How Often Does Hail Actually Hit Macomb County? The Record
Everyone in southeast Michigan has a hail story. We wanted numbers instead, so we pulled every hail report the National Weather Service has logged for Macomb County in the NOAA Storm Events Database since 2006. Here is what twenty years of the federal record actually shows.
Hail is the storm damage people argue about most. A neighbor swears the whole street got hammered; an adjuster shrugs that the county barely sees hail at all. Both are pointing at memory. This field note points at the record instead. We queried the NOAA Storm Events Database, the federal log the National Weather Service keeps of severe weather reports, for every hail entry filed under Macomb County from January 2006 through the spring of 2026. The result is 121 individual hail reports. Sorted, counted, and dated, they answer the three questions homeowners keep asking us: how often, how big, and when.
01 /What we pulled, and how to read it
The Storm Events Database is a log of reports, not a radar archive. An entry lands in it when a trained spotter, an emergency manager, a law officer, or a verified member of the public reports hail to the National Weather Service, and multiple reports from one storm are logged separately. That cuts two ways. A single afternoon can generate seven entries, and hail that falls on an empty field at 3 a.m. may generate none. So treat every count below as a floor. The true number of hail falls in Macomb County over twenty years is higher than the record shows, never lower.
02 /How often it actually hits
Those 121 reports collapse into 53 distinct hail days. That works out to hail confirmed falling somewhere in Macomb County on two to three days in a typical year. The distribution is lumpy, not steady: the busiest years in the pull are 2007 with 17 reports, 2010 with 16, and 2012 with 13, while 2018 and 2022 produced zero reports at all. Size is where the record gets specific.
| REPORTED SIZE | COMMON COMPARISON | REPORTS 2006 TO 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.75 inches | Penny | 39 |
| 0.88 inches | Nickel | 23 |
| 1.00 inch | Quarter | 40 |
| 1.25 inches | Half dollar | 4 |
| 1.50 inches | Ping pong ball | 5 |
| 1.75 inches | Golf ball | 9 |
| 2.25 inches | Larger than golf ball | 1 |
Since January 2010 the National Weather Service has classified hail of 1 inch or larger, about quarter size, as severe. By that bar, 59 of the 121 reports qualify, spread across 32 distinct days. Call it a severe hail day in Macomb County roughly three times every two years on average, with long quiet stretches between the clusters.
03 /When it clusters
Macomb County hail is a warm season phenomenon with a long tail. May through August accounts for 93 of the 121 reports, about 77 percent, with July the single busiest month at 28 reports, June close behind at 26, then May at 21 and August at 18. But the season is wider than most people assume. The earliest calendar entry in the pull is March 6, and March and April together contribute 22 reports, several of them large: the biggest stone in the entire record, 2.25 inches at Sterling Heights, fell on April 6, 2010. The latest entries are from October 26, when hail was reported three times across the county in 2008. If a storm can build a tall enough updraft, the calendar does not protect you.
04 /The days on record
Ten of the 121 reports logged stones of 1.75 inches or larger, golf ball class, on six separate days. These are the dates worth checking against your roof's age:
- June 25, 2009. 1.75 inch hail reported in Roseville.
- April 6, 2010. The biggest day in the record: 2.25 inch hail at Sterling Heights, with 1.75 inch stones logged at Waldenburg and Mount Clemens. One report narrative notes hail covering the ground.
- March 15, 2012. 1.75 inch hail at Center Line, in the middle of March.
- July 4, 2012. 1.75 inch hail reported at Center Line, Van Dyke, and Warren while half the county was outside waiting for fireworks.
- July 20, 2023. 1.75 inch hail at Mount Clemens and 1.50 inch hail at Roseville, just weeks before the August 2023 wind storms that became FEMA disaster DR-4757.
More recently, May 19 and 20 of 2024 produced a seven report cluster running from Utica up through Macomb Township to Armada, topping out at 1.50 inches. The most recent entry in the pull is quarter size hail near Macomb Township on March 6, 2026.
The Storm Events Database only knows what someone reported. Hail that falls at night, falls below severe criteria, or falls where nobody calls it in never enters the record, and roof damaging hail does not need to make the news. If one of the dates above passed over your street and your shingles have never been checked since, the absence of a report is not evidence of an undamaged roof. This is general information, not insurance advice.
05 /What the record means for your roof
Read as a whole, the record says Macomb County is not hail alley, but it is not safe ground either: confirmed hail two to three days a year, a severe hail day roughly every year or two, and a genuinely damaging day a few times a decade. That cadence is slow enough for homeowners to forget and fast enough to matter across the life of an asphalt roof. A roof in its third decade here has statistically stood under severe hail more than once. What a given stone size actually does to shingles is its own subject, and we keep it in a separate note rather than padding this one; the short version is that hail damage is a bruise, not always a hole, and it hides from the driveway.
If a date above lines up with your address, start with our storm damage service page for how documentation and inspection actually work, or go straight to the insurance claims guide. We inspect for free, at no cost or obligation, we photograph what we find either way, and we can meet your adjuster on site. We never promise what a carrier will approve; no honest contractor can. Many hail findings are repairs rather than replacements, and repairs run $350 to $3,200, with larger or complex repairs running higher. You can sanity check any bigger number in sixty seconds with the cost calculator, and the guides library holds every note we have filed on storms, claims, and pricing.
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database, hail entries for Macomb County, Michigan, January 2006 through spring 2026. Queried July 2026; all counts, dates, and sizes in this note come from that pull.
- National Weather Service, severe thunderstorm criteria: hail 1 inch in diameter or larger has been classified as severe since January 2010.