Hail, storm, and what the record actually shows

What NOAA logged for this county

NOAA's Storm Events Database recorded 125 hail events in St. Louis County between 2020 and 2025. The largest stone measured was 2.5 inches. The average across those events was 1.32 inches. For comparison within the same period and the same database: St. Charles County logged 54, Jefferson County 44 and Franklin County 30.

What survives that caveat is still meaningful. Hail of an inch and a third, arriving repeatedly across a handful of years, is a real load on an asphalt roof, and the seasonality is sharp: April and May carry roughly 56 percent of the metro's annual hail reports according to NOAA Storm Prediction Center climatology for this area.

The tornado, precisely as recorded

On 16 May 2025 an EF3 tornado moved through the St. Louis area. The National Weather Service rated it EF3 with estimated peak winds of 152 miles per hour. It began near Clayton at about 2:41 in the afternoon and travelled a path of 22.6 miles, with a maximum width of 1.8 miles, which makes it the widest tornado in the region's modern record, a record that begins in 1950. Five people were killed. The damage figure of 1.6 billion dollars comes from NCEI rather than from the Weather Service rating.

The federal disaster declaration that followed, DR-4877-MO, covered St. Louis City and St. Louis County. Under it, FEMA recorded 9,427 individual assistance approvals, 58.13 million dollars in Individuals and Households Program funds, and 105.01 million dollars in public assistance.

Separately, the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance reported 253,241 catastrophic claims from the 2025 season, with more than 2.9 billion dollars paid, roughly 83 percent of it residential. That figure is published at insurance.mo.gov and covers the whole state and the whole season rather than any single event.

Two national rankings that are often merged

Missouri appears in two separate national hail rankings and they measure different things, so they should not be run together into a single claim.

• The Insurance Information Institute, citing NOAA Storm Prediction Center data, placed Missouri fifth nationally for major hail events, with 253 in 2025. That is a count of weather events.
• State Farm separately ranked Missouri second nationally in hail claim dollars paid. That is a count of money, from one insurer's book.

Those are two different measurements from two different sources and neither one implies the other. A page that combines them into one sentence is manufacturing a statistic.

RSMo 135.445, and why it has a date on it

One genuinely useful and largely unadvertised thing: Missouri created a state tax credit equal to a homestead insurance deductible incurred in 2025. The credit is capped at 5,000 dollars, it is transferable, and it is written with an expiry. No new credits are authorised after 15 October 2026.

This is a tax matter, not a roofing matter, and it belongs with your accountant rather than with a contractor. It is mentioned here for one reason: it is real, it is dated, and almost nobody in this trade is telling homeowners it exists. If you carried a deductible on a 2025 loss, it is worth ten minutes of a professional's time to ask about.

What to do in the week after a storm

1. Photograph everything from the ground, dated. Downed limbs, dents in gutters and vents, granule accumulation at downspout outlets, anything on the lawn. Ground level evidence is useful and it is safe to collect.
2. Do not climb on it. A steep roof with hail on it is not a place to be, and a roof that has just been hit is often less sound than it looks.
3. Get a written condition report. Photographs, measurements, and a plain statement of what is damaged and what is not. Yours to keep.
4. Read your own policy. Coverage questions belong to you and your insurer. See also matching an older roof honestly, since mismatch is where a partial roof loss usually becomes contentious.
5. Do not sign in a hurry. The urgency is being manufactured. Details in how to vet a roofing contractor.