Roofing in Palm Beach County

The Census Bureau's 2020-2024 survey counts 719,463 homes in Palm Beach County. About 45.5% are single-family detached houses, 25.1% sit in buildings of 10 or more units, and 2.8% are mobile homes. Owners live in 70.1% of the occupied ones.

Age is the bigger story for roofs. The median home was built in 1986, a third of homes predate 1980, and only 9.2% went up in 2010 or later. NRCA, the national roofing trade group, says most new roofs are designed for about 20 years of service. A house from 1986 has passed that span twice.

Two rules follow from that age. When an older roof comes off, the code can require deck re-nailing and a secondary water barrier, as the county re-roof page explains. Under 15 years, roof age alone cannot cost you a policy; past that, Florida law lets you get an inspection before an insurer can require a new roof. The county inspection page walks through the forms.

Palm Beach County is not in the Florida Building Code's High-Velocity Hurricane Zone; that zone covers only Miami-Dade and Broward. In those two counties the code sends homes to a separate HVHZ chapter. Here, roofs follow the code's regular residential and building chapters.

Regular does not mean light. The code assigns each address a design wind speed from the ASCE 7-22 maps, and the state's wind mitigation form sorts homes into Region 1 at 140 mph or more, Region 2 at 130 to 139 mph, or Region 3 under 130 mph. The code's wind-borne debris region takes in any address rated 140 mph or more, plus open-water exposures within a mile of the coast rated 130 mph or more.

There is no single county number to quote. Your design speed comes from your address, and the building office or a wind mitigation report will show it.

West Palm Beach International Airport averages 61.75 inches of rain a year, with 86.1 days that bring at least a tenth of an inch. Totals shift across the county: the Juno Beach station averages 72.19 inches, and Belle Glade, on Lake Okeechobee, 55.22.

Most of it lands in the warm half of the year. About 67.3% of the airport's normal rain falls from May through October, and August is the wettest month at 8.68 inches. That stretch overlaps hurricane season, which runs June 1 to November 30 and peaks around September 10.

For gutters and roof edges, the burst matters more than the total. NOAA Atlas 14 gives West Palm Beach a 10-year, five-minute rate of 11.3 inches an hour, the highest of the ten Florida points in our data, and 9.38 inches over 24 hours in that same 10-year storm.

Thunderstorms also set the pace of roof work. NWS Miami's lightning guidance says not to work on rooftops while thunder can be heard, because lightning can strike miles from the storm that makes it.

From barrier islands to the farm towns on Lake Okeechobee, the roof questions shift with the ground. The list below names every city, town, village and large unincorporated place in the county.

On the barrier islands, Palm Beach, South Palm Beach, Manalapan, Ocean Ridge and Palm Beach Shores sit between the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. The mainland coast runs from Tequesta and Jupiter south through Riviera Beach, West Palm Beach, Lake Worth Beach, Boynton Beach and Delray Beach to Boca Raton. Inland, Wellington, Royal Palm Beach, Greenacres, The Acreage and Loxahatchee Groves carry the county west toward its farm belt.