Roof Repair in Onion Creek

The permit record for Onion Creek

Roof permits in Onion Creek, year by year

The busiest year on record for Onion Creek was 2018, with 11 permits. A spike inside one neighbourhood is almost always weather. Hail falls in a band a few miles wide, and the claims reach the permit desk three to six months behind it.

Careful with the headline number here: 51% of the roof permits in Onion Creek are commercial, not residential. Warehouses, offices and apartment blocks are a different trade with different materials and a different price list, so the neighbourhood total overstates how much house roofing goes on.

Flat commercial roofs and pitched residential ones share a name and almost nothing else — different materials, different failure modes, different warranties. In a mixed area like this it is worth asking a contractor which of the two they actually live on.

How concentrated the work is

Onion Creek covers 4.27 square miles, which works out at 11 roof permits per square mile — 79th densest of the 91 neighbourhoods with a measured area. The city average is 99.

Spread this thin, travel time starts to matter. Some crews put it in the quote and some absorb it, and the only way to know which is to ask. It is also why an inspection here may be slower to arrange than one closer in.

82nd by number of permits, 79th once you divide by area. The two figures tracking each other means the roof work here scales with the neighbourhood rather than concentrating anywhere in particular.

What the work in Onion Creek actually is

• Remodel — 32 (65%)
• Repair — 13 (27%)
• Addition and Remodel — 3 (6%)
• Addition — 1 (2%)

Nearly all of it is work on existing roofs. Onion Creek is looking after what it has, and in that kind of area the question worth asking a roofer is not the price but what happens if the decking underneath turns out to be soft.

What roof work costs in Onion Creek

11 residential roof permits in Onion Creek carry a declared value. The median is $22,269. Median rather than average on purpose: one gut renovation on a single street would drag an average somewhere useless, and in an area this size that happens easily.

That sits close to the $21,890 median across Austin neighbourhoods, so general city pricing is a fair starting point in Onion Creek.

Bear in mind what a declared value is: the number written on the application before the old roof came off. It tells you the league a job is in. It does not tell you what the invoice said.

When Onion Creek roofs come due

Since 2006 the city has permitted 1,647 new homes inside Onion Creek. 497 of them — 30% — went up between 2006 and 2010.

A cohort of 497 homes from 2006–2010 explains most of what happens on these streets. They aged together. If yours is one of them and still wears its first roof, the arithmetic has caught up with you.

Why Onion Creek has almost no roof history

Here is the oddity in the data. Onion Creek has 1,647 homes permitted since 2006 but only 49 roof permits in the entire record. That is not a gap in the file. It is what a genuinely new neighbourhood looks like: the roofs went on with the houses and have not needed touching since.

1,150 of those homes went up after 2010, which means most roofs here are under fifteen years old — inside the working life of an asphalt shingle in Central Texas, even allowing for what the sun and the hail take off it.

The practical upshot is that if something is wrong with your roof in Onion Creek, age is probably not the cause. Storm damage, a flashing detail done badly at build time, or a manufacturing fault under warranty are all likelier. Before you pay for a replacement, find out whether the builder’s warranty or the shingle manufacturer’s still covers it — on a house this young, one of them often does.

The year the sky picked this neighbourhood

Austin as a whole peaked in 2024. Onion Creek peaked in 2018 — a different year entirely. That year ran 255% above this neighbourhood’s own average, which is the signature of a hail band rather than ordinary wear.

City-level figures flatten exactly the thing you want to see. Onion Creek peaked in 2018 while Austin peaked in 2024, which means the roofs replaced on these streets are on a clock of their own — 8 years and counting.

For scale: Onion Creek holds 0.3% of every roof permit issued in Austin.

If you own a roof in Onion Creek

Numbers for a neighbourhood cannot tell you what your own roof needs; only somebody standing on it can. What they can do is tell you what normal looks like in Onion Creek, so that an unusual quote looks unusual.

Sources: City of Austin issued building permits, joined to the city’s own neighbourhood boundaries by permit coordinates; Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, active sales tax permit holders. Both public records, retrieved September 2026.