Texas Has a Fall Hail Season. In DFW It's About a Twelfth the Size of Spring.

Search "DFW hail season" and you'll get the same line from a dozen roofing sites: North Texas has a second severe season in the fall, when the first strong cold fronts run into air that's still summer-humid. We said a version of it ourselves last week.

It's true. The shape is real. What nobody puts next to it is the size.

So we counted. The numbers below come from the Storm Prediction Center's hail report database, 2015 through 2024, filtered to reports of 1 inch or larger — roughly where hail starts showing up in roof claims. These are spotter and NWS reports, so they lean toward places where people live. For a roofer, that's the right bias: a stone that falls on an empty pasture isn't a lead.

The ten-year average, by season

DFW metro counties, average hail reports ≥1" per year (2015–2024):

March and April alone carry about 51% of the Metroplex's hail. The four fall months carry about 8%. Per month, spring runs roughly twelve times the fall rate.

Statewide the picture is the same. Texas averages about 1,073 qualifying reports a year, and only about 57 of them land between September and December. October and November together average 16 and 13 reports — across the entire state.

So yes, there's a fall bump. But "second season" makes it sound like a smaller copy of April. It isn't. It's a handful of storm days a year, spread over four months, landing somewhere in a state bigger than France.

For comparison, the Denver metro averages 2.1 fall reports a year. DFW's fall is five times busier than Colorado's. It's still not a season you can staff for.

What an average of 10.8 actually means

An average hides how lumpy this is. Ten or eleven reports a year across a multi-county metro could be one legitimate storm day that tags a few neighborhoods, a scatter of marginal inch-hail cores along a front, or close to nothing at all. Reports also cluster: one decent cell can generate five of them on a single evening.

Plan on it the way you'd plan on a Gulf hurricane: have a response ready, don't build payroll around it. The roofer who keeps a canvass crew on salary through October waiting for a fall hail day is making a bet the ten-year record doesn't support.

The fall fronts do bring wind, and wind doesn't need a stone to take shingles off a street. That's a separate lane — we made the case in the San Antonio wind piece — and it's worth having a plan for. But it's also event-driven. You can't schedule it either.

The inventory you already have is spring's

Here's what actually matters in October: the spring was enormous.

By hail report count, Tarrant County was the #3 hail county in the United States in 2025 and is #2 so far in 2026. Dallas County sits at #6 this year and Parker at #9. Denton and Collin both rank in the national top ten over the last decade. DFW averages 23 reports a year of 2-inch-plus stones — about three times the Denver metro's count.

Most Texas homeowner policies want a hail claim reported inside roughly a year of the date of loss. The policy language governs and it varies, but lay that rule of thumb against the 2026 calendar and the spring storms are all still live:

The mechanics of that closing-window lane are in the 12-month clock. The short version for DFW: a lot of the spring backlog from the busiest hail metro in the country is still sitting there while crews wait for a fall event that averages under three reports a month.

The catch is the one we covered in the 2% deductible piece. On a home insured at $350,000, a 2% wind/hail deductible is $7,000 out of the homeowner's pocket before the carrier pays anything — and an older roof settled at ACV can leave the claim barely worth filing. A spring backlog in North Texas isn't a list of every address under the swath. It's the subset where the roof age, the depreciation, and the deductible still leave the homeowner a reason to call you back. Score for that before you route anybody.

Winter changes the channel, not the list

December in Dallas loses the sun around 5:25 p.m. Dallas's solicitor permit allows home solicitation from 9 a.m. to sunset, Monday through Saturday, with ten holidays blacked out — we laid out the city-by-city rules in the door-knocking permit post. That leaves a short daylight window, most of it during working hours when the two-income household you need isn't home.

So the fall and winter work shifts toward mail, email, and manual dials. That's exactly where Texas got stricter: since September 2025, marketing texts count as regulated telephone solicitation under state law, and plaintiff firms have noticed. If your winter plan is "text the backlog," read the 2026 texting rules first. General information, not legal advice.

What to do with October–February in DFW

1. Work the 2026 spring backlog by storm date, oldest first. March storms close first. Filter by roof age and home value against the 2% deductible so you're not dialing claims that won't pencil for the homeowner.
2. Keep a fall response plan, not a fall crew. Know which ZIPs you'd hit if an October front drops a real core, and how you'd reach them in 24 hours. Don't pay for idle doors waiting on it.
3. Get your paperwork done in January, not March. Solicitor permits, sales tax certificates, and the city-by-city registration list take days to process. The Metroplex's biggest two months start March 1, about two months before Colorado's season even gets going.
4. Sign in winter, install in spring. A contract signed in December fills your March calendar, which is the one month every competitor walks into with a cold list.

Run the number

Say you hold a territory at $699 a month through the five slow months. That's $3,495. A DFW insurance re-roof at an illustrative $18,000 and a 30% gross margin is about $5,400 of gross profit — one signed job covers the whole five months about 1.5 times over. Illustrative only: your ticket, your margin, your close rate, and nothing here promises anybody a contract. Put your own figures into the cost-per-job calculator before deciding.

The short version

North Texas does get a fall hail bump. In DFW it averages about 11 reports a year across four months, against about 67 in March and April alone. Don't staff for it. Work the spring backlog that's still inside the claim window, filter it hard against the 2% deductible, move winter outreach onto channels that are compliant after dark, and have your permits filed before March 1.

See what radar-estimated hail fell this year on the Central Texas hail map, and check which cities are still open on the territory map. One roofer per city gets it, and the roofer holding it in February is the one holding it when March hits.