Verisk says roof claim severity rises despite fewer homeowners claims

Fewer roof claims did not mean less pain for carriers. Verisk said overall claims volume in 2025 fell nearly 20 percent, yet average U.S. residential roof replacement costs still climbed to $17,631 and repair costs reached $4,699, a sharp reminder that frequency can soften while severity keeps rising.

The company’s Roofing Reality Check report, released in Jersey City, New Jersey, on May 29, 2026, showed how the pressure shifted inside the homeowners book. Replacement costs were up 33 percent and repair costs up 25 percent versus the prior four-year average, even as residential roof replacement cost value declined to $23 billion in 2025 from an average of $24.4 billion in 2021-2024. Verisk said that drop reflected a limited U.S. landfall hurricane season, not a retreat in underlying roof loss pressure. Everyday wind and hail events, many below catastrophe thresholds, still drove roof claim severity.

That is the operational problem for P&C software buyers. A carrier that watches only claim counts can miss the bigger signal: each roof loss is getting more expensive, and the systems handling underwriting, claims, and reserving need to see that sooner. Verisk said roofs in moderate to poor condition produced about 60 percent higher loss costs than roofs in good or excellent condition, and 38 percent of U.S. residential homes had roofs in moderate to poor condition in 2025. In hail-prone states, 57 percent of housing stock had roofs nine years old or newer, compared with 38 percent in non-hail states. That kind of condition and age mix is exactly the sort of property-level intelligence that should flow into pricing, inspection, and severity forecasting models before a loss ever hits the desk.

The hail picture was just as blunt. Verisk defines severe hail as hail at least 1 inch in diameter, and 16 U.S. states saw severe hail affect more than 20 percent of roofs in 2025, up from 12 states in 2024. Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota ranked among the hardest-hit states by share of roofs impacted. With roofing line items representing around 30 percent of all line items within claims estimates, those weather patterns do not stay confined to the roof line. They show up in broader property claim costs, reserving assumptions, and vendor assignment decisions.

Verisk’s earlier Roofing Realities Trend Report had already pointed in the same direction, saying roof repair and replacement cost value reached nearly $31 billion in 2024, up nearly 30 percent since 2022, while non-catastrophic wind and hail roof claims rose from 17 percent to 25 percent over the same period. The message for carriers was hard to miss: underwriting rules, claims triage, and reserve models need better roof-condition data, stronger imagery workflows, and more disciplined severity models, because the cost of getting roof exposure wrong kept climbing even when the storm calendar looked quiet.