Hail
What NOAA logged, and what that means
NOAA's Storm Events Database logged 125 hail events in St. Louis County between 2020 and 2025. The largest measured stone in that record was 2.5 inches. The average was 1.32 inches. For comparison in the same period NOAA logged 54 events in St. Charles County, 44 in Jefferson and 30 in Franklin.
NOAA logged hail events, 2020 to 2025, by county
The caveat that always gets removed
These are counts of reported events, not counts of damaged roofs and not counts of insured losses. A hail event enters the database because a human being reported it, and reporting density tracks population. St. Louis County has far more people than Franklin County, so it will log far more reports from the same weather.
Read conservatively, the number still says something real: a roof in this county takes repeated impact across its service life. It does not say your roof has been hit 125 times, and any page that implies it does is misusing a public dataset.
Seasonally, NOAA Storm Prediction Center climatology for this forecast area puts roughly 56 percent of the metro's annual hail reports in April and May. That is the practical planning fact in the whole section: if you are going to have a roof looked at before a season rather than after one, the useful month is March.
May 16 2025
The tornado, stated accurately
The National Weather Service rated the St. Louis tornado of 16 May 2025 as an EF3 with maximum winds of 152 miles per hour. It began near Clayton at 2:41 in the afternoon and ran a path of 22.6 miles, reaching a maximum width of 1.8 miles, which is the widest path recorded in this region in a record that begins in 1950. Five people died. NCEI puts the damage at 1.6 billion dollars, and that dollar figure is NCEI's rather than the Weather Service's.
Clayton is a short drive east of Creve Coeur. That is close enough to matter to a regional roofing and claims market and it is not the same statement as saying the tornado came through this city, which it did not. The reason it is worth knowing here is what a path nearly two miles wide does to contractor availability, materials lead times and the number of unfamiliar trucks on a residential street for the following eighteen months.
The federal declaration that followed, FEMA DR-4877-MO, covered St. Louis City and St. Louis County. FEMA recorded 9,427 Individual Assistance approvals, 58.13 million dollars in Individuals and Households Program payments, and 105.01 million dollars in Public Assistance.
The season in aggregate
What the state regulator published
The Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance reported 253,241 catastrophic claims from the 2025 season, with more than 2.9 billion dollars paid and approximately 83 percent of those claims residential. That is the state insurance regulator's own figure and it is the one worth citing, because it is collected from insurers rather than estimated by a vendor.
Two separate national rankings also circulate, and they are frequently merged into one sentence that is wrong. The Insurance Information Institute, citing NOAA Storm Prediction Center data, ranked Missouri fifth nationally for major hail events, with 253 in 2025. Separately, State Farm ranked Missouri second among states for hail claim dollars paid. Those are two different measurements from two different organisations, and Missouri is not second for hail events nor fifth for claim dollars.
Figures this site will not publish
Several numbers circulate on competitor roofing blogs in this market with no traceable source: a figure of 173,000 homeowners claims and 1.6 billion dollars attributed to the Missouri DCI, a claim of five presidential disaster declarations in Missouri in 2025, and various Missouri specific loss estimates attributed to modelling vendors.
We cannot find primary sources for any of them, so they do not appear here. If you see them on a roofing page, ask where they came from. The reply is informative either way.
RSMo 135.445
A Missouri credit with an expiry date
This one is real, it is state law, almost nobody in the roofing trade is writing about it, and it stops next year.
Missouri statute RSMo 135.445 provides a state tax credit equal to the amount of the homestead insurance deductible a taxpayer incurred in 2025, capped at 5,000 dollars. The credit is transferable, and no new credits are issued after 15 October 2026.
Reckoning 01 · the shape of it
This is a matter between you, the Missouri Department of Revenue and your tax professional. It is not something a roofing contractor administers, offers, discounts against or has any role in, and nothing about it changes what you owe on a roofing contract. It is on this page because it is a real, sourced, expiring benefit and you are unlikely to hear about it from anyone else in this trade.
How to use any of this
Three practical conclusions
- Have the roof looked at on your schedule, not a storm's. March, before the April and May peak, is the useful month, and it is also the month when every competent crew in the metro is not yet fully booked.
- Keep your own record. Dated photographs of your roof in good condition are worth a great deal later, and they cost nothing today. Take them from the ground, all four elevations, once a year.
- Treat a statistic on a roofing page as a claim to be checked. Every figure on this page names its source specifically so you can go and check it. If a competing page does not, that is information about the page.
What a contractor can and cannot do once a storm has actually damaged your roof is a separate question with a statute behind it, and it is on the claim sheet.