While home insurance covers many aspects of your home from a variety of dangers, there are a few key exclusions and limitations to keep an eye on when it comes to your home insurance policy. Your home’s roof is one of the most expensive areas of your home to insure, as it is the most difficult and expensive to replace.

How to Insure Your Roof

Home insurance coverage is calculated based on the total replacement cost value of your home. This is not the same as its market value, or the amount you paid for the home. Instead, the total replacement cost value is how much it would cost to completely rebuild the home in case of a disaster, including building and material costs. The value of your roof should be calculated into this cost.

As long as the roof is properly calculated, your home insurance provider should provide compensation for a replacement or repairs if needed after a covered disaster.

What Does Home Insurance Cover for Your Roof?

Your roof is considered part of your dwelling coverage, which covers the physical home and its attached structures in case of fire, wind, hail, lightning, smoke, vandalism, explosions, falling objects and more. In other words, if lightning strikes your roof and causes a fire, you should be covered for damages and a possible replacement.

There are some limitations, however. Home insurance policies commonly have exclusions for damages caused by earthquakes. If your home’s roof caves in because of an earthquake, you may not be covered.

Insurers also will not cover damages to your roof if the damage is caused or made worse by negligence.

Say a storm with heavy rain and hail sweeps in, breaking through part of your roof and causing severe water damage. A claims adjuster from the insurance provider investigates the claim and discovers that you have not replaced missing shingles, leaving the roof vulnerable to a storm. This could affect how much compensation you receive, or even lead to your claim being denied.

Another exception is if you update your roof without notifying your insurer. Since your compensation will be based on your home’s initial replacement cost value, any changes that you do not add to the policy may not be covered because it was never calculated into the cost. If you do make any updates or changes to your roof, be sure to notify your insurer so that you can be properly covered in case of a disaster.

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