How to vet a St. Louis roofer

Start from what does not exist

There is no Missouri state roofing licence. Bills to create one have been filed repeatedly and have failed each time: SB 1022 in 2016, SB 153 in 2019 and SB 326 in 2021 all failed to become law. Anyone who tells you they are state licensed as a roofer in Missouri is either confused or hoping you are. What does exist is municipal: some cities and both St. Louis County and St. Charles County require a business licence to operate, and a handful of municipalities run their own contractor registration on top of that. Ballwin and Kirkwood are two of them.

So the check is not a licence lookup. It is three documents and four questions, and the documents matter more.

The three documents

• General liability certificateAsk for it to be sent to you directly by the insurance agency, not handed over as a PDF or a photograph. An agency-issued certificate is current by definition. A PDF is a picture of a document that may have lapsed. This single request removes a meaningful share of the market.
• Workers compensation certificateThis is the one people skip and it is the one that matters if somebody is injured on your property. Ask specifically whether the crew doing the work is covered by that policy or whether they are subcontracted and carry their own, and if it is the latter, ask for theirs too.
• The written scopeNot an estimate. A scope: what is being removed, what is going back on, what happens to the decking, what the flashing plan is, what is hauled away, and what triggers a change in price. If a company cannot produce this before you sign, the number on the estimate is not a price, it is an opening position.

The four questions that separate companies fastest

These are the ones where the answer, and the ease with which it arrives, tells you almost everything.

1. Are the crews employees or subcontracted? Neither answer is automatically wrong. Many good companies subcontract. The wrong answer is a vague one, because it usually means the person selling does not know who will be on your roof.
2. Will the person selling this job be on site while it is done? In a storm-heavy market, a great many salespeople never see a completed roof. If the answer is no, ask who the site contact is and get their name and number in writing.
3. What happens if the decking is soft? The good answer is a price per sheet written into the contract before work starts, plus a commitment to photograph it and call you. The bad answer is that they will let you know.
4. Who honours the workmanship warranty in four years, and how do I reach them? The manufacturer's warranty covers the shingle. The workmanship warranty covers the installation, and it is only as good as the company still existing and answering. Ask how many roofs the company did last year and how many callbacks it handled.

What to watch during the appointment itself

A proper visit takes forty minutes and involves a ladder. The roofer should go up, walk the planes, photograph the flashing, the valleys, the pipe boots and the ridge, and then go into the attic with a torch to look at the underside of the decking and check the ventilation. If nobody goes into the attic, nobody has looked at half the roof.

Ask for the photographs afterwards. A company that will not send you photographs of your own roof is a company that either did not take them or does not want you comparing them against the next quote.

If there is storm damage in the picture

Keep the roles straight, because Missouri law does. Under RSMo 407.725 a roofing contractor may not represent or negotiate on a homeowner's behalf on an insurance claim, so any contractor offering to run your claim for you is offering something the statute forbids. What a contractor can properly do is document the roof, provide a written scope with measurements and photographs, and meet the adjuster on site as the contractor doing the work. The claim, the policy and the correspondence remain yours.

If you genuinely want somebody representing you rather than the insurer, that role exists and it is a separate licensed profession: a public adjuster, licensed under Missouri chapter 325. They are not roofers and RSMo 325.055 bars them from doing the repair work on the same loss.

The full set of Missouri rules worth knowing →