Roof Age and Homeowners Insurance in Minnesota: What Changes at 15, 20 and 25 Years

A few years ago nobody's insurance company asked how old their roof was. Now the question turns up on renewal forms across the Twin Cities, and homeowners want to know what to make of it.

Here is the part we can help with. Roof age is a real, measurable thing about a building, and what happens to asphalt over twenty Minnesota winters is not a matter of opinion. What any particular policy or carrier does with that number is not ours to explain, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

I am Luke. I am a roofer, not an insurance agent, and I am going to be clear about where my knowledge stops. But I sit at a lot of kitchen tables in Blaine, Coon Rapids, Minneapolis and St. Paul where roof age has come up, and the roofing side of it is the same every time.

Need this handled? See our roof replacement service.

Where the insurance questions go

Straight to your own agent or your carrier. That is not us being coy. Minnesota Statute 325E.66 bars a residential contractor from interpreting policy provisions, from advising an insured about coverage or about duties under a policy, and from adjusting a claim, unless that contractor is also licensed as a public adjuster. We are a roofing company, so we will not guess at your policy, your renewal, or a letter you have received.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce publishes plain guidance for homeowners at mn.gov/commerce, and your agent can answer the rest. Ask them to put the answer in writing.

What actually happens to the roof at each age

Years one to twelve. A properly installed asphalt roof is at full strength. Seals are intact, the mat is sound, and granule cover is doing its job.

Years twelve to eighteen. Granule loss becomes visible on the sun facing slopes. Seal strips lose grip, so wind lifts tabs more easily, and the shingle bends less before it cracks. This is where ventilation faults show up as premature wear.

Years eighteen to twenty five. Tabs snap rather than flex, exposed asphalt shows at the rakes, and flashings and pipe boots are usually well past their own life. A roof in this band has little in reserve for a hard storm.

Past twenty five. On most Minnesota asphalt roofs this is borrowed time, and repairs get harder to do well because the surrounding shingles will not lift without breaking.

Metal and other long life roofs run on a different clock, and we will tell you where yours actually sits when we walk it.

How to work out how old your roof actually is

A surprising number of homeowners do not know, and the number on a form should not be a guess. Four ways to pin it down, roughly in order of reliability.

• The permit record. A reroof needs a permit in every Twin Cities city we work in. Call the building department for the address, or search their online permit records. That gives you a date somebody wrote down at the time.
• The seller's disclosure or closing file. If the roof was replaced before you bought, it is often in the paperwork from the sale.
• The previous roofer. If a company put it on and is still in business, they have the job on file, usually with the shingle line and color code, which is worth having anyway.
• The roof itself. A roofer can read the age fairly closely from the shingle line, the wear pattern, the state of the seal strips, and how the tabs behave when lifted. It is an estimate rather than a date, but it is an informed one.

Worth knowing: the age that matters is the age of the current covering, not the age of the house. If a previous owner reroofed in 2009 on a 1978 house, the roof is from 2009. If there are two layers up there, the top one is the one keeping water out and the bottom one is just adding weight and heat.

If you have had a letter about your roof

Take it to the person who wrote your policy. Your agent or your carrier is the only party who can tell you what the letter means for you, what your options are, and what any date in it refers to. We cannot read it for you and we should not try.

What we can do is the roofing half: come out, walk the roof, photograph every slope, and give you a written assessment of its actual condition along with an itemized price to replace it if that is what it needs. Plenty of people use that report simply to know where they stand before they make a phone call.

What we look at on an older roof

An inspection on a fifteen or twenty year old roof is a different job from an inspection after a storm. We are looking at condition rather than at an event.

• The seal strips. We lift tabs by hand in several places. If they come up with no resistance across a slope, the roof is no longer a bonded sheet, and the next strong wind will find that out.
• Flexibility. An old shingle cracks where a sound one bends. That single test decides whether a repair is even possible, because on a brittle roof you break three shingles getting at the nails for every one you meant to replace.
• Granule cover, especially on the south and west slopes, and how much is sitting in the gutters.
• Flashings, boots and penetrations, which have their own life and are usually the first thing to fail on a roof that is otherwise holding.
• The deck and the attic, from underneath, with a flashlight. Soft decking, daylight, damp sheathing and frost on nail points all say something the surface does not.
• Ventilation. A starved attic is the single most common reason a Minnesota roof wears out early, and it is fixable at replacement.

What a new roof does, on the roofing side

A new roof gives you a fresh deck inspection, new underlayment and ice and water membrane at the eaves and valleys, corrected ventilation where the old attic was starved, and new flashings and boots. That is the part we can stand behind, and it is the part that decides how the house handles the next twenty winters.

Whether a new roof changes anything on your policy is a question for your agent or your carrier. Ask them before you decide, and get their answer from them.

The bigger picture

Nobody decided your roof is old. Your roof got old. Asphalt in this climate lasts twenty to thirty years when it was installed well and ventilated right, and considerably less when it was not.

If yours is in the watch zone, the useful move is to know where it stands rather than to guess. That means a documented inspection with photographs, an accurate age from the permit record, and a conversation with your own agent about anything on the insurance side.

Do those three things and you get to choose the year you replace it, on your schedule, with quotes you had time to compare.

Want to know where your roof stands before the next renewal? Request a free inspection and we will give you a written report with photographs you can hand to your agent, plus a line-item quote if the roof is at the end. We are roofers, not insurance advisors, so bring your policy questions to your agent and the roof questions to us.