Consumer alerts

It sounds like generosity. It is an offence.

Texas Insurance Code §707.003 prohibits a contractor from paying, waiving, rebating or absorbing any part of your insurance deductible, and from advertising that they will. A "we'll eat your deductible" offer is not a discount — it usually means the invoice sent to your insurer will be inflated to cover the gap.

That misrepresentation is made using your claim and your name. The contractor leaves town. The policy is yours.

Your deductible is a term of your policy. Anyone promising to make it disappear is describing something they are not permitted to do — and telling you, in advance, exactly how much they are willing to misrepresent.

What you can lawfully do instead: ask about a documented payment plan. TDI recognises a written payment plan with a contractor as evidence relating to the deductible obligation. That is a real arrangement, not a vanishing act.

After a storm, someone will offer to handle your roof *and* negotiate your claim. In Texas that combination is prohibited.

Public insurance adjusters are licensed under Insurance Code chapter 4102. Section 4102.163 separately bars a roofing contractor from acting as a public adjuster on a property it is contracted to repair. The conflict is obvious once stated: the person negotiating how much your insurer pays would also be the person receiving it.

If someone offers to do both, they are either unaware of the law or untroubled by it. Neither is a good sign on your roof.

Ask directly: "Are you a licensed public adjuster, and are you also bidding the repair?" The answer should never be yes to both.

As hail losses mounted across North Texas, carriers moved large numbers of policies from replacement cost to actual cash value on the roof — or attached a roof payment schedule that steps the payout down for every year of roof age.

This usually arrives inside a renewal packet as an endorsement. Nobody rings to discuss it.

The practical effect: on a twenty-two thousand dollar roof replacement, an older roof under an ACV settlement can pay a fraction of the cost, with the remainder yours. Pair that with a percentage wind and hail deductible and a mid-sized loss can produce a payment near zero — while still recording a claim against your history.

Find your declarations page. Look for the word "roof" and the words "actual cash value". It takes two minutes and it is the single most consequential paragraph in the document.

Most Texas homeowners can recall a deductible figure. Many are recalling the wrong one.

Wind and hail is frequently a separate deductible, and it is frequently expressed as a percentage of your dwelling limit rather than a flat amount. TDI warns specifically that percentage deductibles can create substantial out-of-pocket costs, and that where a repair falls below the deductible the carrier pays nothing at all.

On a home insured for $300,000, a 2% wind and hail deductible is $6,000 — while the everyday deductible for a burst pipe might still be $1,000. Two numbers, one policy, different perils.

Do the multiplication now and write the dollar figure down. Most people have never once seen this number expressed in dollars, which is precisely why it lands so hard when it finally matters.

TDI advises storm victims to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage — covering openings, making temporary repairs, keeping receipts.

Do that. But photograph first.

Temporary repairs protect the property. Permanent repairs, made before the loss is documented, remove the evidence of what happened. Once the roof is replaced, the only surviving account of its prior condition is whatever somebody wrote down beforehand.

Date every photograph. Keep every receipt. A dated image taken before there is a dispute is worth many times the same image reconstructed afterwards — not because anyone is acting in bad faith, but because memory is not evidence and nobody else was writing anything down.