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Owner-led residential roofing in West Austin
The Honest Roofer

What a roof inspection should actually cover after a Hill Country hail storm

What a real post-hail inspection covers: soft metals first, test squares per slope, bruising versus granule loss, and how to spot a sales walkthrough.

A real post-hail roof inspection does not start on the roof. It starts on the ground with the soft metal around the property, because that is what establishes whether hail actually fell here, roughly how big it was, and which direction it came from. Only after that does anyone go up, mark test squares on each slope, and count what is inside them. It should finish with dated photographs you keep, a slope-by-slope account of what was found, and a plain answer on whether the damage is functional or only cosmetic. If someone is on a ladder two minutes after arriving, comes down with a phone full of chalk circles, and wants a signature before you have read anything, that was a sales call with a ladder.

Here is what the inspection itself should cover.

The soft metals come first

Thin aluminum and light-gauge steel record a hailstorm far better than a roof does. Before touching the roof, an inspector should walk the whole property looking at gutters and downspouts, drip edge, roof vents and turbines, valley and wall flashing, the gas meter housing, garage door panels, and the aluminum fins on the outdoor air conditioning unit. Those fins are soft enough that even modest hail leaves clean round dimples in them.

Those dents answer three questions the shingles cannot answer on their own.

Did hail actually fall on this property. Storms in the Hill Country are narrow and erratic. A street in Bee Cave can take one inch stones while a house half a mile up the hill gets rain. Soft metal is the local record.

How big were the stones. Dent diameter in soft metal tracks stone size closely enough to sort a marginal storm from a serious one, which matters because the size that damages a roof depends entirely on what the roof is made of.

Which direction was it moving. Hail almost never falls straight down. It arrives on a slant, so damage concentrates on the slopes and elevations that faced the storm. Spatter marks, the bright spots where a stone knocked oxidation, dirt or lichen off a painted or weathered surface, have a small tail pointing back the way the stone came. Read enough of them and you know which slopes to look at hardest and which ones should be clean.

If there is no soft metal evidence anywhere on the property, that is a finding in itself, and it should make everyone considerably slower about calling marks on the shingles hail.

Test squares, marked on every slope

On the roof, the method is a test square: a ten foot by ten foot area, one hundred square feet, chalked out and counted. The inspector marks each impact inside the square and records the count.

The part that gets skipped is doing it on every slope. Damage density is a per-slope measurement, not a roof measurement, because a storm out of the southwest can wreck one plane and leave the north face untouched. That is why a legitimate estimate sometimes covers two slopes and not the whole roof. It is also why a single test square on the most convenient slope is weak evidence. One square is a small sample and where it is placed changes the answer, so ask where the squares were and how many.

Carriers set their own thresholds for how much damage per hundred square feet warrants replacement, and the number varies by insurer and by policy. A roofer can tell you what they counted. Only your carrier can tell you what their number is, so ask them directly rather than taking a contractor’s version of it.

Bruising, granule loss, and the marks that are not hail

This is the part that separates someone who knows the material from someone reading a script.

A bruise is the real thing. A hailstone hard enough to matter fractures the fiberglass mat under the granules. The spot is round, the granules are driven into the asphalt rather than merely missing, and under a thumb it feels soft and slightly spongy, like a bruise on an apple. The mat is the shingle’s structure. Once it is fractured, that spot weathers from the inside and the shingle’s remaining life is shorter than the calendar says. Bruising is functional damage.

Granule loss on its own usually is not. A shingle can lose surface granules and still shed water perfectly well. Aging roofs shed granules into the gutter after every hard rain. Loss without a fractured mat is a cosmetic condition and an aging signal, not a storm claim.

Blisters get mistaken for hail constantly. Blistering is a manufacturing and ventilation condition where a small bubble in the shingle pops open and leaves a crater. It looks like an impact. It is not one. Blisters have sharper edges, feel firm rather than soft, and turn up scattered across every slope including the ones the storm never reached.

Mechanical damage looks like hail and is not. Scuffs from foot traffic, ladder feet, dropped tools and dragged branches leave marks in lines and clusters rather than in a random spread, and they concentrate on walking paths and around penetrations.

The pattern is the tell. Hail damage is randomly distributed across the exposed slopes, in proportion to which way the storm was going, and it is corroborated by the soft metals. Damage that is identical on all four slopes, or arranged in a line, or found only where a person would walk, is something else.

Metal, composition and tile fail in different ways

The size of hail that matters depends on the roof under it, and the failure mode is different for each.

Composition shingle starts taking functional damage around the one inch mark, roughly a quarter, on standard shingles. Impact-rated Class 4 products take considerably more before the mat fractures.

Metal dents early and leaks late. A standing seam panel will dimple from stones well below the size that would bruise a shingle, and the roof carries on shedding water exactly as before. Functional damage on a metal roof means a punctured panel, a fractured or spalled coating that will now corrode, a seam that has opened, or damaged flashing and fastener details. A dimple in the flat of a pan is not any of those. Whether cosmetic denting on metal is covered varies from one policy to the next, and it is a specific question worth putting to your own agent rather than assuming either way. The trade-offs between metal and tile in the Hill Country turn on this difference as much as on anything else.

Tile and slate crack rather than bruise. Concrete and clay tile take larger stones before they fracture, but a cracked tile is a genuine opening rather than a shortened lifespan. The awkward part is that tile fractures often run along the edge or under the overlap of the tile above, invisible from the ground and from a drone. They have to be found by someone who knows how to walk a tile roof, which is a real skill, because careless footfall produces exactly the same cracks hail does.

What the rest of the property is telling you

Collateral evidence corroborates the roof and helps date the storm, and it is free to look at.

Wood fences and decks show hail as bright, clean spots where a stone stripped weathered gray or old stain off the surface. Window and porch screens tear or stretch, and screen damage is one of the more reliable indicators of stone size. Painted trim, garage doors and downspout faces chip and spatter on the exposed elevation and stay clean on the sheltered one. Skylight domes, patio furniture, grill lids, plastic vent caps and the leaves of anything soft-leaved in the beds all take the same beating.

If the roof supposedly has hail damage and nothing else on the property does, the two accounts disagree, and the roof is the one that should be looked at again.

Inside, before anyone leaves

The attic is part of the inspection. Look for daylight through the decking, water tracks or staining on the underside of the sheathing, damp or matted insulation, rusted nail shanks and a musty smell. Check the ceilings below the slopes that took the worst of it, and around chimneys, skylights and bath vents.

Hail rarely punches through decking. A fractured shingle mat, though, leaks slowly, and the interior evidence often shows up weeks or months after the storm rather than that night. If water is coming in now, this is no longer an inspection question and the order of operations changes, which is a different situation entirely.

Photographs, and why they carry the claim

The adjuster’s visit is a separate inspection, often weeks later, and by then spatter marks have re-oxidized and faded back into the surface. The photographs taken on the day are what survive.

A usable set includes a wide shot of each elevation, a shot of each chalked test square with the marked hits visible, close-ups of individual impacts with something in frame for scale, every piece of dented soft metal, the collateral damage around the property, and the attic and interior. Each one labeled by slope and direction, each one dated.

Ask for a copy of the files, not a slideshow on a phone. It is your evidence, it is about your house, and a contractor who will not hand it over has told you something.

Which storm, and when

Your insurer will want a date of loss, and a good inspector should be able to say which storm they believe it was and why. Fresh spatter is bright and distinct. Older spatter fades as the surface re-oxidizes. Dents in soft metal weather too. Read alongside the local storm record, those observations point at a date rather than to a guess, and an inspector who assigns a date because it happens to suit a claim window is doing you harm.

How your policy wants a loss reported, and within what time, is in your policy and nowhere else. Read it, or call your carrier and ask. Do not take a roofer’s summary of it, including a confident one.

Cosmetic, functional, and the answer nobody is selling

Functional damage compromises the roof’s ability to keep water out or measurably shortens its service life. Cosmetic damage changes how it looks. Everything above exists to place a given mark on one side of that line or the other, because that is the decision the whole inspection is for.

Plenty of honest inspections land on nothing. A storm that dented the gutters and stripped some stain off the fence may have done nothing at all to a five year old architectural shingle roof. Granule loss on a fifteen year old roof with no fractured mats anywhere is a roof aging normally, not a roof that was damaged. Both of those are real findings, and a homeowner should be told them plainly, with the photographs behind them, without a pivot into why the roof should be replaced anyway.

Being told the roof is fine is a good outcome. You stop thinking about it, and you now have a documented, dated baseline of the roof’s condition, which is exactly what you want to be holding the next time hail comes through.

An inspector who has never told a homeowner there is nothing here is not inspecting.

How to tell an inspection from a sales walkthrough

The differences are visible while it is happening.

The order is the whole tell. An inspection finds out what is on your roof and then you decide what to do about it. A sales walkthrough decides what to do and then goes looking for the evidence.

After a Hill Country hailstorm, ask for four things: what the soft metals showed, what the test squares counted on each slope, photographs you get to keep, and a straight statement of functional versus cosmetic. If a roofer will not give you all four, that is reason enough to call someone else. The Honest Roofer works across West Austin, West Lake Hills, Lakeway, Bee Cave, Spicewood and Horseshoe Bay, and the process puts reviewing the property first, before any conversation about materials or scope, for the same reason this article does.