Which parts of your roof are due, and which are not

A roof is several parts on several clocks. The shingle, the flashing, the vents and the gutters each wear at their own pace, and on a house that has been re-covered once already, some of those clocks started long before the surface did. Give it the year the house was built and what has been replaced since, and it will show where each part stands.

Use this to decide what to look at, not what to buy. It sets ages against the service lives the trade generally expects. A roof over a shaded, well-vented attic can outlast the range by a decade; one over a hot, sealed attic can fall short of it by the same. Exposure and installation matter more than the calendar.

Nothing entered here leaves your browser. There is no form and no record.

Set the house, then set what has been done

When was the house built? What is on the roof now?

What has already been replaced?

Leave a row on Original if it was never replaced, or if a previous owner may have done it and no paperwork came with the house. Not knowing is a legitimate answer and the tool treats it as one.

Roof covering Flashing at walls, valleys and penetrations Underlayment and ice-and-water shield Gutters and downspouts Attic ventilation Skylights (if you have them) Chimney crown, cap and masonry (if you have them) Fascia and soffit Siding or exterior cladding Window seals

Roofs rarely give out in the open. They give out at the seams. Which is why flashing, not shingle, is the item most worth knowing the age of.

Tap to enlarge

1 Ridge caps. Thin, fully exposed, and the first course to lift.
2 The field. Granule loss is the honest measure of how much life is left.
3 Valleys. One channel taking the runoff of two slopes, all year round.
4 Flashing. At the chimney, and where the garage roof meets the wall of the house.
5 The vent boot. Small, rubber, and on a much shorter clock than everything around it.
6 Eaves. Where water that has backed up at the edge gets under the courses.

Why the shingle date is not the roof date

When a roof is laid over the previous one, the surface looks new and the underlayment beneath it is whatever was there before. The first line of defense resets. The second does not. That is why this page asks about underlayment separately, and why on a great many houses the honest answer is that no one knows when the deck was last exposed.

Flashing works the same way. Sealing the existing metal at the chimney and the walls is faster than replacing it, and it happens often enough that a roof from five years ago can be carrying flashing from thirty years ago. If you are told the roof is recent, the question worth asking is whether the flashing is.

Use this page

This tool may be copied or linked freely, with credit to mdvaroofing.com. If it saves someone in Maryland or Virginia from replacing a roof that only needed its chimney reflashed, that is what it is for.

Already have quotes? The quote comparison puts up to three of them side by side, line by line.