Your deductible, and Missouri's deductible tax credit
The deductible is the one number in a roof claim that comes out of your own pocket, and the one number the law is most specific about nobody being allowed to play with. There is also a Missouri tax credit attached to it that almost nobody has written about, and it stops issuing in October.
- Whose money is it
- Yours. It is your share of the loss, by contract.
- Common form on newer policies
- A separate wind and hail percentage, often 1% or 2% of the dwelling limit.
- What a roofer may offer about it
- Nothing at all. RSMo 407.725(2).
- The credit
- Up to $5,000, transferable, and it stops on 15 October 2026.
How the deductible behaves inside a roof claim
A deductible is your retained share of a covered loss. In a roof claim it is subtracted once, from the settlement, before the carrier issues anything. It is not an invoice, nobody sends you a bill for it, and it is not a fee: it is simply the part of the repair the policy was never going to fund.
Two things about it surprise people. The first is where it appears in the arithmetic. Under a replacement cost policy the carrier takes both depreciation and the deductible off the first payment, so the initial cheque can look startlingly small next to a five figure estimate. The worked example is on the ACV page. The second is that on newer Missouri policies the roof often has its own deductible, separate from and larger than the one on the front of the declarations page.
That separate wind and hail deductible is usually written as a percentage of the dwelling limit rather than a flat sum, commonly one or two per cent. On a house insured at $400,000 a two per cent wind and hail deductible is $8,000, against a flat all-other-perils deductible that might be $1,000 on the same policy. Households discover this at the worst possible moment. Go and look at your declarations page now, while nothing is wrong, and find out which one you are holding.
A Missouri roofing contractor may not advertise or promise to absorb, rebate, discount or otherwise account for any part of your insurance deductible, and RSMo 407.725(7) makes doing so an unfair practice under the Merchandising Practices Act. Every version of the offer is caught: eating it, building it into the price, a matching donation, a rebate on completion, a discount that happens to equal it, free upgrades in place of it.
The reason is straightforward. If the contractor absorbs your retained share, the number sent to the carrier no longer reflects what the work actually cost anybody, and the policy's whole loss-sharing arrangement is fiction. That is insurance fraud with the homeowner's name on the claim form, whatever the person in the driveway calls it.
So: if it is offered to you, the company offering it has told you something important about how it operates. Keys Roofing makes no offer of any kind about your deductible, on this site or anywhere else.
A Missouri tax credit worth up to five thousand dollars, expiring
This one is real, it is in the statutes, and it is remarkably little discussed for something worth four figures to a household that has just been through a claim.
RSMo 135.445 creates a Missouri income tax credit equal to the amount of a homestead insurance deductible a taxpayer actually incurred during calendar year 2025, up to a maximum of $5,000. The credit is transferable, meaning it can be sold or assigned rather than simply carried, and that matters to a household whose Missouri tax liability is smaller than the credit itself.
The part with a date on it: no new credits are issued after 15 October 2026. That is not a filing deadline in the ordinary sense, it is the end of the programme's authority to issue. If you had a deductible in the 2025 calendar year on a Missouri homestead, this is a thing to raise with whoever prepares your return, and to raise soon rather than at the next filing season.
Read the statute yourself at revisor.mo.gov and take the administration questions to the Missouri Department of Revenue or to a tax preparer. Nothing on this page is tax advice, a roofing contractor is not a tax adviser, and eligibility turns on facts about your return that are none of a roofer's business.
Four sentences that mean the same unlawful thing
The offer rarely arrives in plain words, because plain words are prosecutable. It arrives dressed up. These are the dresses.
What an honest answer sounds like
"Your deductible is your share of the loss and there is nothing I am allowed to do about it. Missouri bars a roofing contractor from advertising or promising to absorb or rebate any part of it, under RSMo 407.725, and a violation is an unfair practice under the Merchandising Practices Act. My price is my price for my scope."
That answer is less pleasant than the alternative and it is the one that leaves your claim clean. A contractor willing to commit an unfair practice to win your job has told you what they will do when something goes wrong on the roof and nobody is watching.
Where this connects
The deductible sits inside the arithmetic on the ACV and RCV page, and the tax credit sits alongside every other dated thing in this process on the deadlines page. If the reason you are reading about deductibles is that somebody in your driveway raised the subject, the fuller account of what a Missouri roofing contractor may and may not do is on the lanes page.
A price for a scope, and nothing else
Keys Roofing quotes the work the roof needs at the price that work costs. There is no offer attached to your deductible, because RSMo 407.725 does not permit one from any roofing contractor in Missouri.
What you get is a documented roof: photographs of every slope, a measurement and a written scope you keep, whether or not a claim exists and whether or not you hire us.
Roofing, gutters and downspouts across greater St. Louis. No siding, no windows, no commercial work.
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This reaches Keys Roofing, a roofing contractor. It does not reach your insurer, it does not open a claim, and nothing you type here is submitted to anybody but Keys.