clean and the shingles look "hailed," the shingles are probably weathered. If the metals are dented in a consistent size and direction and the shingles show bruises in the same size, you have a hail loss.

Take the test squares the way you would anywhere. A ten-by-ten square on each directional slope, hits counted, photographed with a chalk circle and a ruler in the frame. Include an overview that shows the slope, a close-up of a representative hit, and the soft-metal collateral. In a market where the carrier, the contractor, and eventually a public adjuster are all going to re-inspect, the photographs are the file.

Old hail, new hail, and the roof that was already tired

First-time hail markets have a specific argument waiting on every slope older than about twelve years. Granule loss from heat and ultraviolet light looks, at a glance and from the street, like hail. It is uniform, it favors the south and west slopes, and it has no collateral on the gutters. Hail is random within a slope, spares some areas under an overhang, and hits the metals.

There is a second version of the same argument, and it is harder. The roof took hail three years ago, nobody claimed it, and this storm added more. Splitting old hits from new ones is legitimate work. Fresh bruises are darker, sharper, and still have loose granules associated with them. Old ones are grayed, the exposed asphalt has started to check, and the edges of the granule loss are worn smooth. Say which is which in the notes, with photographs of each, because the estimate should pay for the damage this occurrence caused. A tired roof is not a blank check, and it is also not a reason to call obvious new fractures "wear."

Age itself is a coverage fact on a growing number of policies. Roof surfacing schedules, already common in Texas, Oklahoma, and parts of the Midwest, pay a declining percentage of replacement cost as the roof ages, or switch the roof to actual cash value after a stated year. They are spreading into states that are just now seeing hail as a frequency problem. Read the schedule before you talk numbers. A 16-year three-tab paid at 40 percent of replacement cost is a different conversation from a full replacement-cost roof, and the homeowner who hears the second number first will not easily accept the first.

The cosmetic endorsement

Cosmetic damage endorsements were written for hail country, mostly for metal roofs, and they are now attached to policies in places where the agent and the policyholder have never discussed them. The typical wording limits or removes coverage for hail damage that does not reduce the roof's ability to shed water and does not shorten its remaining service life. Dents in a metal panel that do not open a seam, and sometimes granule loss that does not fracture the mat, fall on the excluded side of that line. A puncture, a split seam, or a bruise that has broken the reinforcement does not.

Two consequences follow for the inspection.

First, "dented" is no longer the end of the observation. On a metal roof with the endorsement, you have to say whether the dent compromised the finish in a way that will rust through, opened a lock seam, or displaced a fastener. A photograph of a dent with no description of the panel's function is an argument you will have twice, once with the contractor and once with your reviewer. On asphalt, say whether the mat is fractured or only scuffed. The endorsement's test is functional, so the note has to be functional.

Second, soft metals and appurtenances are often outside the endorsement's definition of "roof surfacing," or inside it, depending on the form. Gutters that no longer drain because hail closed the bead are a water-shedding failure even when the panel above them is only dented. Air-conditioner fins that are flattened will fail at the next heat wave. Scope them on their own line and let the endorsement apply where its definitions say it applies, rather than treating the whole exterior as one cosmetic lump.

If the endorsement is on the policy, tell the policyholder it is on the policy before you hand them a number. Pulling it out after the contractor has quoted a full replacement is how a routine hail file becomes a department of insurance complaint. The endorsement was on the declarations page. Most policyholders have never read it, so explain it while the contractor is still quoting.

The contractor who knocked first

In Oklahoma or Colorado, the storm-chasing cycle is a known part of the file. In a city that has not had a real hail day in a decade, it arrives as a surprise, and it arrives fast. Canvassers are on porches before the power is back on. The contract is a contingency assignment: the homeowner owes nothing unless the carrier pays, the contractor will "handle the insurance," and the price will be whatever the carrier allows. Some of those contractors do honest work. A meaningful share are from out of state, have no local license, and have priced the job for a market with different labor rates and a different building code.

What belongs in the file:

• The contract, if the homeowner will share it. Look for an assignment of benefits, a hold harmless that shifts the deductible back to the contractor, and a cancellation penalty. Several states prohibit a contractor from rebating or absorbing the deductible. Paying a claim into that arrangement can put the policyholder and the contractor in a bad spot. Know the rule where you are working.

• The contractor's license and whether the state requires one for roofing. A name and a truck wrap are not a license.

• Whether the scope includes slopes with no damage, full replacement of gutters that are dented but functional, and code items nobody has asked the building department about. Separate those lines. Pay the damaged slopes. Negotiate or decline the rest with a reason written down.

• Direction-to-pay requests. Many are legitimate. Some are how a contractor gets paid for work the carrier has not agreed is owed. Follow the carrier's procedure, and do not sign the homeowner up for a fight they did not ask for by refusing a reasonable direction to pay on an agreed scope.

The useful sentence to the homeowner is a plain one. They can hire anyone they want. Your estimate is for the covered damage at local prices. If their contractor's price is higher, the difference is between them and the contractor unless the contractor can show a reason, a code item, a material you did not see, a layer count you did not confirm. Offer to meet the contractor on the roof. The ones who are serious will take the meeting. The ones who will not are telling you something, and the file should say that they declined.

Pricing a loss in a market with no hail bench

Price databases lag a sudden hail event everywhere. They lag longer in a region that has no recent hail claims to draw prices from. The first week of estimates will be wrong, usually low on steep-slope labor and on dumpster and material delivery, sometimes high where an out-of-state contractor's invoice has been entered as the new local price. Keep a running note of the local quotes you are seeing, three or four of them, not one, and attach it when you request a price deviation. A deviation supported by local invoices holds up. A deviation supported by the contract signed on the driveway does not.

Matching is the other price driver, and state law is the authority. Some states require a reasonable match of the repaired area to the undamaged slopes when a repair would be conspicuous. Some do not, and the policy's own matching language controls. A north slope with eight hits and three undamaged slopes is a repair in a state without a matching statute, unless the shingle is discontinued. It may be a full replacement next door across a state line. Look it up for the state you are in this week, not the state you worked last week.

While you are up there, look at the deck. Hail-bruised shingles over spaced plank, over a second layer, or over a deck that is already soft from an old leak, change the scope. In hail country, adjusters check the layer count by habit. In wind country, they sometimes do not, because a hurricane claim is so often a full tear-off that the layers stop mattering. On a repairable hail loss the layer count is the difference between a repair and a tear-off. Note it on every file.

What to hand the homeowner

The explanation that works is physical, not contractual. Water gets in when the mat is broken or a seam is open. Dents and scuffs that leave the mat intact are ugly and, on this policy, unpaid. Here are the slopes with broken mats, here is the price, here is the deductible, here is what the contractor's contract commits you to. If a cosmetic endorsement or a roof schedule reduced the payment, say that in the same conversation and point to the endorsement by form number.

Then write the file the way you would want to read it in a year, when this city has had two more hail days and someone asks why the 2024 roofs were paid the way they were. Hits per square, collateral, mat fractured or not, endorsement applied or not, license checked, layer count, local price support. The next storm will not be a surprise. The roofs still will be, until the housing stock catches up, and that will take longer than the next spring.