How To Tell If Your Roof Has Hail Damage

By Taylor Grant, licensed public adjuster · Published June 11, 2019 · Updated September 24, 2026

You do not need to climb up to know whether you have a claim. The soft metals at ground level tell you almost everything, and they are the evidence an adjuster has the hardest time arguing with.

Everybody's first instinct after a storm is to get on the roof, and that is the one thing you should not do. Wet composition shingle is slick, a bruised shingle gets worse under foot traffic, and the marks your boots leave give the carrier something to point at later.

You do not need to be up there. Almost everything worth knowing is visible from the ground.

Start with the soft metals

Aluminum and thin steel dent at a lower impact energy than it takes to fracture a shingle mat. That makes them your free hail gauge, and they are at eye level:

• Gutters and downspouts - look along the run at a low angle, with the sun behind you. Dents show as shadows. Check the top surface of the gutter, not just the face.
• Downspout elbows and the flat face of the downspout - these dent first.
• Fascia wrap and drip edge.
• Roof vents, turtle vents, turbines and the flashing around them - use binoculars or the zoom on your phone.
• Window screens - a stone punches the mesh or bends the frame.
• The air conditioning condenser - look at the fins on the storm-facing side.
• Anything painted and horizontal - mailboxes, the top of a deck rail, a trailer, a grill lid.

If you find dents in three or more of those, hail hit hard enough to mark metal on your property that day. That is the conversation starter.

Then look for granules

Open the bottom of a downspout or look at the splash block. A roof sheds some granules for its whole life - what you are looking for is a heavy fresh deposit that was not there last month, sharp-edged and the same color as your shingles.

Granules on their own do not prove a claim. Granules plus dented metal is a strong pair.

What hail damage on a shingle actually looks like

If you do end up seeing the roof - from a ladder at the eave, in a photo a roofer took, or in the adjuster's pictures - a hail hit is:

• Round, not linear. Random across the slope, not in rows.
• Dark in the center where granules have been knocked off and the asphalt mat shows.
• Soft to a thumbnail - the mat under it has been bruised, and it gives slightly.
• Present on the slopes facing the storm and on the ridge and hip caps, which are the most exposed shingles on the roof.

What it is not: a straight line of scuffs (that is foot traffic), a blister with a shiny bottom (that is manufacturing), a shingle curled at the corner (that is age), or a gray patch under a tree branch (that is abrasion).

The other half of the roof nobody checks

Turn round and look at the rest of the property. Hail that hits a roof also hits:

• Siding, especially vinyl on the storm elevation. Cracks in vinyl are almost invisible at midday and obvious at a low sun angle, early or late.
• Window wraps, garage doors and overhead door panels.
• Fences, sheds, detached garages, pergolas, skylights.
• Solar panels - look for cracked glass and check the output on your monitoring app against a clear day before the storm.

All of this is part of the same claim. Every one of these that goes unphotographed is a line item that will not be in the estimate.

Confirm the storm actually happened there

Before you call, check that there is a record. The National Weather Service storm reports and the Storm Prediction Center's archive both let you search hail reports by date and county, and both are free. Note the date, the reported stone size and the nearest report to your address.

Carriers check this. Walking in with the event date and the stone size already in hand changes the tone of the first phone call, and it heads off "we show no hail at that location" before it is said.

What to do once you are fairly sure

1. Photograph it all yourself, before anyone touches anything - here is how to do it so the photos are usable.
2. Write down the storm date and what you saw that day.
3. Report the loss and get a claim number.
4. Ask for the policy in writing.
5. Be there when the adjuster goes up.

And if the inspection comes back as "wear and tear," do not treat that as the end of it. A denial on a storm-dated loss is an opening position, not a verdict.

If you would like a second set of eyes before you file at all, send us what you have. We would rather tell you there is no claim than watch you file one that hurts you.

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