Hail and the garage door: exposure, gauge and the claim

What we found

No standard rates a garage door for hail, and the standards body says so itself. DASMA (the Door and Access Systems Manufacturers Association) publishes the garage door industry’s technical data sheets. We searched its full index for a hail or dent rating and found none.

What exists instead is TDS #154, the DASMA Metal Gauge Chart. It is clear about its own limits: "metal gauge is only one function of the overall performance of a door assembly."

What the chart does give is steel thickness by gauge. 24-gauge bare steel measures 0.0209 inches and 27-gauge measures 0.0144 inches. That is a 45 percent difference in raw metal.

Exposure is where we could compute something real. NOAA’s Storm Events Database, filtered to hail for 2015 to 2025, shows 97,094 recorded events nationally. They cluster in a belt from Texas up through the Dakotas. Texas alone recorded 14,072.

The damage figure needs a firm warning. NOAA recorded a property-damage estimate for only 5,571 of those events, totaling about $11.5 billion. That is all property damage from the storm, not a garage door figure.

Is there a hail rating for garage doors? No. Here is how we checked

Roofing has UL 2218, an impact rating from Class 1 to Class 4. Insurers in hail-prone states use it for premium discounts. Someone buying a roof in Texas or Colorado can ask for a Class 4 shingle and get an answer. There is no matching question you can ask about a garage door.

We went through DASMA’s complete technical data sheet index, the same one behind every other DASMA citation on this site, looking for a hail, dent or cosmetic-impact rating. None exists. The closest document is TDS #154, the Metal Gauge Chart. It is a steel-thickness table, not a performance rating.

TDS #154 says so itself: "Industry research has shown that metal gauge is only one function of the overall performance of a door assembly."

It then points to other tests: "Structural performance is best determined by testing to a static air pressure standard such as ANSI/DASMA 108 … Additionally, standards such as ANSI/DASMA 102 for garage doors should be utilized to best assess overall door performance."

The three standards it names cover wind pressure (108), general door performance (102), and springs and balance parts (103). None tests for falling ice. For the wind side, see our page on garage door wind ratings.

HyreGarage analysis: the gap is likely not an oversight. A roof takes hail straight down across its whole surface. A garage door is one upright panel that hail hits at a shallower, wind-driven angle, over a smaller area.

The industry seems to have focused on wind-pressure and repeated-load testing, which decide whether a door fails in the storms that matter most. A dent rating is a real concern, but a lower-stakes one than a door blowing in.

How much hail does the US get?

About 8,827 recorded events a year. NOAA logged 97,094 hail events over the eleven years 2015 through 2025. Yearly counts ranged from 6,272 (2021) to 11,761 (2023), with no steady trend up or down.

Texas had more hail events than any other state: 14,072 over the period. Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Colorado came next. This is the well-known "hail alley," running from the Texas Panhandle and North Texas up through Kansas and Nebraska into the Dakotas. The same Great Plains storms also bring the region’s severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

In the ten states HyreGarage covers, two counties stand out. El Paso County, Colorado (the Colorado Springs area) recorded 809 hail events, the most of any county in those states.

Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth, in the Dallas–Fort Worth area) had the highest total recorded property damage of any county we looked at, about $1.4 billion.

9.5% of all hail events had a reported size (stone diameter) of 2.00 inches or more.

The National Weather Service gives spotters a chart that compares hail to familiar objects; we retrieved it from a Weather Forecast Office publication.

On it, 2 inches is "Hen Egg Size," between "Golf Ball Size" (1¾ inches) and "Tennis Ball Size" (2½ inches).

The other 90.5% of events were smaller than a hen’s egg. Small hail is far more common, but much less likely to mark a steel door than larger stones.

HyreGarage analysis: if you live in the Colorado Springs or Fort Worth area, hail is a real, repeat risk for your door. After a big storm, check the panels, then read our guide to garage door repair before you call anyone.

What we could not find, and so did not write

Any hail damage or claims figure for garage doors alone. This is the number readers most want, and no federal or industry source we found breaks it out.

NOAA’s damage field is per storm, not per part of the house. We did not find, and did not invent, an insurance source that separates garage doors in hail claims.

A hail test result for any door product. We reported what DASMA’s index does and does not contain. We did not test a door. We make no claim about which gauge or maker does better in a real hailstorm. That would need the impact testing DASMA itself says does not exist for this.

Whether NOAA’s 2025 data is final. NOAA revises Storm Events files as reports are finalized. The 2025 file we used was the newest on the retrieval date. Later revisions could shift the 2025 count slightly.