What is the date of loss (DOL) on a roof claim?
The calendar day the storm actually damaged the property — the single date the whole claim is built on, and the one the carrier checks first.
The date of loss, almost always written DOL, is the day the damage happened. Not the day the homeowner noticed it, not the day you inspected, and not the day the claim was filed — the day the hail fell or the wind blew. Every carrier form asks for it, and every decision downstream hangs off it.
It matters because it decides three things. It decides which policy applies, since a homeowner who switched carriers in March has a different contract for a February storm. It decides whether the claim is inside the filing deadline, which many states and most policies cap at one or two years. And it decides pricing, because Xactimate price lists are versioned by date — a scope written against the wrong month can be off by real money.
A wrong DOL is one of the quietest ways a good claim gets denied. If the homeowner guesses “sometime in the spring” and the carrier pulls radar for that day and finds nothing, the file reads as no storm rather than wrong date. Matching the address to a verified hail or wind event before anyone writes a number on a form is the cheapest insurance in the whole process.
This is also why storm history is a sales tool, not just a claims tool. Pulling the dated hail events for a specific address gives you the DOL, the hail size, and the radar evidence in one move — which is a far better door approach than asking a homeowner to remember the weather.