Midwest Hail Season, State by State

Hail needs two ingredients stacked on top of each other: warm, wet air near the ground and cold air high up. Early in the year the meeting point between Gulf moisture and the cold air sliding off the Rockies sits across Oklahoma, southern Kansas and the lower Missouri valley. As the ground heats up through May and June, that boundary climbs. By July the most active storm days usually belong to Nebraska, the Dakotas and Minnesota. It's a moving target. A homeowner in Springfield, Missouri and one in Fargo are really living on two different calendars.

This is the longest season we deal with and the busiest. Storms tend to fire off the higher ground to the west in the late afternoon, organize, and roll into Wichita, Lincoln and Omaha after dinner. April storms happen. May and June carry most of the damage, July is still active, and a September hailstorm out here doesn't surprise anybody who has lived through a few. The western Midwest also sits closest to the country's hail corridor, which we cover on our Hail Alley page. If you own a home here, assume the roof will see more than one claim-grade storm in its working life and choose materials with that in mind.

The season opens earliest in the southern half of these states. Southern Missouri, southern Illinois and the Evansville area can take damaging hail in March, well before most people have put the snow shovel away. Activity builds through April and usually peaks in May. St. Louis, where we've been based since 1947, sits right in that early window. Farther north and east, around Columbus, Cleveland and Fort Wayne, the peak runs a little later and big storms come less often. Less often isn't never. Ohio still has its bad afternoons, and a roof doesn't care how rare the storm was.

Iowa straddles both calendars. The southern counties behave like Missouri, the northern counties more like Minnesota, and the whole state sits under the long summer squall lines that cross it in June and July. Those lines sometimes carry more wind than hail, and the worst of them are derechos, which tear roofs apart in a completely different way than stones do. Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and the Quad Cities all sit in the path.

Up north the season is compressed into roughly June through August. Fewer months, not gentler storms. A short season also means a short repair window. A Fargo or Duluth homeowner who finds damage in late August may have eight or ten weeks of dependable roofing weather left before temperatures fall off. We'd rather inspect that roof in September than in April, when the claim is older, the shingles have spent a winter cracking open, and every contractor in town is booked solid.

Every spring somebody calls because the evening news showed hail in their county. That's a reason to look, not a reason to file. Hail swaths inside a storm can be a few blocks wide, and one side of a subdivision can take golf balls while the other side gets rain. Before anyone files, we want to see evidence on your house specifically: bruised shingles, dented vent caps, spatter marks on the siding or the deck rail. If it isn't there, we'll say so and leave you with a dated record of a clean roof.

Carriers don't pay less because a storm came in August or October. A date of loss is a date of loss. What does hurt late-season claims is delay: homeowners assume the season is over, put off the inspection, and then winter goes to work on the fractured mat. Freeze-thaw cycling pries those cracks open a little more with every cold snap. The damage was always there. It just gets easier to see and harder to tie back to one particular storm.

A few habits pay off. Check the roof after any storm that dropped stones three-quarters of an inch or larger, and don't wait for a leak to tell you, because hail-bruised roofs usually stay dry for a couple of years. Write down storm dates as they happen; a timestamped phone photo of hail piled on the patio is worth more than you'd think. And get any late-summer damage looked at before the first hard freeze. Our free inspection covers all of it, and our after-storm checklist walks through what you can safely look at yourself from the ground.