The county baseline
The framework underneath everything
In unincorporated St. Louis County the position on residential roofing is:
- A like for like asphalt shingle replacement on a slope of 4:12 or steeper does not require a building permit.
- A slope below 4:12 does require one, because at that pitch asphalt shingle is outside its normal application and the assembly changes.
- A change of roofing material requires one. Asphalt to metal, asphalt to tile, anything that changes the load or the assembly.
- Replacing more than a quarter of the decking requires one, which is a structural threshold rather than a roofing one.
Those four points are worth memorising because they cover the great majority of residential roofing decisions and because a surprising number of contractors in this market can only recite the first one.
The city on top
Why you confirm with Creve Coeur
An incorporated city can and often does require more. Municipalities in this county variously require contractor registration with the city, proof of insurance filed with the city rather than shown to you, a permit for work the county would not require one for, and inspection at particular stages. Ballwin and Kirkwood, to take two nearby examples, run their own contractor licensing rather than deferring to anyone else.
So the correct sequence for a job in Creve Coeur is: contact the city's building department, confirm whether your specific job needs a permit and whether your contractor needs to be registered with the city, and get the answer before the dumpster arrives rather than after a neighbour has called someone.
Why there is no phone number on this page
There is exactly one telephone number anywhere on this site and it is the Keys Roofing office line. Publishing a second local number on a page like this is how a homeowner ends up calling the wrong party, and it is how lead generation sites quietly leak the calls they generate.
Look up the City of Creve Coeur building department directly, from the city's own website, and speak to them yourself. If your contractor offers to do it, that is fine, and you should still know the answer.
The licence that does not exist
Missouri, plainly
Missouri has no state roofing licence. There is no state board, no state number and no state examination for residential roofing. Bills to create one have been filed and have failed: SB 1022 in 2016, SB 153 in 2019 and SB 326 in 2021 all failed to pass, and none of them is law.
This matters in two directions. If a contractor offers you a state roofing licence number, they are offering you something that does not exist, and you should want to know what it actually is. And if a contractor tells you Missouri does not licence roofers, they are telling you the truth, and the follow up question is what they are registered for instead: the city, the county, and what insurance they carry.
What licensed and insured should mean in practice on a Missouri roofing job is: general liability insurance, workers compensation for the people on your roof, and whatever municipal registration your city requires. Ask for the certificate of insurance to be sent to you directly by the insurance agent rather than handed over as a photocopy. That is a five minute request and it defeats the single most common form of paperwork fraud in this trade.
Inspections
What a permit actually buys you
Homeowners tend to see a permit as a tax. It is more useful to see it as a second set of eyes that you are not paying for directly.
Where a permit is required, the work becomes part of the record of the house. An inspector looks at the assembly. If a structural repair was involved, somebody other than the contractor has confirmed it was done. When you eventually sell, the work exists in the municipal record rather than existing only in a folder you may or may not still have.
Where a permit is not required, none of that happens, which raises the value of the contractor's own documentation. Photographs of the deck before it was covered, photographs of the membrane and flashing details, and a written scope you keep are the private version of an inspection record. On a job that legitimately needs no permit they are the only version you will have.
The low slope trap
The most common permit surprise here
The single most frequent way a homeowner in this county ends up needing a permit they were told they did not need is a low slope section they had not thought about: a porch roof, a breezeway, a garage connector, an addition with a shallow shed roof over it.
Anything below 4:12 is not just a permit question, it is a materials question. Asphalt shingle below that pitch is outside its designed application, and the correct answer is usually a different product entirely on that section, tied properly into the shingle above it. A contractor who proposes to shingle a 2:12 porch roof the same way as the main house is proposing something that will leak, and the fact that the previous roofer did it that way is not a defence.
If any part of your roof is visibly shallower than the rest, raise it before you get bids, not after. It changes the permit position, the material, the price and the comparison between two proposals. Related: measuring a roof honestly.