The eight steps of a St. Louis roof claim
Each move, the document it produces, the person who owns it, and the specific way it tends to go wrong in this metro. Read it once before the storm and it takes ten minutes. Read it during, and it saves weeks.
- Total moves
- Eight. Four of them are yours.
- Moves a roofer owns
- One and a half: documenting the roof, and building it.
- Usual bottleneck
- Step five, the field adjuster queue, after a metro-wide event.
- Most misread number
- The first cheque at step six.
The claim is a contract argument about a date and a building
Two facts do most of the work in a roof claim, and both of them get established in the first week. The first is the date of loss: which storm, on which day, did this. The second is the condition of the building, described in a builder's terms rather than an adjective. Everything in the eight steps below exists to nail down one or the other.
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Day zero
Weather
The storm, and the date you write down
A roof claim is not filed against a roof, it is filed against an event. The carrier will match your reported date against its own weather data for the address, and if those two disagree the conversation gets much harder. Write the date on the day it happens, in something you will still be able to find in six weeks: a note on your phone, an email to yourself, a photograph of the sky.
Metro St. Louis is not short of candidates. NOAA logged 125 hail reports in St. Louis County between 2020 and 2025, with the largest recorded stone at 2.5 inches and an average of 1.32 inches, against 54 in St. Charles County, 44 in Jefferson and 30 in Franklin. Those are counts of reports that a human being phoned in, not counts of insured losses, and reporting density follows population, so the county with the most people logs the most hail. April and May alone carry roughly 56% of the metro's annual hail reports.
Document this step produces: a date, written down somewhere with a timestamp on it.
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Day zero to two
Your move
Your own photographs, taken from the ground
Stay off the roof. A ladder in the days after a storm is how homeowners get hurt, and there is very little on a roof that you can photograph usefully without knowing what you are looking at. What you can photograph from the ground is worth having: granules piled at the downspout outlet, dents in soft aluminium like gutter aprons, fascia and vent hoods, a split limb on the lawn, hail still lying on the deck rail, a stain spreading on a bedroom ceiling.
Photograph the inside of the house too. Water in a ceiling is the difference between a claim about appearance and a claim about a building that is currently getting wet, and those two claims move at different speeds.
Document this step produces: a dated set of photographs that belong to you and to nobody else.
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Day one to seven
Contractor
A contractor documents the roof and writes a scope
This is where a roofer earns their place in the process, and it is the whole of it. A proper documentation visit produces photographs of every slope and every penetration, a measurement of the roof in squares with pitch, ridge, hip and valley footage, and a written scope: tear-off, layers found, decking allowance, underlayment, drip edge, valley treatment, flashings, pipe collars, ventilation, ridge, and disposal, each with what it costs.
Note what that document is. It is a statement about a building, written by a builder, in the units that estimates get argued in. It is not a claim document, it is not addressed to your carrier, and you keep it whether or not you ever hire the person who wrote it. If the paper you are handed instead is a contingency agreement, an assignment of benefits, or anything that asks you to sign away a decision on a first visit, you have been handed a different kind of document and you should read it very slowly.
Document this step produces: photographs, a measurement, and a written scope with prices.
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Day one to fourteen
Your move
You report the loss and receive a claim number
You make this call. Not your roofer, not your roofer's office, not somebody who knocked on your door. In Missouri that is not a stylistic preference: RSMo 407.725(6) says a contractor shall not represent or negotiate, or offer or advertise to represent or negotiate, on behalf of an owner of real estate on any insurance claim connected with roof work. A roofing company that offers to open the claim for you is offering something the statute closes off.
Have four things ready: the date of loss, the address, the policy number, and one plain sentence about what you noticed. You are reporting a loss, not arguing a case. Answer what is asked, avoid volunteering conclusions about causes you did not witness, and write down the claim number, the name of the person you spoke to, and the time.
Document this step produces: a claim number, and the first entry in your own log of who said what and when.
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Day three to thirty, longer after a catastrophe
AdjusterContractor may attend
The field adjuster comes out
An adjuster is assigned and calls to book a time. After a widespread event that call can be weeks out, because the queue is regional. The Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance counted 253,241 catastrophic claims from the 2025 season, with more than $2.9 billion paid and roughly 83% of it residential, and every one of those was an appointment somebody was waiting on.
On the day, the adjuster climbs the roof, chalks test squares, counts impacts, photographs soft metals and shingle mats, and measures. Your contractor can be up there at the same time, as the contractor, showing what they found and answering questions about the building. The appointment has its own page.
Document this step produces: the adjuster's own photograph set and field notes, which belong to the carrier, not to you.
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Day seven to forty five after the inspection
Insurer
The written estimate, and the first payment
Two things arrive, often in the same envelope: a line item estimate produced in the carrier's estimating software, and a cheque. Ask for the full estimate, every page of it, not the one page summary. The line items are where the whole rest of this process happens.
The cheque is normally actual cash value: replacement cost, minus your deductible, minus depreciation for the age and condition of the roof. Under a replacement cost policy the depreciation is usually recoverable later, against work you actually carry out. Under an actual cash value roof endorsement it is not, and that is the difference between an inconvenience and a serious shortfall. The arithmetic is worked through here.
Document this step produces: a full line item estimate and an initial payment, both addressed to you and to your mortgage holder if you have one.
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Whenever you are ready
Your moveContractor
You contract the work, and the roof gets built
Now you hire somebody. You are not obliged to use whoever inspected it, you are not obliged to use a carrier preferred vendor, and the price in the contract is the roofer's price for the roofer's scope. If that number is above the carrier's estimate, the gap is normally a scope difference and it is worked through by comparing lines, as the policyholder, with the carrier.
The contract you sign should say the scope, the price, the payment schedule and what happens if the decking under the shingles turns out to be bad, because that is invisible until tear-off day. If the contract is contingent on insurance paying, RSMo 407.725(3) gives you five business days to cancel running from the insurer's written denial, the contract has to carry a detachable cancellation notice, and any deposit has to come back within ten business days.
Document this step produces: a signed contract between you and a builder, with a scope attached to it.
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On completion
Your moveInsurer
Final invoice, and the depreciation release
The finished invoice, the completion photographs and any supplement for work that was genuinely found rather than argued for go to the carrier. Under a replacement cost policy the withheld depreciation is then released, up to what you actually incurred. If your mortgage company is named on the cheque, its loss draft department has its own inspection and release schedule, and that department is slower than everybody expects. Call them in the same week the first payment arrives, not in the week the roof finishes.
Document this step produces: a paid invoice, a closed claim, and a file you keep for the next storm, because there will be one.
Four ways this goes wrong, in rough order of how often
- Nobody wrote the date downSix weeks later the household remembers a storm in "April or maybe May" and the carrier's weather data has three candidate dates with different hail sizes. This costs more claims than any other single thing.
- The estimate was never read past page oneThe summary sheet says a number. The line items say how many squares, what pitch, whether there is a ridge vent line, whether the valley is open metal or closed cut. Disagreements live in the lines and nowhere else.
- The first cheque was treated as the settlementPeople bank an actual cash value payment, spend some of it, and discover at step eight that the recoverable half only comes back against work actually done and invoiced.
- Somebody signed on the first visitUsually a contingency agreement handed over in the driveway by somebody who arrived with the weather. Read anything you are asked to sign in the first week twice, and be very suspicious of paper that talks about your insurer more than your roof.
Two pages that sit directly under this one
Step five and step six are where most of the questions land, so both of them have a page of their own. The adjuster appointment covers what actually happens in the ninety minutes somebody is on your roof with a chalk line, what they are counting, and what to have in your hand. ACV, RCV and depreciation takes the first cheque apart line by line and explains why it is smaller than the estimate.
If you have already been told no, or told a number that does not resemble reality, the denial page sets out what a denial actually is, how a reinspection gets requested, and the routes that exist after that. And if you want to know why the deadline printed in your policy may not be the deadline that counts in Missouri, that is the deadlines page.
Step three, if you want it done properly
Keys Roofing photographs each slope, measures the roof, and writes a scope of the work the roof needs. You keep all of it whether or not a claim ever exists and whether or not you hire us.
If a claim is already open, a Keys estimator can be on the roof during the adjuster's inspection as the contractor and answer questions about the building. Keys does not speak for you to your insurer, does not negotiate any part of the claim, and takes no share of any settlement.
Roofing, gutters and downspouts across greater St. Louis. No siding, no windows, no commercial work.
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