Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
There is no best roof. There is a roof that matches your house, Utah's weather, and how long you plan to live under it.
You have bids for three different roofs and three different stories about which one is best. Best is the wrong question. The right roof is a match between your house, the weather at your address, and how many years you plan to be under it. Here is how each material actually performs in Utah, and the one thing that matters more than all of them.
· About a 12 minute read
A mid-range shingle over a properly vented Utah attic will outlast a premium one over a hot attic, every time.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
Homeowners ask which roof is best. It is a fair question and it has no answer.
A family staying two more years and a family in their forever home should not buy the same roof. Same house, same weather, two different right answers. The thing that changed was who is living in it.
So instead of ranking products, match three things.
The pitch of the roof, how many corners and penetrations it has, whether any part of it is nearly flat, and how the attic breathes.
Hard sun, big daily temperature swings, snow load, and wind. Utah ages roofing faster than the ratings assume.
How many years you honestly expect to be in this house. You only collect the years you are there for.
That last one does more work than people expect. A longer lasting roof only pays you back if you are still living under it when the cheaper one would have needed replacing.
The honest ranking first, since you deserve the numbers. Then the thing that outranks the ranking. Then each material's real ownership catch, the kind that shows up in year seven and never came up during the sale.
None of it requires you to know roofing. It requires you to know how long you are staying, and to look in your attic once.
Here is the ranking, stated plainly, with Utah numbers rather than brochure numbers.
Stone-coated steel sits at the top and surprises people twice. Once on the lifespan, and once when they find out it does not have to look industrial. It can be made to look like shingle, shake, or Spanish tile.
Ratings get set under proper conditions. Utah is not average conditions.
So take any published lifespan and read it as a ceiling rather than a promise. What decides whether your roof reaches that ceiling is the next section, and it is not the material.
This is the part that should change how you spend your money, and it almost never comes up in a sales visit.
Within any material category, the difference between a roof that reaches its number and one that quits early is almost never the product. It is two things. Whether the attic underneath is vented, and whether the crew followed the spec.
A hot attic cooks the roof from below for its entire life. Every day, for twenty years.
Around 90 of every 100 Utah homes we open up are not moving the air the code calls for. So most roofs in this state are running in conditions their rating never assumed. The hottest attic ever measured on one of our assessments was 180 degrees.
Think about what that means for a shingle. The sun is hitting it from above. A 180 degree attic is heating it from below. It is being baked from both sides, and nothing on the wrapper accounted for that.
To be fair, nobody is hiding this. The manufacturer's rating is honest about what the material can do under proper conditions. It just cannot know what is happening in your attic. And the person selling you the shingle usually has not looked either.
Homeowners almost never suspect the attic. The symptom is a hot upstairs and an air conditioner that runs all afternoon, so people call an HVAC company. They get told the unit is fine, which it is. Nobody thinks to look up.
Budget for the ventilation first. Then pick your material with what is left.
That order is the whole point. A mid-range shingle over a properly vented attic beats a premium one over a hot attic, every time. Spending the money in the other order buys you a better product and the same short life.
You can check this yourself. Go stand in your attic on a hot afternoon. If it is much more than twenty degrees above the outside temperature, you found the thing that matters most.
Say you bought a shingle labeled 30 years. At year 15 it already looks tired. You are not imagining that, and it is not your fault. The product changed underneath everyone.
Modern asphalt shingles carry less of the oil that keeps them flexible. More filler makes up the volume. Less oil means a shingle that stiffens sooner, and a stiff shingle cracks instead of flexing.
The name on the wrapper says 30 years. The asphalt inside says about 20 in Utah, and the asphalt is the one telling the truth.
Yes, and here is the actual reason. A thicker shingle has more asphalt in it. That is a quality difference, not just a look.
Forget the brochure. Ask a roofer how long they will warranty their own labor on each shingle you are considering.
That number is their real opinion of the material. Many companies extend a workmanship warranty further on better material and shorter on the cheapest. There is a plain reason for that, and it is worth understanding.
When anything goes wrong with a roof, everybody points at the roofer. That is fair, because a homeowner has no way to tell a material problem from an installation problem. Both look identical from the living room ceiling. So a company backing its labor for 25 years on one shingle and 10 on another is telling you what it believes about each one.
Ask the question of all three bidders. It costs you nothing and it beats any brochure you will be handed.
Most people choosing metal are choosing it so they never have to think about their roof again. Whether they get that depends entirely on one detail nobody explains during the sale.
Exposed fastener is not a bad product. On a shop or a barn it is often the right call. The mismatch happens when it goes on a house owned by someone who picked metal to stop thinking about roofs. Then year seven brings a leak nobody budgeted for.
So ask one question of any metal bid. What does this system need from me, and how often? If the answer is nothing, you are looking at concealed fastener.
Different tools, different detailing, different failure modes. The panels are long, and metal moves as it heats and cools. So the details at the edges either allow for that movement or they open up over time. A shingle company bidding your metal roof is not being reckless. It is just worth asking to see metal work they finished several years ago.
Almost every Utah house has a low-slope section somewhere. A porch, an addition, a bay window, the tie-in behind a dormer. And it is where a surprising number of leaks live.
Here is the distinction that decides everything. Shingles shed water. They do not waterproof.
Water on a 6:12 pitch is gone in seconds. Water on a 1:12 sits there. It creeps under the shingle overlaps and finds the nail holes. That is why building code and every shingle manufacturer prohibit shingles below a 2:12 pitch. Membrane belongs there instead.
If your flat section has shingles on it, that is the problem. Not the patch that failed, and not the roofer who did the patch. The material and the pitch disagree, and the pitch always wins.
The crew that put them there was usually not being dishonest. They only knew shingles, so they roofed what was in front of them with what was on the truck. Then the patch crews after them treated the symptom of a mismatch nobody had named.
Membrane is its own trade, and most Utah roofing companies came up on shingles. These roofs almost always fail at the edges rather than out in the open field, because the edge is where the specification gets skipped.
One more piece of good news. Membrane installs year round in Utah, so a failing low-slope section does not have to wait for shingle weather.
This is the single most useful piece of arithmetic in the whole decision, and it takes ten seconds.
Take the gap between two bids. Divide it by the number of years you honestly expect to be in the house. Look at that annual number instead of the lump.
Seeing it per year makes this much easier to decide truthfully, in both directions.
Metal costs roughly 1.75 to 2 times an asphalt roof and delivers about 2 to 2.5 asphalt lifespans. So per year of service, metal is cheaper. That is real, and it is not a sales line.
The catch is when the payoff arrives. The savings show up in year 28. You only collect them if you are still living there.
Plenty of Utah homeowners should buy the shingle roof. If you are moving in five years, asphalt done properly is the honest answer. And if reaching metal means economizing on the ventilation to afford it, that is the wrong trade. A well-built shingle roof over a correctly vented attic is a good roof, not a compromise.
Resale rarely returns the full premium. Buyers price a roof's condition, not its expected remaining life. A five year old metal roof and a five year old shingle roof both read as "roof is fine" to most buyers.
And the highest bid is not automatically the best one. Big sales operations often carry the largest numbers in this market, because a marketing engine and commissions get paid from somewhere. That does not make their work bad. It means you may be paying for the presentation as well as the roof, and nobody itemizes that line.
The honest middle is where a lot of the good work sits.
Answer the first two yourself, before anyone comes out. Ask the last three of every bidder.
Be honest rather than optimistic. This one answer decides more of the material question than anything a salesperson will tell you. Under about seven years, asphalt done properly is usually the right call.
Go stand up there on a hot afternoon. Much more than twenty degrees above the outside temperature means ventilation is your first spend, before any material upgrade.
Ask it for every shingle grade you are considering. The number is the company's real opinion of that product, and it is far more useful than the brochure.
The metal question. Exposed fastener panels need re-screwing every five to eight years. Concealed fastener systems do not. Get the answer before you sign, not in year seven.
Every house has one somewhere. If the answer is shingles on anything below a 2:12 pitch, that bid has a leak built into it. Ask about the drip edge while you are there.
Then ask for tiered pricing with the ventilation held constant. That way you are choosing between real options above a fixed floor, instead of hoping nobody quietly removed the part that matters.
A roof is a twenty year decision. Make it about the twenty years, not about the bid stack.
One of the few rules I hold without exception is that we do not touch anything we are not 90 percent good on. That rule has cost us work. It is also exactly why I am comfortable telling you when a material is not the right answer for your house.
Metal is a genuinely different trade from shingles. So is membrane. Different tools, different detailing, different ways of failing. A crew that came up on shingles is not being reckless when they bid your metal roof. Metal is a growing category, customers are asking for it, and this trade has always learned on the job. The uncomfortable part is only that somebody's house ends up being the classroom.
What I care about more is the thing underneath all of it. Around 90 of every 100 homes we go into are under-ventilated. So most Utah roofs are running in conditions their rating never assumed, and the homeowner has no idea. That is not a product problem. No material fixes it.
So Master Roofing looks in the attic before recommending anything that goes on top of it. Bids get built to the specific house rather than to a package. The weather at your address and the shape of your roof are not the same as your neighbor's.
Everybody I hire, I want to be completely sure I could send them to anybody's grandma's house. And they would give her exactly what she needs, nothing more and nothing less.
Before you get near a bid, three answers are already yours to give. How long am I staying. What is my attic doing. Where would the snow land if it all came off at once. Those three fit a roof to your house better than any brochure will.
Two decisions, in this order.
First, find out what your attic is doing and fix it if it is wrong. That single item moves your roof's lifespan more than any upgrade on the material list. It is also the cheapest line on the whole project.
Second, pick the material against your timeline. Staying a few years, buy asphalt and have it installed properly. Staying for good, run the per-year math on metal and look hard at stone-coated steel. Either answer is a good answer when it matches the person living there.
And wherever your roof goes nearly flat, make sure membrane goes on it. That one is not a preference. Below a 2:12 pitch the pitch has already decided.
The best roof is the one that fits your house and your years in it. Everything else is a brochure.
Building codes, permit rules, and licensing requirements change over time, and they differ by city and county across Utah. Verify current requirements with your local building department before relying on anything here, and work with a licensed contractor who knows the rules in your jurisdiction.
This article is general information about Utah roofs, not an assessment of yours. Every roof is different, and no article can tell you what is actually happening on your specific house. Have a licensed roofing contractor look at it in person before you act on anything here.
Stone-coated steel, which is a genuine fifty year roof. Quality metal systems come next and generally deliver about two to two and a half asphalt lifetimes. Asphalt shingles in Utah give about twenty years if you are lucky. But the ranking matters less than people think. Within any of those categories, whether a roof reaches its number comes down to attic ventilation and whether the crew followed the spec. A hot attic cooks a roof from below every day for its whole life. So budget the ventilation first, then pick your material with what is left.
No, it does the opposite. The intuition comes from touching hot metal, which is fair and points at the wrong thing. What matters is not how hot a surface gets. It is how fast it lets that heat go. Metal sheds absorbed heat quickly. Asphalt holds it and keeps radiating into the attic after sundown, which is exactly when people notice their upstairs is uncomfortable. If your second floor is hot, the cause is almost always the attic rather than the roofing material. Go stand up there on a hot afternoon before you buy a roof to solve it.
It depends on one number, and it is not a number about the roof. Metal costs roughly 1.75 to 2 times asphalt and delivers about 2 to 2.5 asphalt lifespans, so per year of service it is cheaper. That part is real. The savings arrive in year 28, though, so you only collect them if you are still in the house. Take the price difference and divide it by the years you honestly expect to stay. If you are moving in five years, the shingle roof is the honest answer. And never economize on ventilation to afford metal.
Because the product changed and Utah is hard on it. Modern asphalt shingles carry less of the oil that keeps them flexible, with more filler making up the volume. Less oil means the shingle stiffens sooner, and a stiff shingle cracks instead of flexing. Then Utah's intense sun and big daily temperature swings speed that up. So a wrapper that says 30 years often means about 20 here. You are not imagining it and you did not do anything wrong. If the roof still has good bones, restoring its flexibility is a real option worth asking about.
Yes, and the reason is physical rather than cosmetic. Three-tab shingles are a single flat layer. Architectural and designer shingles laminate layers together, so they weigh more, resist wind better, and carry longer manufacturer terms. More layers means more asphalt, which is the part that ages. The best test of whether an upgrade is worth it costs nothing. Ask the roofer how long they will warranty their own labor on each grade you are considering. That number is their real opinion of the material, and it beats any brochure.
Most likely because it has shingles on it. Shingles shed water, they do not waterproof. Water on a steep pitch is gone in seconds. Water on a nearly flat section sits there, creeps under the shingle overlaps, and finds the nail holes. Building code and every shingle manufacturer prohibit shingles below a 2:12 pitch for exactly this reason. Membrane belongs there instead. Patching keeps treating the symptom of a material mismatch, which is why the same leak comes back. The good news is that membrane installs year round, so the real fix does not have to wait for spring.
On most Utah metal roofs, yes, and it is a design requirement rather than an upgrade. Snow does not melt off metal slowly the way it does off shingles. It releases all at once, whenever it decides to. So the question is what sits underneath your eaves. A walkway, a driveway, a gas meter, a doorway, a place where people stand. Snow retention has to be engineered for the snow load at your specific address, not picked by eye from a catalog. Raise it while you are still comparing bids, not after the panels are on.
Rarely in full, and it is worth knowing why. Buyers price a roof's condition rather than its expected remaining life. To most buyers, a five year old metal roof and a five year old shingle roof both read as fine. One has decades more life in it, and that rarely shows up in the price. So a premium roof bought purely for resale usually does not return the premium. What a sound roof does do is remove an objection and keep the negotiation off your roof entirely. If a sale is coming soon, get it assessed first so you know which conversation you are going to have.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.