Most of the confusion around a roof or exterior claim comes down to one thing: nobody explains the order it happens in. This page walks through how a roof or exterior claim generally works in Alberta, what sort of damage people claim for, what an adjuster expects to see, and exactly where our part in it starts and stops. It is an explanation, and it does not replace the wording of your own policy.
Five steps, in this order. Something sudden damages the roof or another part of the exterior, the damage gets assessed and photographed, you report it to your insurer, an adjuster reviews what happened, and the work your insurer approves gets built. Nearly all the anxiety around claims comes from people trying to run step three before step two, deciding whether they have a claim before anyone has been up to look. You do not need to work that out first. Booking an assessment does not open a claim, and finding damage does not commit you to filing one.
A storm, a wind event, debris coming down, or water appearing inside. Claims are built around events with a date attached, so note when it happened while you still remember.
Book an assessment while the evidence is fresh. Looking at the roof or the exterior does not start a claim, and finding damage does not oblige you to file one.
You contact your insurance company. Report suspected damage promptly and ask your insurer what notice and proof-of-loss requirements apply to your policy, because those are set by them and not by a contractor.
Your insurer reviews what happened and works out what your policy covers. That assessment and that decision sit with them.
Whatever your insurer approves still has to be carried out on the roof or whatever else was affected, and the choice of who does it is normally yours.
This page explains how roof and exterior insurance claims generally work in Alberta. It is not insurance advice, and it does not describe your policy. Coverage, limits, deductibles and reporting windows are set by your own policy and decided by your insurer. Insurers also differ in what they want to see, so treat the sequence above as the order that keeps your options open rather than a rule that fits every policy. Confirm the specifics with your insurer.
Most exterior claims in this city trace back to a short list of events, and what they have in common is that something happened on a day you can name. Hail and wind account for the bulk of them, and the roof is usually the most visible part, but the same event often marks siding and cladding, soffit, fascia, eavestrough, and window or door trim at the same time. Impact damage turns up every summer when a branch or a piece of storm debris comes down, and water appearing inside during a storm is what gets most people to the phone in the first place. What follows describes the events themselves. It is not a statement about what your policy covers, because that part sits between you and your insurer.
The one Calgary is known for, and the one that hides best. A strike can crush the granules and fracture the mat underneath without cracking the surface, so a badly hit roof often reads as perfectly fine from the driveway. The same hailstorm dents siding and soft metal cladding at the same time, and soft metal tells the story first.
A gust breaks the adhesive strip and the shingle settles back into place looking sealed. It is not. The next driving rain runs under it instead of over it, and the shingles that came off outright are usually the smaller half of the problem. The same wind event can pull eavestrough loose, lift soffit panels, and work flashing free at the joints.
Water arriving inside during or just after a storm, rather than a stain that has been slowly spreading for two years. That difference matters more than almost anything else on this page, because it is the difference an adjuster is looking for. The entry point is not always the roof either: flashing and window or door trim let water in the same way.
Meltwater refreezing at the cold eave backs up under the shingles and finds its way in above the fascia line. It is the one on this list that most often traces back to a building condition rather than a single storm, which is exactly why it gets assessed carefully.
If your roof was hit by a hailstorm specifically, the restoration side of that work, documentation through to the finished roof, is covered in detail on our storm and hail restoration page. If water is coming into the building right now, that is an emergency roof repair before it is a claim, and the two run in parallel rather than in sequence.
Worth understanding before you file anything, because it explains most of the claims that do not go the way people expect. Home policies are generally written around sudden and accidental events, the ones that happen on a date you can point to. They are generally not written around a roof reaching the end of its life. Storm and hail damage often is covered, while wear, age and deferred maintenance generally are not. Coverage depends entirely on your policy, your deductible and the adjuster assessment.
A hailstorm on a date, a wind event that took shingles off overnight, a branch that came through. The damage has a beginning, and the roof was in a different condition the week before. This is the shape a claim is generally built around.
Granule loss across the whole field, curling at the edges, brittle shingles on a roof in its twenty-fifth year, or siding and trim that have simply aged out along with it. Nothing happened to it. It got old, which every roof and every exterior surface does, and that is generally treated as an ownership cost rather than an insured event. How your own policy handles it is a question for your insurer.
The hardest one to hear. A known problem that was put off tends to be viewed differently from the same problem found the week it appeared, and a long gap between the event and the report makes the damage harder to tie to the event at all.
Plenty of roofs sit somewhere between these three, which is the honest reason we photograph what is there rather than telling you in advance which box it falls into. Where a roof is simply worn out rather than damaged, our roof replacement cost page is the more useful read.
Documentation of what is on the roof or the rest of the exterior, when it happened as far as can be established, and what it means for the surface in question. An adjuster is working out two things above all: what happened, and when. A file that answers both is straightforward to assess. A file that answers neither creates work for everyone and slows the whole thing down. The list beside this is what gets photographed and written up when we assess a roof or exterior after an event, and it is yours to keep and use however you decide.
Request a Roof AssessmentDocumentation is produced during the assessment itself, so the practical detail of how a roof gets walked and recorded lives on our roof inspection page. Where a roof has been on a maintenance schedule, those earlier reports are useful for a different reason: they establish what condition it was in before the event.
Red Seal Certified
Interprovincial Standard
Storm season brings a lot of ladders to this city, and not all of them are attached to someone with an interest in an accurate answer. Ours are carried out by the same in-house Red Seal certified roofers who do the repair and replacement work, which cuts both ways. They know what genuine storm damage looks like underfoot, and they have no reason to invent any. If your roof and exterior came through intact, the report says so, and a documented property in good condition is a useful thing to own. More on the certifications and coverage behind the crews is on our why trust us page.
Insurance work attracts a lot of vague language, so here is the unvague version. We inspect the roof and the rest of the exterior, photograph and document what we find, and share that documentation with you. That documentation belongs to you, and what happens with it next is your decision and your insurer’s assessment. We are careful about that boundary, because a record of the roof is only worth having if it is a straight record of the roof.
We get on the roof and walk the rest of the exterior wherever access allows, record what is there and describe what the damage means for that surface. That is the work, and it is the same work whether a claim follows or not.
Documentation of what we find on the roof or elsewhere on the exterior. Take it to your insurer, sit on it, or take it to another contractor for a second opinion. None of those choices are ours to make and none of them change what we hand over.
We are roofers. We are not your insurer, we do not interpret policy wording, and we cannot tell you what will be approved. Coverage is settled between you and your insurance company, and nothing on this page changes what an insurer will approve.
Whatever your insurer does approve still has to be built, on the roof or wherever else on the exterior the damage turned out to be. Depending on what that is, the roof side of it is either a defined roof repair or a full roof replacement, and the equivalent applies to siding, soffit, fascia or eavestrough. It is ordinary exterior contracting work either way.
It happens, and the first move is the same either way: ask your insurer for the reasoning in writing. The reason decides what you can do about it. A decision that turned on a missed reporting window is a different situation from one that turned on the cause of the damage, and a settlement that came back lower than expected is different again from a refusal. Be wary of anyone who offers to fix this for you, and be especially wary of a promise about how it will turn out, because nobody outside your insurer is in a position to make one.
A verbal explanation on a phone call is difficult to work with. Ask for the decision and the reasons behind it in writing, and keep it with the rest of your file.
Insurance companies run an internal review and complaint process, and it is the first formal step. Your policy documents or your broker will tell you how to start one and who it goes to.
If the internal process does not resolve it, Alberta policyholders have independent complaint channels available outside the insurance company. That route sits with you and those bodies, not with your roofer.
Where a re-inspection would genuinely add something, ask for one, from us or from anyone else. What a roofer can contribute at this stage is a clearer record of the roof. The decision itself is not ours to influence.
Sooner than most people do. Two separate clocks start when a storm passes over. Your policy sets a window for reporting damage, and that window is written into your own documents rather than set by any contractor, so it is worth reading. The second clock is evidential. Fresh hail and fresh wind damage are far easier to tie to a specific date than the same damage found after a summer of weather has worked on it. Neither clock requires you to decide anything about a claim on day one.
Hail is dated by how it looks. A roof or exterior assessed within days of the storm ties to that storm far more readily than one assessed the following spring, by which point the evidence has weathered.
Reporting windows vary between insurers and between policies, and we cannot tell you what yours is because we cannot see it. Your policy documents or your broker can, and it is a five-minute check.
If water is actively getting in, containment comes before paperwork. Policies commonly expect you to take reasonable steps to limit further damage, though the specifics are set by your own policy, so confirm them with your insurer. The emergency work itself gets documented alongside the damage.
Where the trigger was hail specifically, our storm and hail restoration page carries the restoration detail. Where water is coming in tonight, start with emergency roof repair and let the claim follow the containment.
The sequence is the same on a building, but the documentation has more people to satisfy. A property manager is usually reporting to an owner or a board as well as to an insurer, and on a flat or low-slope roof, or across siding and cladding several storeys up, the damage is frequently invisible from the ground and slow to show itself inside, which makes a dated condition record more valuable rather than less. Where a building already has condition reports on file from a maintenance schedule, those become the before picture that a one-off assessment cannot supply. The detail on how membrane roofs get assessed and repaired sits on our flat roof repair page, and the wider picture is under commercial roofing. Coverage on a commercial policy varies at least as much as it does on a residential one, so confirm the specifics with your insurer or your broker.
It depends on why it is leaking. Most Alberta home policies are built around sudden, accidental damage, so a leak caused by a hailstorm, high wind or a falling branch is the kind of event a policy is generally written for. A roof that has simply reached the end of its service life is usually treated as maintenance rather than a claim. The distinction an insurer draws is between something that happened and something that wore out. Confirm the specifics with your insurer, since we cannot speak to what your individual policy covers.
Standard Alberta home policies commonly cover sudden hail and wind damage, though deductibles, exclusions and roof-age terms vary a great deal between policies. Some policies settle an older roof at depreciated value rather than replacement cost, which changes the number significantly. Read your own policy or ask your broker, because two houses on the same street can have very different coverage.
Report suspected damage promptly and ask your insurer what notice and proof-of-loss requirements apply to your policy. Those are separate things with separate timelines, and both are set by your insurer rather than by any general rule. Reporting promptly matters for a practical reason too: the longer the gap between the event and the report, the harder it is for anyone to establish when the damage happened.
Storm damage is an event: bruised or fractured shingle mats from hail, creased or lifted tabs from wind, impact marks on soft metal like vent caps and eavestrough. Wear and tear is gradual: granule loss from age, curling from long-term heat cycling, brittle failure from sun exposure over many years. The two can look similar from the ground and often sit on the same roof at once, which is why the assessment matters more than a photo from the driveway.
Generally: photographs close enough to show the damage clearly, wider shots that place it on the building, evidence on soft metal where hail is involved, interior photographs where water has come inside, and the date the event happened alongside the date the damage was found. We inspect the roof and document what we find, and that documentation is yours to use however you decide. What your insurer requires for your specific claim is a question for them.
In Alberta you generally choose who does the work on your own property. Insurers often maintain preferred or recommended contractor lists, and using one can be convenient, but a recommendation is not usually a requirement. Confirm how your own policy handles it with your insurer, and be aware that the approved scope and the price your insurer will settle at are matters between you and them.
A denial is not necessarily the end of the process, and it is worth knowing that two different situations get handled differently. If the dispute is about whether something is covered at all, insurers have an internal complaint procedure and there is an independent ombudservice route beyond that. If the dispute is instead about the amount, the extent, or how a repair should be done, Alberta has a separate dispute-resolution process for that. Ask your insurer which one applies to your situation, and seek qualified insurance or legal advice if it matters enough. What we can tell you is what we found on the roof and what it means for the roof, which does not change either way.
Knowing what is actually on the roof before you start a claim is generally useful, because it tells you whether there is real damage and roughly what scale of work is involved. That lets you make an informed decision rather than a guess. Whether filing is the right move for your situation depends on your deductible, your policy terms and your own judgement, and that decision stays with you.
Tell us what happened and roughly when. We will look at the roof and the rest of the exterior, document what we find, and share that with you to use however you decide.
Serving: Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks, Chestermere.