One-inch hail is the National Weather Service’s severe threshold. Whether it damaged your particular roof depends on the shingle, its age, the angle it fell at and how long it fell for. Here is how to think about it, and where to look up what was actually measured near you.
One inch is where the Weather Service calls hail severe, and roughly where asphalt shingles start taking real damage — but it is a threshold, not a line. An old, brittle roof can be totalled by hail that leaves a two-year-old roof alone. What matters more than the number is how long it fell: in the June 2026 north metro storm some areas saw hail for over ten minutes straight, which is a very large number of impacts on one slope.
One inch — about a quarter — is the National Weather Service’s severe criterion and is roughly where functional damage to asphalt shingles starts to appear. Below that you are usually looking at granule loss rather than a compromised mat.
But the size is only one of four variables. A shingle at the end of its life is brittle and fractures at an impact a new one absorbs. Hail driven at an angle hits some slopes hard and spares others entirely, which is why damage so often appears on one or two elevations. And duration matters as much as diameter.
That last point is underrated. The Weather Service recorded that in the June 19, 2026 storm some areas saw hail fall for over ten minutes without stopping. Ten minutes of two-inch hail is a different event from one minute of it, even though both get reported as the same number.
NWS Twin Cities: “This storm cut through the Twin Cities metro and hit areas along the I-94 to 694 loop hard, producing 2″+ hail in northern St Paul, MN. Some areas saw hail fall for over 10 minutes straight.” Source: NWS Twin Cities, June 19 2026 event summary
The National Weather Service logs Local Storm Reports with a measured size, a time, a location and who filed each one. They are public, and they are the same records an adjuster works from.
We publish the ones for the Minnesota counties we work in, with the figures pulled from the national archive and a link to the source on every page. If your county is there you can see what was measured, when, and how far from you.
A caution worth carrying: the reports record where somebody was standing with something to measure, not where hail fell. A county with four reports was not necessarily hit less than one with twenty-nine — it may just have fewer people outside at suppertime in April.
A hail bruise is a roughly circular impact where the granules are knocked clear and the mat underneath is fractured. Pressed with a thumb it feels soft, like a bruise on fruit — which is where the name comes from. That soft centre is the thing that distinguishes real damage from cosmetic marking.
What it is not: scattered granule loss in the gutters, which is normal ageing; blistering, which is a manufacturing or ventilation issue and shows as small raised craters with intact mat; or mechanical scuffing from someone walking the roof, which runs in lines rather than in a random scatter.
The pattern tells you as much as the individual mark. Hail arrives randomly distributed across a slope and biased toward the direction it came from. Damage clustered along one line, or only around a vent, is something else.
Not necessarily, but do not let it drift. Policies carry their own notice requirements and Minnesota’s standard hail policy has a suit-limitation period that is shorter than most people assume — we cover that with the statute quoted in the insurance claim laws guide.
The practical problem with waiting is evidence rather than deadlines. Hail bruising weathers. A year of sun and freeze-thaw on a fractured mat turns a clear impact into something an adjuster can reasonably call wear, and you lose the argument on the roof rather than in the policy.
If a storm on our storm pages covered your county and nobody has been up there since, that is the whole case for getting it looked at now. We will give you a written scope and photographs either way, and we will tell you if the roof is fine.
Hail is a weather event rather than a liability claim, and a single weather claim is generally treated differently from an at-fault one. But Minnesota homeowners insurance has been repricing broadly, and carriers have been changing how they handle roofs specifically — several have moved from replacement cost to actual cash value on older roofs.
The honest answer is that this is a question for your agent about your policy, not one a roofing company should answer for you. What we can tell you is what is on your roof and what it would cost to put right, in writing, so that you are deciding with real numbers rather than guessing.
This page quotes Minnesota statutes and the adopted Minnesota building code and links to the official text of each so you can read it yourself. It is general information from a licensed contractor, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading your own policy. Statutes and codes are amended; the linked sources are authoritative, this page is not. Last reviewed 2026-10-27.
Straight answers to the questions Minnesota homeowners ask before they call anyone.
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