Short answer: No Colorado statute sets a deadline for reporting hail damage to your own insurer — your policy does, and most ask for notice promptly. Suing your insurer is different: that is a contract action with a three-year limit under C.R.S. 13-80-101(1)(a). The widely published two-year figure is the tort statute, C.R.S. 13-80-102.
After the storms that crossed the south metro this August, this is the question we get most: how long do I actually have?
Search it and you'll find roughly a dozen Colorado roofing blogs with the same answer — two years, sometimes framed as "Colorado's statute of limitations for property damage." Some of them then tell you your policy might only give you six or twelve months, which is a different thing again. It's confusing because there are genuinely two clocks, and most of what's published collapses them into one.
Here's each one separately.
What deadline does Colorado law set for filing a hail claim?
None. There is no Colorado statute that sets a deadline for reporting a loss to your own insurance company.
That obligation comes from your policy. Standard homeowner's forms require the policyholder to give notice of a loss promptly, or "as soon as practicable," and to cooperate in the investigation. What that means in practice, and how strictly a given carrier applies it, varies — which is why nobody selling you a roof can tell you your deadline. Your declarations page and your carrier can. That's a five-minute phone call and it's the correct first step.
What we can tell you is why waiting is genuinely expensive, and it isn't a legal reason. Hail damage doesn't announce itself. A bruised shingle looks fine from the ground for months. But the further you get from a storm date, the harder it becomes to establish which storm did it — and after a summer like this one, with reported hail in Douglas County on August 15 and again on August 26, "which storm" stops being a formality. Documentation gets weaker with time. The claim doesn't get easier.
Isn't the deadline two years?
Two years is a real number from a real Colorado statute. It's just not the one that applies here.
C.R.S. 13-80-102 sets a two-year limitation for tort actions. That's the general property-damage limitation you'll see cited on roofing blogs, and if you were suing, say, a contractor for negligently damaging your roof, it would be the right one.
A claim against your own insurance company for failing to pay what your policy owes is not a tort. It's a breach of contract — the contract being the policy. And C.R.S. 13-80-101(1)(a) provides that all contract actions must be commenced within three years after the cause of action accrues. That's the number.
This matters more than a trivia correction. Someone relying on the two-year figure could conclude a claim is dead when it isn't.
Can my insurance policy give me less time than that?
Not for suing. This is the part almost nothing published on this topic mentions, and it's the strongest protection in the set.
C.R.S. 10-4-110.8(12)(a) provides that notwithstanding any provision of a homeowner's insurance policy requiring the policyholder to file suit within a period shorter than the applicable statute of limitations, a homeowner may file suit within the full statutory period.
C.R.S. 10-4-110.8(12)(b) goes further, at the insurer: on and after January 1, 2014, an insurer shall not issue or renew a homeowner's insurance policy that requires the policyholder to file suit in a shorter period than the applicable statute of limitations.
So if you're reading an older policy with a one-year suit provision in it, Colorado's legislature has addressed that directly. Colorado's federal district court has applied subsection (12) to exactly that situation — a policy's one-year limit on bringing suit, held not to bar the homeowner's breach-of-contract and statutory bad-faith claims (Schniedwind v. American Family Mutual Insurance Co., 157 F. Supp. 3d 944 (D. Colo. 2016)).
Note the boundary carefully: subsection (12) is about filing suit. It does not rewrite your policy's notice-of-loss provision, and it is not a licence to sit on a claim.
So what should I actually do after a hailstorm?
In this order:
- Write down the date. Not "sometime in August." The specific date of the storm you think hit your house. If you don't know, county-level storm reports from the National Weather Service will narrow it down — we keep a county-by-county record at our hail history page precisely because most homeowners can't recall the date six weeks later.
- Look at your soft metal. Gutters, downspouts, metal roof vents, the AC fins. Aluminum dents at a smaller stone size than asphalt bruises at. If your gutters are clean, your roof most likely is too. This is free and takes two minutes from the ground.
- Call your carrier and ask two questions: what does my policy require for notice of loss, and what's my deductible. Not your roofer. Your carrier.
- Get the roof looked at from the roof. Not from the driveway, not from a drone photo, not from a guy who knocked. Bruising is a texture you find with your hand as often as your eye.
- Get the findings in writing either way — including "your roof is fine."
What if a roofer tells me I have to decide today?
Then you've learned something useful about the roofer. The urgency is almost always manufactured out of exactly the confusion this page is about — collapsing "your policy asks for prompt notice" into "you have a deadline and it's now."
Colorado wrote a statute specifically about insurance-funded roofing contracts, and it gives you the opposite of urgency: C.R.S. 6-22-103(1)(f)(I) gives you 72 hours after signing to cancel and get your deposit back, and C.R.S. 6-22-104(1) gives you a second 72-hour window after you receive written notice that your claim was denied in whole or in part. We wrote up that statute in full, including the part most sites get wrong, here.
This is general information about Colorado statutes, not legal advice, and it is not a description of your policy. Your policy governs your claim. Read your declarations page, and call your carrier or an attorney about your specific situation.
Last verified: August 31, 2026. Statutory text read from the current Colorado Revised Statutes.