We get golf-ball hail in DFW every spring. How do I protect my windows?

Why does hail damage roofs and cars but usually spare the windows?

It's geometry more than toughness. Hail falls, so it strikes upward-facing surfaces square on and full force. A shingle, a soft aluminum gutter, a skylight, an air conditioner's condenser fins and a car hood all sit in that plane. A wall window is vertical, so unless wind is driving the stones sideways, hail arrives at a glancing angle and sheds energy across the pane rather than concentrating it.

Two other things work in a window's favor. Most residential glazing sold in recent decades is insulated, so a stone has to defeat an outer pane, an air gap and an inner pane before anything reaches the room. And windows are small targets compared with the several thousand square feet of roof above them.

Where glass does break, there is usually a specific reason:

• Wind-driven hail on an exposed elevation, particularly a west or south wall with no eave or porch above it.
• Skylights and sun tunnels, which are horizontal and therefore behave like the roof, not like a window.
• Debris rather than hail. A limb, a piece of fence panel or a neighbor's patio umbrella is what breaks glass in a lot of storms people describe as hailstorms.
• Large unbroken spans, where a big single pane flexes more and has no mullion carrying load.

Knowing which of those applies to your house is what tells you whether to spend on glazing at all.

What actually helps protect windows from hail, if film doesn't?

Three things do real work here, and none of them is a film.

Impact-rated laminated glazing. This is glass built with a bonded interlayer at the factory and tested to standards like ASTM E1996, the large-missile impact test. It is the genuine article for impact resistance, and it is priced accordingly. On 2026 cost guidance, a standard replacement window in Texas costs between $600 and $1,000 apiece installed, and impact-rated units sit above that. This makes sense on a specific exposed elevation, or when you're already replacing those windows anyway.

Shutters. Rolling or hinged exterior shutters are the only thing on this list that removes the glass from the storm entirely by putting a solid barrier in front of it. They are common on the coast and rare inland, mostly on looks and cost. If you have one wall that keeps getting hit, they are worth a quote.

Exterior screens. Solar screens cost around $50 to $150 a window installed on 2026 cost guidance, with discounts for whole-house quantities. They are not hail-rated and nobody should sell them as such. What a taut exterior mesh does do is absorb some energy from small stones and windblown grit before it reaches the pane, and it shades the window through the summer, which is its real job.

Above all of it: the roof. At your next re-roof, ask your roofer and your insurer about impact-resistant roofing products, because that is where the hail money goes in North Texas.

What is a wind and hail percentage deductible really costing you?

Of everything in hail preparation, this costs nothing and changes the most.

Many Texas homeowners policies apply a separate deductible for wind and hail, and it is often written as a percentage of the dwelling coverage amount rather than as a flat dollar figure. That's a very different number from the deductible people remember.

Run your own arithmetic, because it is simple. If your dwelling limit is $400,000 and your wind and hail deductible is 2%, you pay the first $8,000 of a hail claim. At 1% it is $4,000. (Those are straight multiplication from an assumed limit, not published figures — use your own declarations page.) One broken window and a dented gutter will not come close to that threshold, which means it is your money, not the insurer's.

What to do with that:

• Find your declarations page and locate the wind and hail line specifically. It is usually separate from the all-other-perils deductible.
• Do the multiplication now, while nothing is broken, so you know the number you are self-insuring for.
• Photograph the house before spring. Roof, all four elevations, windows, screens, fences and vehicles, with dates. Documented prior condition is the single most useful thing in a disputed claim.
• Ask your agent what changing the percentage does to your premium. Sometimes moving from 2% to 1% is affordable, sometimes it isn't, but you should be choosing rather than discovering.

Deciding your deductible is a bigger financial lever on a hail event than anything you can install on the glass.

So what does security film actually do in a hailstorm?

Here is the honest version, because this is where the category gets oversold every March.

Safety and security film is a heavy polyester laminate bonded to the interior face of the glass. Its engineering purpose is to hold a pane together once it has broken, and to resist tearing while it does. That is fragment retention. That is genuinely useful, and it is a different property from impact resistance on the outside face.

Consider what that means during a storm. A stone hits the outside face of the outer pane. The film is bonded to the inside face of the inner pane, with an air gap and a second sheet of glass between them. It is not in the impact path. If the pane does break, the film does its job: the glass holds together, fragments stay out of the room, and the opening is not left standing wide open to wind and rain. That is worth something at two in the morning. It is not hail armor.

3M does publish impact ratings for the Ultra Series, but read what they are. Fitted with the Impact Protection Attachment system, the Ultra S800 meets ASTM E1886 pressure cycling and the ASTM E1996 large-missile test. That large-missile procedure fires a length of timber at the assembly. It is a windborne-debris standard written for hurricane country, not a hail test. No credible person should quote it as one.

If somebody tells you window film will stop hail damage, that alone tells you what the rest of the estimate is worth.

What should a DFW homeowner actually do before spring?

Texas hail season runs hardest in spring, with April and May historically the peak months. That gives you a natural deadline. Work down this list in February or early March.

1. Read the wind and hail deductible and calculate the dollar figure, as above.
2. Photograph everything, including a walk of the roof if you can do it safely, or a drone pass if you can't. Store the images somewhere that isn't the phone in your pocket.
3. Clear the yard of ammunition. Patio furniture, umbrellas, planters, trampolines and loose fence pickets do more window damage in a spring storm than hail does.
4. Cut back limbs overhanging the roof and the glass. Wind plus a limb is the classic broken-window story.
5. Sort out covered parking. A garage that is full of storage while two cars sit in the driveway is the most expensive storage unit in Texas. If there is no garage, know which covered lot or carport you'd drive to.
6. Check the roof's condition, not for hail but for age. An old roof fails at a hail size a newer one shrugs off.
7. Set warning alerts that will actually wake you, so you have the ten minutes needed to move a car.

Notice that six of those seven cost nothing. That is not modesty about our own product, it is what the risk actually looks like at a typical Arlington or Fort Worth house.

Is impact-rated glass worth it on a North Texas house?

Sometimes, and the deciding factor is usually whether you were replacing that window anyway.

Upgrading glazing purely as hail defense is hard to justify on arithmetic. You are spending above a $600 to $1,000 per window baseline to protect against an event that, at most houses, damages a roof and a car long before it takes out a wall pane. Spread across twenty windows the number gets uncomfortable quickly.

The picture changes in three situations. First, if the units are due anyway — fogged from failed seals, rotted frames, sashes that no longer operate — then the upgrade to laminated glazing is an incremental cost on a project you were already funding. Second, if you have one clearly exposed elevation, typically a west or southwest wall with no eave, doing four windows rather than twenty is a real budget. Third, skylights, which face the sky like the roof does and are the glass most likely to be broken by hail on the whole house.

There's also the option of doing nothing at all to the glass and putting the same money against the deductible, the roof, or covered parking. For a lot of DFW homeowners, that is genuinely the better allocation, and any contractor who won't say so is not costing your problem, they're costing their product.