Hail is the most misunderstood thing that happens to a roof in Texas, and the misunderstanding is simple: people expect damage to announce itself. It mostly does not. A roof can take a storm that materially shortens its life and show you nothing at all for two or three years.
So the useful question after a storm is not "is it leaking?" It is "what is the condition of my roof now, compared with last week?" This is a practical plan for answering that.
The uncomfortable truth about hail
An asphalt shingle is a fibreglass mat saturated with asphalt and surfaced with mineral granules. The granules are armour: they take the sun so the asphalt does not. The mat is structure: it holds the shingle together and lets it flex through the daily heat cycle without tearing.
Hail attacks both. An impact of sufficient energy fractures the mat, and the shingle loses the ability to flex without splitting along that line. The same impact knocks granules off, exposing asphalt to direct ultraviolet light. Neither of those necessarily creates an opening on the day.
What they create is a roof that is quietly on a shorter clock. The fracture becomes a split a year or two later, under the ordinary stress of expansion and contraction. The bare asphalt hardens and cracks faster than the material around it. By the time water comes through, the storm is a distant memory and the leak looks like age. That delay is the entire reason hail damage goes unaddressed.
The first 24 hours
Everything in this section happens from the ground or from inside. None of it involves a ladder.
- Check inside first
Walk every room and look at ceilings, especially near exterior walls and under any roof penetration. Note anything damp or discoloured, even faintly.
- Look in the attic with a flashlight
New daylight through the decking, or fresh wet marks that look different from old staining, are the two things worth finding tonight.
- Photograph the air-conditioning condenser
The aluminium fins dent at impact energies well below what damages a roof. This is the best single piece of ground-level evidence most properties have.
- Walk the perimeter with a camera
Gutters, downspouts, fascia wrap, window screens, fence tops, mailbox, any painted metal. Soft materials record the storm honestly.
- Note the time and date of the storm
Write it down while it is fresh, along with anything you observed about stone size.
If anything is actively coming in, stop reading and deal with that first — containment inside, and a call for emergency roof leak repair. A roof that is open with more weather in the forecast needs a proper dry-in before it needs an assessment.
Your ground-level evidence map
You cannot grade shingle damage from the lawn. What you can do is build a picture of what the storm actually did at your address, which is a different and genuinely useful thing. Work through these in order.
Soft metal. Vent caps, roof jacks, gutters, downspouts, fascia and drip edge. These dent visibly and they do not dent from anything else. Peppered soft metal and apparently untouched shingles is a combination that means the shingles need a closer look, not that they escaped.
The condenser. Worth repeating because it is so reliable. Look at the fins on the outdoor air-conditioning unit from a few angles in good light.
Gutter contents. A heavy, sandy deposit of granules after a single storm is a strong signal. Some granule loss is normal over a roof's life; a sudden accumulation is not.
Soft organic material. Shredded leaves under trees, stripped foliage on shrubs, holes punched in window screens, and dents in a wooden fence top all establish that stones of real size fell.
Your own slopes, through binoculars. Look for missing shingles, missing ridge caps, dark circular patches where granules have gone, and any shingle edge that is lifted and has not laid back down.
What hail damage actually looks like
Three distinct things get called hail damage, and only two of them matter.
A bruise is the one that counts. The mat has fractured. It often shows as a circular area of granule loss with a darker centre where the asphalt is exposed, and it frequently feels slightly soft to the touch, like a bruise in fruit. Sometimes there is barely a surface mark at all and the fracture is only detectable by pressing. This is why assessment is tactile rather than purely visual, and why photographs from a drone are useful for coverage but not conclusive on their own.
A crease comes from the wind rather than the stones. A gust lifts the leading edge of a shingle, folds it back, and breaks the factory sealant strip bonding it to the course below. The shingle lies flat again when the wind drops, so from the ground nothing is wrong, but the fold is a permanent weak line and the course is no longer sealed against the next wind event.
A scuff is cosmetic. Granules disturbed on the surface without the mat being damaged. Marks from a previous installer's boots, from a branch dragging, or from light impacts all look broadly similar to an untrained eye. An honest assessor will tell you when what you have is this, and a post-storm inspection should separate the categories explicitly rather than giving you a total count of "hits".
Do not walk the roof to check it yourself. Hail-bruised shingles break further under foot, so you can turn a slope that was repairable into one that is not. Footfall also leaves marks that are hard to distinguish from storm damage afterwards, which muddies any assessment made later.
Why your roof and your neighbour's can differ
People reasonably assume that a storm either hit the street or it did not. Several factors make that untrue, and understanding them saves a lot of pointless second-guessing.
Hail falls at an angle. Driven by wind, stones arrive on a slant, so the slopes facing the storm take the impacts and the opposite slopes may be almost untouched. Two houses with different orientations, or different roof geometry, genuinely get different outcomes from the same cell.
Storms track on a line. Severe cells move across the metro in a band rather than covering it evenly, which is why damage is patchy by subdivision. One neighbourhood takes a direct hit and the next one over gets rain. In the north-east corridor through Schertz this is routine, and it is also why a roof that came through last spring untouched can be damaged this spring.
Roof age changes the threshold. A shingle that has been through several Texas summers has lost flexibility, so it bruises at impact energies a newer shingle would shrug off. Your fifteen-year-old roof and your neighbour's four-year-old roof are not the same test subject.
Covering type matters. Metal dents and tile cracks, but neither fails the way asphalt does. Out toward Boerne, where metal and tile are far more common, the same storm produces a completely different damage profile.
Documenting it so it holds up
Whatever you decide to do afterwards, the record is worth building properly, and the window for building it is now.
- Date everything. Photographs carry their own timestamps; make sure you can still tell which storm they belong to in a year.
- Shoot wide and close. A wide shot establishes what you are looking at, a close shot shows the detail. Pairs are far more useful than either alone.
- Include something for scale in close shots — a coin, a tape measure, a hand.
- Film the hail if it is safe to do so from a doorway or window, beside an object of known size. Stone size at your specific address is the one detail nobody can reconstruct later.
- Keep the assessment photographs as files, not just as images inside a report. Ask for them.
- Keep your own before-photos. One set of each slope, once a year, from the same spot in the yard. Two minutes annually, and almost nobody has it.
A documented storm and hail damage assessment does the same job at a professional level: test squares marked on each elevation, impacts counted and classified, soft metal recorded, and the results organised by slope.
Four things not to do
Do not climb up to check. Covered above, and it is the most common expensive mistake.
Do not sign anything at the door. Door-knocking after a storm is normal in Texas and not automatically a problem, but take the usual precautions: ask for a licence and a certificate of insurance, get the scope in writing, never sign a document that assigns an insurance claim or commits you to work contingent on a claim outcome, and be wary of large payments up front. Ask to be shown the damage in photographs rather than simply told it exists.
Do not let anybody tell you the roof needs replacing before you have seen evidence. Scattered impacts on a sound roof are a repair. Widespread mat fracture on a worn roof is a different conversation. Both are legitimate outcomes; being told which one you have, with pictures, is not optional.
Do not assume no leak means no damage. This is the whole point of the article. The roof you have today is not the roof you had last week, whatever your ceiling says. If you want the full picture of how this fits with everything else, roof leak repair throughout San Antonio is the place to start, and storm and hail damage repair is the service that handles it.
Questions after a hailstorm
How long after a storm can hail damage still be identified?
The damage itself does not heal, so it stays visible for years. What degrades is attribution — the ability to connect this damage to that storm. After a couple more seasons of weather, impacts from different events overlap, normal weathering blurs the marks, and foot traffic from other trades adds its own. If you know a storm came through, having the roof assessed within weeks rather than years keeps the record clean.
Can I tell the difference between hail damage and normal wear myself?
Partly. Normal wear is even across a slope and worst where the sun is strongest, usually the south and west faces. Hail damage is random in placement, circular, and often concentrated on the elevations that faced the storm. The part you genuinely cannot assess from the ground is whether an impact fractured the mat inside the shingle, which is the difference between damage that matters and a cosmetic scuff.
Does a new roof get hail damage too?
Yes, and it hides it better. A new shingle bruises just as an old one does; it simply shows fewer surface marks because the granule layer is intact and the colour is even. This catches a lot of people in the newer suburbs, where a roof looks perfect from the street and has fractured shingles across one elevation.
Is granule loss on its own a problem?
It depends on the extent and the cause. Some granule shedding is normal throughout a roof's life, especially in the first months after installation. Heavy loss concentrated in circular patches after a storm is a different thing: it exposes the asphalt beneath to direct sun, which ages it quickly, and it usually accompanies a mat fracture underneath. A sandy deposit filling your gutters after one storm is worth taking seriously.
My roof is not leaking. Is there any reason to act now?
The reason is the next storm rather than this one. Hail damage shortens the remaining life of a roof without necessarily opening a path for water, so a bruised roof going into the following spring is starting from a worse position than its age suggests. Acting now is also the only way to keep the damage attributable to a known event rather than to general wear.
Keep reading
Once you know what you are looking at, these are the practical next steps.