What Hail Damage Actually Looks Like — And Why Soft Metals Are the Key to Your Claim
After a hailstorm passes through the St. Louis area, most homeowners do the same thing: walk outside, look up, see their roof looks mostly intact from the ground, and assume everything is fine. What they don't realize is that the damage hail leaves behind — on shingles, vents, gutters, and trim — is almost never visible from street level. Here's what hail damage actually looks like up close, straight from real inspections we've performed on properties across the metro.
What Hail Damage Looks Like on Asphalt Shingles
On an asphalt shingle roof, hail damage appears as circular impact marks where the granule coating has been knocked off the surface. These are called bruises — the asphalt beneath is now exposed and darker in color. They range in size from a dime to a quarter or larger depending on hail diameter. The key detail: they have a soft, spattered edge — not a clean cut. If you pressed a golf ball into a shingle and rotated it slightly, you'd replicate exactly what hail does on impact. From the ground, these marks are nearly invisible. From 18 inches away on the roof, they're unmistakable. During our inspections, we chalk-circle every single one and photograph each hit with a scale reference.
What Hail Damage Looks Like on Soft Metals — and Why It Matters More
Soft metals are thin aluminum or galvanized steel components on your roof and exterior: gutters, downspouts, roof vents, A/C condenser fins, metal drip edge, and aluminum window trim. Unlike shingles, soft metals cannot absorb a hail strike. They dent. And those dents are clean, round, perfectly shaped by the hailstone that caused them — and impossible to fake or attribute to something else. A gutter hit by 1.5-inch hail shows a 1.5-inch round dent. A metal box vent hit by a storm shows a field of circular dimples across its entire surface. This is exactly what insurance adjusters are trained to look for. In fact, soft metal damage at your property is often the single most powerful piece of evidence in a storm claim — because it proves definitively that hail of a specific size fell at your exact address.
Roof Vents: The Most Overlooked Hail Evidence
Round galvanized metal roof vents are some of the clearest hail damage indicators we find. A single large hailstone hitting a round metal vent can leave a massive crater-like dent — sometimes collapsing the center of the vent cap entirely. Smaller hail leaves a pattern of smaller dimples across the surface. Either way, it's physical, measurable, photographic evidence that cannot be disputed. We document every roof vent on every property we inspect. In many claims, the vent photos alone are enough to trigger adjuster agreement on full replacement.
Box Vents and Attic Vents: Dense Dimpling Pattern
Rectangular metal box vents and attic ventilation covers often show the most dramatic soft metal evidence after a hailstorm. Because they have large flat surfaces exposed at a relatively low pitch, hailstones hit them nearly straight-on. The result is a dense field of circular impact dimples — sometimes dozens on a single vent cover. Each dimple represents one hailstone, and the pattern tells a story of how many stones fell and how large they were. When we photograph a vent cover with 40 individual dimples on a single 12"x12" surface, an insurance adjuster has no room to argue that hail didn't hit the roof.
Commercial Roofs Are Hit Just as Hard
Hail does not discriminate between residential and commercial properties. Large commercial flat or low-slope roofs are often ignored after storm events — business owners assume that because the roof is mostly flat, it sheds hail impact differently. It doesn't. We've inspected large commercial buildings in the St. Louis area where chalk marks across the roofing field documented consistent hail hit density from one end of the building to the other. Commercial property owners are leaving significant insurance claim money on the table by not getting their roofs inspected after a storm.
Why You Can't Rely on Visual Inspection from the Ground
We cannot stress this enough: hail damage on asphalt shingles is not visible from the ground. The granule displacement that indicates a hail bruise is subtle — a few millimeters of surface disruption on a dark gray shingle, 20 feet above your head. Even standing at the edge of your property looking up at a sunny day, you will see nothing. This is why insurance companies send adjusters up ladders, and it's why we inspect every slope of every roof on foot. The damage is real, it's there, and it's documented — you just cannot see it until you're on top of it.