How to Prepare for a Hailstorm (and Protect Your Car & Home)

Hail is one of the costliest severe-weather hazards, driving most of the tens of billions in annual U.S. severe-storm insured losses, and it is especially common across “Hail Alley,” from Colorado’s Front Range near Denver and Colorado Springs through the southern Plains around Oklahoma City and the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. For an individual, the bills add up fast: the average hail claim runs about $3,500 for a vehicle and around $12,000 for a damaged roof.

The good news is that hail damage is often preventable with a little lead time: the difference between an exposed car and a covered one.

For a sense of how violent hail can get, the largest hailstone ever recovered in the U.S. fell in Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010: 8 inches across, roughly the size of a volleyball, and nearly 2 pounds. Most damaging hail is far smaller, but it still falls fast enough to crack a windshield or dent a roof in seconds.3

Hailstones start as raindrops carried up by a thunderstorm’s updraft into air cold enough to freeze them, then grow by colliding with liquid water that freezes onto the surface. The part that makes hail worth reading is what happens next: a hailstone falls when the updraft can no longer support its weight.4

Turn that around and it becomes a measurement. A stone stays up only while the rising air can hold it, so the size of what lands on your car is a direct statement about how violently that storm is breathing. Golf balls in the driveway are not just a repair bill, they are evidence of an updraft strong enough to be worth respecting for other reasons too.

The speeds are worse than they look. Small hail under an inch arrives at 9 to 25 mph. Severe hail, which officially means quarter size or larger at one inch across, comes down at 25 to 40 mph. The 2 to 4 inch stones a big supercell produces fall at 44 to 72 mph, and anything over 4 inches can exceed 100 mph.4

There is a small marvel hidden inside them. Slice a large hailstone and you often find layers of clear and cloudy ice, a record of the different temperatures and water contents it passed through. Clear layers formed where water froze slowly, cloudy ones where it froze instantly and trapped air bubbles. Each stone is a written account of its own trip up and down inside the storm.4

When a roofing product is sold as impact-rated, something specific stands behind the claim. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, an independent research organisation whose membership comes from insurers, runs a Hail Lab that makes its own hailstones and fires them at building-material samples under highly controlled conditions, in order to replicate real-world impacts precisely.5

IBHS publishes the resulting Hail Impact-Resistant Shingle Ratings, which means the difference between two shingles that look identical on a shelf is a matter of public record rather than a sales claim. It has also tested whole assemblies, including a demonstration house comparing impact-rated shingles, non-impact-rated shingles and metal roofing, with vinyl against fiber-cement siding, to show how differently they hold up.56

This is the most useful thing to know before a roof is replaced. If you live anywhere in Hail Alley the shingle choice gets made once every fifteen or twenty years, and it quietly decides whether the next storm is an inconvenience or a claim. Look the ratings up while you still have the luxury of choosing, rather than afterwards when a contractor is offering whatever is on the truck.

A few habits and a few minutes of warning go a long way:

• Park under cover: A garage or carport is best; in a pinch, thick blankets can cushion an exposed car.
• Avoid trees and power lines: Falling branches during a hailstorm cause their own damage.
• Maintain your roof: Inspect it yearly and consider impact-resistant materials in hail-prone areas.
• Secure the outside: Bring in or tie down outdoor furniture, and keep gutters clear.

Hail is not an exotic event. The Storm Prediction Center logged 5,432 hail events across the United States in 2025, up slightly from 5,373 the year before, so on an average day somewhere in the country is being hit fifteen times over.1

Where it falls and where it costs are two different maps, which is the part worth knowing. By raw count in 2025 the leaders were Texas with 902 events, Kansas with 375 and Oklahoma with 369. By claim cost, one large insurer’s figures put Minnesota, Texas, Arkansas, Illinois and Nebraska at the top. Kansas produces enormous amounts of hail and much of it lands on fields; Minnesota produces less and much of it lands on roofs.1

The totals are genuinely large. A single insurer, State Farm, paid over $3.5 billion in hail claims in 2022, more than a billion above the previous year.1

If you live under one of those maps, the useful conclusion is that hail is not a question of whether. It is a scheduled expense arriving at an unknown date, which is a completely different thing to plan for than a disaster.

Once it starts, the decisions get simple and one of them is counterintuitive. Do not go outside to move the car. People get hurt every season doing exactly that, because stones that dent sheet metal do considerably worse to a skull, and the impulse to save the paintwork arrives at precisely the moment it is most dangerous to act on.

Stay away from windows, and put a closed door between you and them if the hail is large. Hail breaks glass inward with a lot of energy behind it, and skylights are the weak point people forget. If you have time before it arrives, the interior of the house away from the exposed side is the right place to be, for the same reason it is in high wind.

Afterwards, photograph everything before you touch it, while the stones are still on the ground next to the damage for scale. Get the car, the roof if you can see it safely from the ground, gutters, screens, siding and any outdoor equipment. Do not climb up to inspect a roof yourself after a hailstorm, because the surface may be damaged in ways that are not visible and it is a bad combination with a wet ladder.

Then be patient with the knock at the door. Large hail events reliably attract contractors who arrive from out of state within days, and the pattern is familiar: an offer to inspect for free, an urgent claim that the damage is severe, and a request to sign something on the spot. A roof that has survived the storm will survive another two weeks while you get a second opinion from someone who will still be in the county next year.

Most of hail’s cost is avoidable if you can move your car and secure your property before the storm. That only works if you know it is coming.

ZoneWatch tracks hail with high-resolution radar and size estimates, and sends hyper-local alerts for your area, so you get the heads-up in time to protect what a hailstorm would otherwise cost you.