The Most Reroofed ZIP Codes in Austin

Accelerating fastest

Last three years against the three before, for ZIP codes with enough record to compare:

A jump like that in three years is rarely gradual ageing. Either weather concentrated it, or a run of houses built in the same few years reached the age where original shingles give up together.

Slowing down

Falling volume does not mean sturdier roofs. It usually means the wave already passed — and the roofs put on during it are quietly ageing towards the next one.

Where the next wave is

Since 2006 the city has permitted 72,967 new homes, and 15,529 of them went up between 2006 and 2010. Asphalt in Central Texas gives fifteen to twenty years rather than the twenty-five on the wrapper, so that entire cohort is at or past the end of its first roof now. Here is where it is concentrated:

If your house is in one of those and still wears its original roof, you are not early to be asking. It also explains why crews work those streets door to door after a storm — the arithmetic is not a secret to them either.

Sources: City of Austin issued building permits; Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, active sales tax permit holders. Both public records, retrieved September 2026.

How this was put together, and what it cannot tell you

Two public files, joined locally. The City of Austin publishes every building permit it issues, with an address, coordinates, a date, a work description typed by whoever filed it, and a declared value. The Texas Comptroller publishes every business holding an active sales tax permit, with the date it first reported sales in the state. Neither office joins them to anything; that is the work.

Four limits worth stating plainly, because most sites quoting permit data do not:

• The record starts in 2006. Anything older is not in it, so nothing here describes how Austin roofs behaved before then.
• Small repairs never appear. A permit is required for replacement and structural work, not for patching. The counts are therefore a floor, not a total — and for work like tarping or inspection, which needs no permit at all, there is essentially nothing to count.
• The work description is free text. Somebody typed it. Searching for a category means searching for several spellings of it and accepting that a permit reading only “new roof” lands in no category at all.
• A declared value is not an invoice. It is written before the old roof comes off, which is exactly when nobody yet knows what the decking underneath looks like.

The ten lines a written quote should contain

Most of the difference between two roof quotes in Austin is not the shingle. It is what surrounds it, and what quietly went missing from the cheaper one:

• The material, named by manufacturer and product line — not just “architectural shingle”.
• The number of squares. Without it, two quotes cannot be compared at all.
• Tear-off or overlay, and how many existing layers come off.
• Decking replacement, priced per sheet. The single clause that most often turns a fixed quote into a variable one.
• Underlayment, and what specifically goes into the valleys.
• New flashing at every chimney, wall and vent — replaced, not reused.
• Ventilation: what is kept, replaced or added.
• Who pulls the permit, and whether the fee is inside the price.
• Cleanup, including a magnet sweep for nails.
• The warranty, split explicitly into labour and material.

A quote that is one line and one number is not a quote. It is an opening position, and you have no way of telling what was left out of it.

Where a sample is too small to average honestly, this site says so rather than publishing a number with a confident face on it. Every figure here can be reproduced from the same two files by anybody who wants to check.