When a Handyman Can Fix Your Roof, and When He Cannot

Half the roofing work in Austin is not a roof job. It is a slipped shingle, a
boot flashing gone brittle, a nail pop weeping in one spot, a gutter pulling off
the fascia. For that kind of thing a full roofing company is expensive and often
slow, and plenty of people go looking for a handyman instead.
The question everyone asks is whether that is a bad idea. In Texas, the
honest answer is that the law does not distinguish between the two at all.

There is no legal line between a handyman and a roofer here

Texas licenses plumbers. It licenses electricians. It licenses air conditioning
contractors. It does not license roofers. There is no state exam,
no trade registration and no board that could take anything away. A man with a
ladder and a business card is, legally, exactly as much a roofing contractor as a
company with twelve trucks.

That is not an opinion, and the state register shows how little the title costs.
81 roofing and sheet metal contractors hold
an active Texas sales tax permit at an Austin-area address — and
44 of those 81, 54%, first
reported sales to the state within the last three years. More than half of
the registered roofing companies in this metro are newer than the roof on most of
the houses they are quoting.

So “is he a real roofer?” is not a question with a documentary
answer in Texas. The useful questions are different ones, and they are below.

The work a handyman does never shows up in the permit record

The City of Austin permit archive is the backbone of this site — every
cost figure here comes out of it. It is also the clearest evidence of where
handyman work sits, because of what it leaves out.

Filtering it to residential permits that are about the roof and nothing else
gives 600 jobs, and the filter discards anything
declared under $500. Below that there is no filing and no
record. Of the 600 that do appear:

256 of 600 — 43% —
came in under ten thousand dollars, and that is only the work big enough
to need a permit at all. The average across all 600 is $27,916, a
number dragged up by the 77 jobs over fifty thousand. Most roof
work in this city is small work.

When a handyman is genuinely the right call

• One leak, one spot, and you can see where. A single boot
  flashing, one lifted shingle, a popped nail. This is an hour of work and a
  roofing company will quote it like a site visit, because for them it is one.
• Gutters and fascia. Hanging, resealing, re-pitching. Most
  roofing companies subcontract this anyway.
• A tarp before a storm arrives, when nobody can get to you
  for three days and the weather is not waiting.
• Anything you would otherwise leave for six months because
  the quote for doing it properly is more than you want to spend right now. A
  cheap fix beats a slow leak every time.

When it is not, and this part is not negotiable

• Anything you intend to claim on insurance. An adjuster
  wants an itemised scope from a roofing contractor. A handyman invoice for
  “roof repair — $400” will not carry a hail claim, and once
  the repair is done the evidence is gone.
• Anything with a warranty attached. Shingle manufacturers
  void material warranties on installations by non-approved installers. If your
  roof is still under one, a handyman fix can cost you the warranty on the whole
  roof to save two hundred dollars.
• Anything structural. Sagging deck, rot in the sheathing,
  a rafter that has moved. That is not a roofing job either — it is a
  carpentry job with a roof on top.
• Anything that needs a permit. A re-roof does. Unpermitted
  roof work surfaces at the worst possible moment, which is when you sell.
• Steep, tall, or tile. Not a skill question, a fall
  question. Which brings us to the one thing that actually matters.

The only question that separates them in Texas

Not the licence, because there isn’t one. Insurance, and
specifically two policies that are not the same thing:

• General liability — covers damage to your house. A
  ladder through a window, a boot through a skylight, water in the ceiling
  because the roof was left open overnight.
• Workers’ compensation — covers the person on
  your roof. And Texas is effectively the only state where private
  employers are not required to carry it, so plenty of small operations
  here do not.

Roofing is one of the most dangerous trades there is and the work happens on
your property. If someone falls off your house and carries no workers’
compensation, the question of who pays does not go away on its own. A handyman
working alone may well have general liability and no workers’ comp, which
for a one-man job can be a reasonable answer — but you want to have asked,
not assumed.

Ask for the certificate of insurance, ask the agent to send it rather than the
contractor, and read the policy dates. That takes five minutes and it is the whole
of the difference between the two options, because the paperwork everyone talks
about does not exist.

What we would do

Get the small job quoted by both. A handyman for the hour of work, and one
roofing company for the same job. If the roofing quote is four times the price for
the same shingle, you have learned something. If it is close, take the one with the
insurance certificate and the permit history.

And for anything that is not small, skip the question entirely. The
77 permits over fifty thousand dollars in this city were not
handyman jobs, and nobody involved pretended otherwise.

Where these figures come from

Permit values and counts: City of Austin building permits, dataset
quv8-5ckq on data.austintexas.gov,
filtered to residential permits whose work description is a re-roof, roof
replacement or roof repair and nothing else, declared over $500.
Contractor count and start dates: the Texas Comptroller’s
Active Sales Tax Permit Holders
file. Licensing: Texas licenses plumbers, electricians and HVAC contractors at
state level and does not license roofing. Declared permit values are what the
contractor told the city the job was worth — not a quote, and the closest
public figure there is to what this work costs here.