Insuring a Home With an Older Roof

Corrections to this page (16)

We publish these rather than editing quietly. Our corrections policy explains how we handle errors.

1. August 30, 2026 — Our FAQ told every Mississippi reader they had no statutory protection. Asked whether an insurer can drop you for roof age, it named Florida and then said that everywhere else roof age is ordinary underwriting. Our own table two sections above says Mississippi's statute is the broader of the two — no age threshold at all, reaching cancellation as well as denial. The correction had reached the table and the flag box under it and not the question a reader with that exact problem actually lands on.
2. August 30, 2026 — We told readers that several states now require an insurer to hand over the aerial image that got them non-renewed. In most states no statute does. Indiana and Georgia require it in the notice from 1 January 2027, Louisiana restricts what an insurer may rely on, and Tennessee's disclosure duty is scoped to claim decisions rather than non-renewals. We had already retracted this claim on our roof-denial and aerial-imagery pages; it stayed live here, in the takeaway box and in the action step, sending readers to spend a short notice window demanding a right they did not have.
3. August 30, 2026 — We told readers the mortgage-side floor on replacement-cost roof coverage was gone, without the date that decides whether it is gone for them. The 2026 change governs what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accept at loan origination. On a loan already written it is the servicer who decides, and servicers have until 1 January 2027. Most readers of this page already have a mortgage, so we gave the wrong half of the rule to the majority of our own audience. This is the fourth round in which this correction has failed to reach every surface.
4. August 30, 2026 — Two sentences said a roof payment schedule percentage is filed and unarguable, with no qualification at all. Filing applies to admitted carriers; surplus lines insurers file neither forms nor rates, and a homeowner declined by the standard market over roof age is the reader most likely to be with one. Separately, even where the percentage is fixed, the roof age recorded and the scope of what is being replaced remain contestable. Both limiters were in the table and in neither the body prose nor the FAQ.
5. August 30, 2026 — Our search-record section still denied the existence of a filed roof depreciation schedule, four rows above a worked example that prices a settlement from exactly such a schedule. Nevada's was located on 25 August and the entry should have gone then; the withdrawal was applied to the table and not to the registry, and the registry is what the reader is invited to check us against. A second entry in the same section treated carrier guidelines as unobtainable everywhere, while its own evidence line recorded Missouri's filing requirement — a records request some readers can actually make, and we were telling them not to bother.
6. August 26, 2026 — Correcting the Alabama half of the correction above. We read West Virginia's bulletin on the department's own site on 26 August 2026 and every word of that entry holds for West Virginia. We have never read Alabama's. The Alabama Department of Insurance publishes Bulletin 2025-03 as a scanned PDF with no machine-readable text on both of its websites. What we described as the bulletin's contents — and put in quotation marks in the table — came from a compliance vendor's summary. We cannot vouch for any of it, the quotation marks are gone, and the row now says only that the bulletin exists. Correcting one error by asserting a second unverified claim is the failure this notice exists to record.
7. August 25, 2026 — Correcting the correction above. In retracting the HB 815 material we wrote that the statute “limits it expressly to steep-slope roofs”. The word “slope” does not appear anywhere in Fla. Stat. 627.7011. Slope was the dead bill's subject, and in correcting ourselves for having read that bill as law we re-attributed its subject matter to the live statute — the third generation of the same error on the same table. The statute protects “a residential structure with a roof that is less than 15 years old” with no roof-type qualifier.
8. August 25, 2026 — We listed the six categories of “authorized inspector” under Fla. Stat. 627.7011(5)(a) without the words that govern them: the inspector must be one “who is approved by the insurer”. We also omitted that roofing contractors are named, and that the sixth category is anyone the insurer recognizes. A reader could have commissioned an inspection the insurer had never approved.
9. August 25, 2026 — We described Tennessee's aerial-imagery bulletin as conditional on disclosure. It is conditional only for underwriting files. For a claim denial or settlement offer it states flatly that failing to give the policyholder copies of the imagery “constitutes an unfair claims practice in violation of Tenn. Code Ann. § 56-8-105”. That is the most actionable line in the bulletin and we had the opposite.
10. August 25, 2026 — We described Alabama's and West Virginia's bulletins as imposing notification duties on insurers using aerial imagery in underwriting. Both are advisory (“should”, “is best practice”), both cover claims handling as well as underwriting, and both recommend giving the homeowner copies of the images — which we had not mentioned. [The Alabama half of this notice is itself withdrawn — see 26 August 2026 below. We had not read that bulletin and could not vouch for any of it.]
11. August 25, 2026 — Our FAQ said a Florida insurer cannot “drop” you over a roof under 15 years old. The statute bars refusing to issue or renew; it does not reach a mid-term cancellation. Subsection (6) also carves out mobile home policies and rejection “for other lawful reasons”.
12. August 25, 2026 — We reported being unable to find a publicly filed roof depreciation schedule anywhere, and used percentages of our own instead. The Nevada Division of Insurance publishes one in its consumer document library — American Family form HO 88 02 01 14, a full percentage-payable table by roof age and covering type. Our invented figures were roughly twice as harsh as the filed schedule.
13. August 24, 2026 — Correcting the correction above. We described Miss. Code 83-5-26 as carrying a 15-year threshold, a five-year useful-life test, an inspection at the homeowner's expense and an “authorized inspector” definition, and labeled the table “verified against the enacted text”. None of that is in the enacted statute. It is in the Senate-passed draft of SB 2130, which the House amended before passage. The enacted section is two subsections and bars cancelling a policy or binder, or denying coverage, solely because of the age of the roof — with no age threshold and no inspection process. This is the same error as the HB 815 entry above, made inside the correction that fixed it: a bill draft read as law, and a verification asserted that had not happened.
14. August 23, 2026 — We described Fla. Stat. 627.7011 as amended by HB 815 with effect from 1 July 2026, and said this had been verified against the statute. HB 815 died in committee on 13 March 2026, as did its Senate companion. Three claims rested on that dead bill.
15. August 23, 2026 — We stated that Florida is the only state with a statutory roof-age rule. Mississippi Code 83-5-26 has been in force since 1 July 2024. Our description of that statute was also wrong — see the entry below.
16. August 23, 2026 — We attributed a depreciation method to ISO form HO 04 93. That form requires actual cash value but does not define it, specify a method, or mention age or condition. The mechanism is our reading and is now marked as such.