Editorial Standards
How we research, review and correct
These are the working rules behind every page. They exist because a referral site has an obvious incentive to overstate how urgent your roof is, and the only useful answer to that is a published standard you can hold us to.
Rule One
Primary sources, named
Where a claim can be traced to a public record, a regulator or a scientific body, we link that source directly rather than a secondary article about it. Storm figures come from the NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database. Guidance about contractor conduct and claims comes from state insurance departments. Where a subject is genuinely contested — and several parts of storm claims are — we say that instead of picking the version that suits us.
Rule Two
No number without a provenance
Every figure on this site is either a value we computed from a named dataset, or a market range explicitly labeled as one. We do not publish precise-sounding numbers that came from nowhere, and we do not cite statutes by section number unless we have read the statute.
Our own storm aggregation is stored as a single source and re-checked against NOAA rather than retyped page by page. When the underlying files are recompiled and a value moves, the check reports it and a human decides what to do — it is never corrected silently.
Rule Three
We publish the limits of the data
Three limits apply to the storm record and appear wherever we use it. The window is 2006–2025, because reporting practice before that is not comparable. Damage figures are National Weather Service estimates recorded as reported, not audited losses and not insurance payouts — many real events carry no figure at all. And we do not present the year-on-year trend, because a decline in recorded events can reflect reporting practice as much as weather.
Rule Four
Who writes and who reviews
Pages are written and reviewed by our roofing editorial team. We are researchers and editors, not roofers and not licensed adjusters, and we do not claim otherwise. Where a question requires a licensed professional — a coverage determination, a structural judgement, a legal deadline in your state — the page says so and points you to who can answer it.
Rule Five
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it and we would rather hear it from you than from nobody. Tell us what the page says, what the correct position is, and where that can be verified. Substantive corrections are made to the page and the last-updated date moves; we do not quietly edit a claim and leave the date untouched.
Reaching us is set out on the contact page.
Last updated .
Before you call anyone
The independent match — we are paid for the introduction, not for the size of your job
Most roofing advice is written by the company that wants to do the work. That is not a failing of the people who read it; it is a defect in who is talking. The estimate, the diagnosis and the invoice come from one party, and no amount of care on your side fixes that.
We are built the other way round. We do not repair roofs and we do not sell materials, so the payment reaches us when you are connected to a licensed, insured roofing company — the same amount whether your roof needs an eight-hundred-dollar repair or a twenty-thousand-dollar replacement. Nobody here has a reason to talk you into the larger number. How we make money and how we research are both written down.
Waiting is the one thing that actually costs money. An insurance clock runs from the date of the damage rather than the date you noticed it, and damage that sits through a season stops reading as sudden and starts reading as wear — which is the exclusion that pays nothing. And if your roof is simply worn out, say so on the call. No claim will pay for age, we will tell you that plainly, and you will have lost nothing but the call.