How often should you have your roof inspected, and what does an inspection cover?

Once a year on a roof under fifteen, twice a year after that, and always following a wind or hail event in your area. Autumn is the better single slot in Maryland because it puts any repair in before the freeze-thaw cycles that widen every small opening. Add an inspection before listing a house and before a policy renewal on a roof past twenty, since roof age is increasingly what drives a carrier decision here.

Ours costs nothing. The inspection, the measurement and the photo report are free and yours to keep whether or not you hire us, and there is no inspection fee and no consultation invoice. Paid alternatives exist for different purposes: the roof section of a home inspection is part of that inspection fee, and a licensed engineer forensic report for a disputed claim runs into the hundreds and is paid by you. What you should never pay for is a contractor coming to look at a roof he hopes to sell.

Broken sealant bonds first, because that is what wind actually does. An inspector lifts tabs by hand across each plane to see whether they are still bonded to the course below, and looks for the sharp horizontal crease left where a shingle folded back and reseated. Then the edges and corners, where uplift is highest: bent drip edge, a wavy rake line, ridge caps lifted at one end. Then everything that is not the roof — fencing, screens, siding, gutters — because damage elsewhere corroborates that something happened.

Partly, and it is genuinely useful on a roof that is too steep, too high or too brittle to walk safely. Aerial photography documents missing and displaced material well and produces imagery that makes a claim legible. What it cannot do is lift a shingle to test the seal, feel a soft deck underfoot or inspect the underside of the sheathing from the attic, and broken seals are the most common wind damage there is. Treat a drone as a camera, not as the whole inspection.

Yes, separately from the general home inspection, if the roof is past about fifteen years or the general inspector flags anything. A home inspector assesses the whole house and typically looks at the roof from a ladder or the ground; a roofing contractor walks the planes, lifts material and checks the attic. The difference matters because roof age drives both the insurance position and a five-figure future cost, and both are things to know before closing rather than after.

You get the report and we go away. A meaningful proportion of the roofs we look at do not need anything doing, and saying so in writing is the point of putting the finding on paper rather than in a conversation. It also gives you a dated baseline: a photographed record of the roof today makes the next storm claim considerably easier to argue, because the before is already documented.