On asphalt shingles:

• Bruising. A soft spot you feel more than see. Press it and it gives slightly, like the soft part of an apple, because the fiberglass mat is fractured underneath. This is the damage that matters and the damage that is hardest to spot.

• Granule displacement in a random scatter. Hail leaves dark spots where granules were knocked away, distributed randomly across the slope. Randomness is the signature. Damage in rows, lines, or repeating patterns came from something other than weather.

• Exposed asphalt. Where enough granules were removed that the black mat shows through.

• Hits concentrated on one or two slopes. Hail generally arrives at an angle, driven by the wind behind it. The slopes facing into that wind take the beating and the opposite slopes may be untouched. That directional pattern is part of what confirms a hail event.

On metal roofs and panels: dents in the flat of the panel, dented ridge caps and closures, and damage to trim. Whether that counts as damage worth claiming is a separate question and one worth reading the section below on.

Where the clearest evidence usually is: the soft metals. Vent caps, gutters, downspouts, drip edge, and flashing dent visibly and hold that dent. When shingle damage is ambiguous, the soft metals are frequently what establishes that an impact event occurred at all.

This section exists because filing a claim on damage that is not hail damage wastes your time, can put a claim on your record for nothing, and gets denied.

Blistering. The most common false positive by a wide margin, and it fools plenty of homeowners and some inspectors. Blisters form when trapped moisture or volatile gases in the asphalt expand under heat and pop the surface, leaving small round craters with granules missing. They look remarkably like hail hits. The differences: blisters tend to be more uniformly round and evenly distributed across the whole roof rather than concentrated on wind-facing slopes, they do not bruise the mat underneath, and they show up on slopes hail could not have reached at that angle. In a valley with intense summer sun on dark shingles, blistering is common enough that any honest hail inspection has to rule it out first.

Foot traffic damage. Granule scuffing in a path across the roof, usually running from an access point toward a chimney, vent, or satellite dish. It follows a route. Hail does not walk anywhere.

Ordinary granule loss from age. Even, gradual thinning across the whole roof with granules accumulating in the gutters over years. If it is uniform and the roof is old, that is a life expectancy conversation and not a claim.

Mechanical damage. Marks from a dropped tool, a ladder, a satellite installer, or a previous repair. Usually clustered and usually near something that explains it.

Manufacturing defects. Certain shingle batches fail in patterns that resemble impact damage. If the pattern is identical across the entire roof including sheltered areas, that points toward the product rather than the weather, and the remedy is a manufacturer claim rather than an insurance claim.

We check for all of these before we tell you that you have hail damage. It is not in your interest for us to be wrong about this, and it is not in ours either.

This distinction decides a great many hail claims, and most homeowners have never heard of it before an adjuster uses it.

Functional damage means the hail affected the roof's ability to do its job: the mat is fractured, the protective granule layer has been compromised, the shingle's service life has been shortened. That is what a claim is for.

Cosmetic damage means the roof looks worse but still performs. The clearest example is a metal roof with dents in the panels. The dents are permanent, they are visible, and the roof continues shedding water exactly as it did before.

Here is the part worth knowing before you need it: some policies contain cosmetic damage exclusions or endorsements, particularly for metal roofing, which specifically remove coverage for hail damage that is purely aesthetic. If you have a metal roof, or you are considering one, that is a genuinely important line to look for on your policy.

The gray area between the two is where claims get argued, and it is the reason documentation quality matters so much. A photograph of a circled impact with a measurement beside it is an argument. A general statement that the roof has hail damage is an opinion.

Hail is a covered peril under most homeowner policies, which puts it in a better starting position than a lot of roof damage. What gets contested is whether the damage is functional, whether it came from the storm you are claiming, and what your policy actually pays.

The mechanics of all that, meaning replacement cost versus actual cash value, deductibles including separate wind and hail deductibles, the claim timeline, and how to avoid post-storm contractors, are covered in full on our storm damage page.

Rather than repeat it here, three points specific to hail:

No leak does not mean no damage. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding about hail. Bruised shingles do not leak the week of the storm. They fail years early, by which point the reporting window has closed and the damage has become, in a carrier's view, ordinary wear. If hail hit your area, get the roof documented while the storm date still connects to it.

Hail is local, and your neighborhood matters. A hail core can flatten one subdivision and leave the next one untouched. Your neighbor's undamaged roof is not evidence about yours, and neither is a countywide report. Slope by slope documentation of your specific address is.

Date it against the record. The National Weather Service archives severe weather reports including hail sizes by county and date. Pairing that record with dated photographs of your roof is considerably stronger than describing the storm from memory. The lookup is described on our storm damage page.

On an approved claim your out of pocket is generally your deductible rather than these figures. Check whether your policy carries a separate wind and hail deductible, because it may be larger than the one you are expecting.