‘It Was Nuts’: The Extreme Tests that Show Why Hail Is a Multibillion-Dollar Problem

The scars left on houses look like shotgun blasts, sometimes. In the aftermath of major storms, Andrew Shick, owner and chief executive of Illinois-based firm Roofing USA, has driven through suburbs blasted by hail and been left stunned by the damage.

Earlier this year, he visited a farm complex in western Illinois where roofs, even sturdy metal ones, were left pockmarked and perforated after 3-inch balls of ice fell from the sky. “It was nuts,” he recalls. There were baseball-sized holes in the lawn, even. “I’d never seen that before.”

Shick has been in the roofing business for several years now. He says it feels to him as though hailstorms are getting worse. Certainly, the damage caused by hail is increasingly expensive to repair, thanks to inflation. Insurers are adjusting their policies to require higher deductibles from those affected by hail damage. “A lot of the customers that I’m running into have had no idea that their policies changed—until hail hits their roof,” says Shick.

There’s no denying that hail is getting really, really expensive. In 2024, hail damage in the US cost more than damage from hurricanes and floods put together. That year, hail-related expenses were estimated to have reached well into the tens of billions of dollars, probably around $40 billion. Just 15 years ago, the annual cost of hail damage was less than $1 billion, says Tanya Brown-Giammanco, director of disaster and failure studies at NIST, a nonregulatory agency that works on standards and benchmarks for a wide range of products. On top of the inflation problem, more people are moving to hail-prone areas of the US.

Hail forms when currents of rising air in thunderstorms carry raindrops upwards to chilly parts of the storm, where they freeze. The pellets then grow as they come into contact with more moisture, which freezes on their surface. When they get too heavy to be held up by the air, they fall as hailstones.

While data suggests that severe hailstorms have become more frequent in the US in recent years, no one is quite sure if or how climate change will affect hail going forward. And there’s still a surprising amount we don’t know about hail and how it falls through the air. Companies increasingly market hail-resistant roofing products because homeowners are under rising pressure to harden their properties against these meteorological bombardments. But when hailstones the size of your fist are raining down on your roof, is there anything you can do to save it?

Most people would despair if giant hail pummeled their home. Not Becky Adams-Selin. Last summer, 3-inch wide stones smashed into her property in Nebraska, damaging the roof. As soon as the storm was over, Adams-Selin, principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a research company, raced outside to gather up samples. She still has some of the stones she collected in her freezer. “I was like, ‘I’ve got more data!’” she says.