Methodology

Contractor listings

Listings are compiled primarily from publicly available business data (including Google Maps business profiles). We focus on businesses that appear to offer roofing or closely related exterior services. Obvious non-roofing businesses may be excluded from promotion or marked not eligible for indexing.

City pages show contractors associated with that metro or suburb based on address and market mapping. The five listings featured at the top of pilot city pages are ordered by Google rating, review volume, and listing completeness (phone, website, and services when present). That ordering is a starting point built from public data — not an endorsement, a vetting process, or paid placement.

Ratings and reviews

Star ratings, review counts, and star distributions come from third-party platforms (typically Google). We display them as published; we do not rewrite individual reviews or invent review themes without source text.

Claimed and verified listings

Contractors may claim a listing. After an ownership review, a listing may show as claimed or verified and can include owner-updated details. That review is about listing ownership and contact accuracy — not a guarantee of licensing, insurance, pricing, or workmanship.

The cost model

The roof cost calculator uses RooferDirectory’s own planning model. It starts from installed-cost bands per square foot for each roofing material, estimates your roof surface from living area, stories, and pitch, and then applies adjustments for regional labor rates, access, roof complexity, tear-off, penetrations, and a permit allowance.

The regional adjustment works at a state or multi-state level. Entering a ZIP code helps us pick the right region, but the model does not price individual ZIP codes, and it never will pretend to. The bands are checked against publicly available industry cost ranges and updated periodically; they are not built from actual quote data. Treat the output as a budgeting range — real bids depend on the specific roof, the season, and what a crew finds after tear-off.

Our source checks include the National Roofing Contractors Association's guidance that roof pricing varies by material, contractor, home size, location, local labor, and season, and that homeowners should compare three or four detailed proposals. We also review broader housing and claims-cost benchmarks for scale, but do not treat an insurance estimate or standardized national project as a local contractor quote.

Storm and weather data

Where available, we derive area-level weather context from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA/NCEI) NOAA historical storm-event records. Learn about the source agency at NOAA.gov. NOAA-created U.S. government source data is public domain. RooferDirectory's selection, aggregation, explanations and visual presentation are derivative analysis. RooferDirectory is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA.

What an event record means

A NOAA event record is not always a unique storm. One larger storm episode can contain several event types, multiple counties, and multiple tornado segments. We therefore label raw totals as event records. Newer pipeline metrics also count unique event days and retain NOAA event and episode identifiers so selected records can be audited back to their source.

Geography

The rebuilt pipeline maps every covered market to an explicit July 2023 U.S. Office of Management and Budget/Census Bureau Core Based Statistical Area or Metropolitan Division code. Cross-state statistical areas are limited to the directory page's state. Primary ranking markets cannot share a county; a refresh fails if an undeclared overlap appears. If two directory markets share one indivisible official geography, one is labeled as a local alias and excluded from national percentile calculations. County-level data is useful for regional context but cannot establish conditions at a street address. Forecast-zone records are not assigned to metro counties by name matching.

Verified history versus recent weather

The NCEI Storm Events Database is the reviewed historical layer and normally trails real time while reports are certified. A separate recent layer collects NOAA Storm Prediction Center preliminary hail, wind, and tornado reports plus active National Weather Service alerts. Preliminary reports can be revised and may include multiple observations of one storm. Alerts describe a threat area, not a confirmed event or property impact. Recent reports and active alerts are labeled separately from the certified historical archive.

Dates, damage, and historical coverage

NOAA's available event types and reporting practices changed over time. The earliest archive years do not contain every modern event category. Property-damage fields are broad estimates recorded at the time of an event; they are not adjusted for inflation and are not specific to roofs. “Generated” describes when RooferDirectory processed a snapshot. “Source through” describes the newest included event date. NOAA may later correct both recent and historical files.

Roof-relevant measures

Public comparisons use the underlying measures instead of a single 0–100 score. Historical tables show unique record days for hail, hail of at least 1 inch, wind, and tornado activity. Multiple records of the same type on the same calendar day count once. Reported magnitude is summarized with a 90th percentile so one extreme record does not define an area's history. These are RooferDirectory aggregations, not official NOAA ratings, forecasts, or property-level risk assessments.

Preliminary roof-weather signals

The recent layer labels reported hail of at least 0.75 inch as a reason to check the roof, and hail of at least 1 inch, wind of at least 58 mph, or a tornado report as a stronger inspection signal. Wind reports without a measured speed can still be flagged when their comments describe roof, shingle, tree, limb, or debris damage. Nearby reports within six hours are grouped into an “activity window.” That window is a browsing aid, not a claim that the reports came from one unique storm.

Refresh and quality controls

NOAA can revise any historical year, so the pipeline checks the complete source-file manifest rather than downloading only the current year. New source files are downloaded immutably, checked for HTTP and gzip integrity, validated against required columns, counted, and hashed. Outputs are written atomically and compared with the live dataset. Official geography is also versioned with its source checksum. Preliminary SPC files are retained by content hash and NWS alerts are stored as timestamped snapshots. A separate daily workflow validates freshness, required fields, report IDs, activity-window coverage, and the absence of score fields before opening a review pull request.

Important limits

The weather pages are historical planning context. They are not forecasts, certified weather reports, engineering inspections, insurance advice, proof that a property was struck, proof of damage, or a coverage determination. For certified weather records used in a claim or legal matter, use NOAA/NCEI's certified-data process and follow the requirements of the relevant insurer or authority. See the hail and wind history comparison for the current covered areas.

Questions

More homeowner FAQs: FAQ & glossary. About the operator: About. Contact: eyal@emberlabs.com.