The hail record for this metro, and what it is worth

Numbers get thrown around on roofing websites in this market with very little care about what they are counts of. Here is the underlying record, the source, and an explicit statement of what it does and does not measure.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, hail reports 2020 to 2025. Some county series in this dataset begin later than 2020, so the smaller counts in particular should not be compared to the larger ones as though every row covers an identical window.

Read the counts honestly

These are counts of logged reports. A report enters the database when a trained spotter, a law enforcement officer, an emergency manager or a member of the public tells the National Weather Service that hail of a given size fell at a given place and time, and the office logs it. That is a fundamentally different quantity from three other things people assume it means.

• It is not a count of hailstorms. A single storm crossing a populous county can generate a dozen separate reports from a dozen locations.
• It is not a count of insured losses. Nothing in the database knows whether a roof was hit, whether a claim was filed, or whether anything was paid.
• It is not a clean measure of where hail falls. Reporting density tracks population, straightforwardly and strongly. St. Louis County has more people than Warren County by an enormous margin, and more people means more phones, more spotters and more reports from the same weather. A rural county with genuinely more hail can log fewer reports than a suburban one with less.

So what is the table good for? Shape, not precision. It says that hail of roughly quarter to golf ball size is an ordinary recurring feature of the weather over this metro rather than a rare shock, and that stones large enough to break a shingle outright rather than merely bruise it do reach these counties. For a homeowner deciding whether it is worth having a roof looked at after a storm, that is the only thing the table needs to establish.

When it happens

Hail season here is short and sharp. Roughly fifty six percent of the metro's annual hail reports fall in April and May, per NOAA Storm Prediction Center climatology for the St. Louis forecast area. That has a practical consequence: the roofing market in this town is seasonal in a way that produces a large temporary population of out of town crews every spring, which is the subject of a separate page.

The 2025 season in Missouri

Last year was not a normal year in this state, and the figures are worth naming precisely with their sources rather than passed around unattributed.

• The Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance reported 253,241 catastrophic claims from the 2025 season, with more than 2.9 billion dollars paid, around 83 percent of it residential. Source: insurance.mo.gov.
• The May 16 2025 St. Louis tornado was rated EF3 by the National Weather Service, with estimated winds of 152 miles per hour, beginning near Clayton at 2:41 in the afternoon and tracking 22.6 miles. Its maximum width of 1.8 miles made it the widest tornado recorded in this region in the NWS record, which begins in 1950. Five people were killed. NCEI puts the damage at 1.6 billion dollars.
• FEMA disaster declaration DR-4877-MO covered St. Louis City and St. Louis County, with 9,427 individual assistance approvals, 58.13 million dollars in individual and household program payments and 105.01 million dollars in public assistance.
• The Insurance Information Institute, citing NOAA Storm Prediction Center data, ranked Missouri fifth nationally for major hail events in 2025, at 253. Separately and on a different measure, State Farm ranked Missouri second in the country for hail claim dollars paid. Those are two different statistics from two different sources and they should not be added together or merged into one sentence.