What is a percentage hail deductible and do I have one?

A percentage hail deductible means your wind and hail deductible is calculated as a percentage of your dwelling coverage instead of a flat dollar amount. To find out if you have one, pull out your declarations page, usually the first page or two of your policy, and look under deductibles. If the wind and hail line shows a percentage instead of a dollar figure, that is it.

The reason this matters is the math. On a house insured for $600,000, a 2% hail deductible is $12,000. That is what comes out of your pocket before the policy pays anything toward your roof. Plenty of people are carrying a number like that while budgeting for the $1,000 deductible they remember choosing years ago.

You probably never chose the percentage version. A lot of Colorado policies moved to this structure at renewal over the past several years, because hail is the most expensive thing that happens to houses here and carriers have been shifting more of that cost to homeowners. The change shows up in the renewal paperwork, which almost nobody reads line by line.

So do the arithmetic once. Take your dwelling limit, multiply it by the percentage, and write that number down somewhere you will see it. If it is more than you could handle in a bad June, that is worth a conversation before storm season, not after. There is more on how roof coverage works on our hail and your deductible page, including two other things worth checking while you have the declarations page out.