How we vet roofing contractors

Tier 1 · Hard filters

A contractor that fails any one of these is not featured. This filter alone excludes the great majority of contractors targeting tier-3 markets after storms.

• Hard filter

  Valid state license

  Active credential for the size and type of work the contractor advertises. Verified at the state board's portal. Where a state has no license (Texas), we substitute RCAT and local jurisdiction registration — see State licensing below.

• Hard filter

  $1M+ general liability

  Verified by phone with the agent listed on the Certificate of Insurance. We do not accept screenshots or stale PDFs. The agent confirms coverage is in force.

• Hard filter

  Workers' compensation

  Where state law requires it (most states, at 3+ employees). Verified the same way as general liability — call the carrier's agent.

• Hard filter

  Clean public records

  No serious court judgments and no unresolved mechanics liens. We check state court systems, the county recorder, and PACER for federal matters.

• Hard filter

  Real physical office in market

  No UPS Stores, no virtual addresses, no recently-relocated entries from out of state. This single filter excludes most storm-chasers.

Tier 2 · Weighted scoring

Contractors that clear Tier 1 are scored across seven dimensions. Scores are normalized to 100 and translated to a letter grade. A and B graded contractors appear in the article body; C-grade is below the fold with the score disclosed; below C is excluded.

• Online reputation

  25%

  Velocity, reviewer history, language patterns, owner response patterns, distribution shape, cross-platform consistency. We don't weight the star average alone.

• Local presence depth

  15%

  In-market HQ, in-market branch with warehouse, or adjacent-county HQ with documented service area. Tier 1 sets the floor; this scores depth above it.

• Manufacturer certifications

  15%

  Top tier (GAF Master Elite, Owens Corning Platinum, CertainTeed SELECT ShingleMaster) weighted heavily. Marketing-tier credentials weighted near zero.

• Local supplier accounts

  15%

  Confirmed running accounts at the local branch (ABC Supply, SRS, Beacon, Allied, regional yards), verified by phone to the supply branch.

• Permit-pulling history

  10%

  Last three years of permits filed with the county or city building department, where public records exist.

• Phone-call rubric

  10%

  Standardized 30-point rubric across communication, transparency, sales pressure, technical knowledge, COI willingness, permit willingness.

• Warranty structure

  10%

  Manufacturer + workmanship + system. We cap credited workmanship-warranty length at 1.5x the operator's verified tenure under the same ownership — a 25-year warranty from a 3-year-old LLC is credited at 4.5 years, not 25, because business continuity is the actual gate on whether the warranty gets honored.

Online reputation, in detail

The single largest input to the score, and the one most often misread. We score six sub-criteria: velocity (steady accumulation vs. spikes), reviewer-account history (long-tenured accounts count more), language patterns (specific to the job vs. templated), negative-review handling (professional engagement vs. silence), distribution shape (a perfectly uniform 5-star distribution is statistically improbable), and cross-platform consistency (sharp divergence between platforms is a flag).

The phone-call rubric

We call every contractor we feature. The rubric is six dimensions of five points each, normalized to 100: communication clarity, transparency, sales pressure (scored inversely), technical knowledge, willingness to provide COI, willingness to pull permits in their own name. We publish the duration, date, and resulting score on every contractor profile.

Tier 3 · Context flags (disclosed, not scored)

These signals matter for reader judgment but we deliberately exclude them from the composite score. Some are too lossy to weight fairly; some require homeowner context to interpret.

• Years in business

  Cross-referenced for prior LLCs under the same owner. A 'new' LLC with five dead LLCs behind it is disclosed.

• BBB complaint history

  Treated as a public-records source for filed complaints. We don't weight BBB accreditation status or letter grade — both are partly pay-to-play.

• Subcontracting model

  W-2 crews vs. subcontracted vs. hybrid. Disclosed for transparency.

• Storm-event correlation

  Was the LLC formed within twelve months of a major local hail or wind event? Flagged for reader judgment.

• Peer reputation

  Once 2-3 contractors are vetted, we ask each one which others in the market do good work. Sources protected.

• Prior entity history

  Secretary of State filings showing the same operator behind multiple successive LLCs.

How the score is assigned

Composite scores are assigned editorially by the publisher, not generated by an algorithm. The published rubric on this page — Tier 1 hard filters, Tier 2 weights, Tier 3 disclosed flags — is what the editor uses to assign each contractor a score. The score then maps to a letter grade against a fixed threshold: 80 and above is A, 65 and above is B, 50 and above is C, below 50 is excluded.

We do this because automated scoring would force false confidence onto dimensions where the underlying data is qualitative — a phone call, an editorial read of review content, the substance of a customer's review. Publishing the rubric and applying it consistently is the audit trail. An algorithmic veneer on top of qualitative inputs would be misleading.

A consequence of this approach: the same contractor would not necessarily get the same composite under a different editor. We accept that. The Tier 1 hard filters are binary and reproducible across editors; the Tier 2 weighted dimensions narrow the range; editorial judgment then assigns the specific number. We re-grade when new data comes in or when the methodology changes.

When a dimension isn’t measurable

Some Tier 2 dimensions can’t be measured for every contractor in every market. County permit data isn’t published in some Arkansas and Oklahoma counties. A great small operator may have chosen not to pursue a top-tier manufacturer cert. A new market may not have local supplier branches that take phone calls.

When a dimension isn’t measurable, we exclude it from that contractor’s denominator and renormalize the remaining Tier 2 dimensions to 100. We disclose on the contractor’s profile which dimension was normalized out and why. The published score is always against the dimensions we actually had data for, never against a partially-blind composite that quietly buries the gap.

The storm-chaser problem

The single highest-impact failure mode for a homeowner in a tier-3 market is hiring a storm-chasing contractor. The pattern is well-known inside the trade and almost completely unknown to the homeowners on the receiving end of it. After a hail or wind event, contractors from out-of-state form temporary LLCs, lease short-term office space, hire door-to-door canvassers, and disappear within twelve to eighteen months — well before workmanship-warranty claims come due.

Our framework filters for this pattern explicitly. The Tier-1 physical-office filter is the single most powerful exclusion: most storm-chasers cannot meet it. Of the contractors that get past it, the storm-event correlation flag and the prior-entity check catch most of the rest.

What we cannot verify

Our framework is a screen, not a guarantee. The following are out of scope, and a homeowner should treat them as their own due diligence:

• The quality of any specific job once it is in progress.
• Whether a 10-year workmanship warranty will be honored.
• The character of the specific crew that arrives at a homeowner’s house.
• Whether the homeowner’s specific situation maps cleanly to a contractor’s typical job.
• The actuarial value of any given warranty.

State-by-state licensing

The Tier-1 license filter applies differently per state. Below is the framework we apply across the pilot corridor.

• ACLB

  Arkansas

  Residential Roofing Registration required for residential work over $2,000 (effective 2022). Commercial $50K+ requires a separate license.

  Verify: portal.arkansas.gov
  (501) 372-4661

• CIB

  Oklahoma

  Roofing Contractor Registration with $500K+ GL and workers' comp. Effective July 1, 2026, residential work additionally requires a Residential Roofing Endorsement.

  Verify: verifyroofing.cib.ok.gov
  (405) 521-6550

• RCAT (voluntary)

  Texas

  No state license. We strongly prefer RCAT-credentialed operators (~300 statewide). §707 makes deductible-absorption illegal — automatic disqualification.

  Verify: rcat.net
  (512) 251-7690