Insurance Claims & Adjuster Disputes
How Carriers Use “Wear and Tear” Against Wind-Lifted Shingles
Wear and tear is excluded from every policy. Carriers apply it to wind damage by pointing at the roof’s age rather than the damage pattern.
Written by Nathaniel Davis, owner of Roof Gutter Now — a licensed exterior restoration contractor in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Updated August 2026
What this comes down to
Every policy excludes wear and tear, and every adjuster knows it. On an older roof it becomes the default explanation for damage that a storm actually caused.
Separating the two
Wear and tear is uniform and progressive: even granule loss, curling across whole slopes, brittleness everywhere. It does not respect wind direction.
Wind damage is directional and discrete. Lifted or creased tabs concentrate on the elevations facing the storm and along the rakes, where uplift pressure is highest. Sealant strips release cleanly rather than degrading gradually.
The documentation that separates them
Map damage by elevation and count it. A storm pattern shows a clear directional bias; wear does not. Pull the NOAA record for the date of loss and note the recorded gust at the nearest station. Photograph the sealant strip on lifted tabs — a clean release reads very differently from a strip that has crumbled with age.
Then corroborate with soft metals. Dented gutter aprons and bent vent caps on the same elevations establish that a wind and hail event occurred, whatever the age of the shingles.
Common questions
Can an old roof still have a valid claim?
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Yes. Age drives depreciation, not causation. The question is what caused the damage, and it is answered separately.
What if there is both wear and storm damage?
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Common, and the carrier owes for the storm portion. Documenting the directional pattern is what carves it out.
Does a NOAA report help?
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It establishes that a qualifying event occurred on the date of loss, which removes one line of argument entirely.
More on Insurance Claims & Adjuster Disputes
- Why Adjusters Call Creased Shingles “Mechanical Damage”
- The Repairability Test: Proving a Patch Will Destroy the Roof
- Overhead & Profit: Triggering the Three-Trade Requirement
- Xactimate RFG DRIP vs RFG DRIP+: Why the Code Changes Your Payout
- Ordinance & Law Coverage: Getting Drip Edge and Ice Barrier Paid
- Reading a Summary of Loss: RCV, ACV and the Net Claim Trap
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