Malarkey shingles, installed / File 10
Permits, and the licence Missouri does not issue
What St. Louis County actually requires, which municipalities run their own licensing, and three bills people still quote as if they had passed.
The licence
There is no Missouri state roofing licence
This surprises people every time. Missouri does not license roofing contractors at state level. There is no state board, no state examination and no state licence number, so any number presented to you as a Missouri roofing licence is either a municipal business registration, a contractor registration from one particular city, or nothing at all.
Bills to create a state licence have been filed and have not survived. Senate Bill 1022 in 2016, Senate Bill 153 in 2019 and SB 326 in 2021 each proposed one and each of the three failed to become law. That last one is still cited in local marketing copy as though it were on the books. It is not law and it never was.
What that means for you is that verification is your job and it is done differently. Ask for a certificate of general liability insurance and a workers compensation certificate, issued by the insurer directly to you rather than photocopied. Ask which municipalities the company holds a current contractor registration in. Ask for the business entity name as registered with the Missouri Secretary of State, and check that the name on the contract is that entity. Those three checks are worth more than any badge on a truck.
The county
St. Louis County thresholds, in plain terms
For unincorporated St. Louis County, the working baseline that the trade operates to is this. A like for like asphalt shingle replacement on a roof slope of 4:12 or steeper does not require a building permit. A permit is required where the slope is shallower than that, where the roofing material is being changed, or where more than a quarter of the roof decking is being replaced.
Confirm it yourself
Codes are amended and interpretations differ between plan reviewers. Before work starts, confirm the current requirement with the building division that actually has jurisdiction over your address, which may be the county or may be your own municipality. This site names the office rather than printing a phone number, because the only number published here is the Keys office line.
Two municipalities worth flagging because they come up constantly: Ballwin and Kirkwood both run their own contractor licensing rather than deferring to the county. There are others. An incorporated municipality can require registration, a permit, an inspection or all three on work that would be unpermitted a mile away in unincorporated county.
Across the river bottoms
St. Charles County, and why this page is careful
St. Charles County is a large part of this metro's roofing market and it is deliberately not summarised here in a single confident sentence. At the time of writing the official page setting out the county's residential reroofing requirement does not load, and the third party sources that repeat it do not agree with one another.
Publishing a definitive rule from conflicting secondary sources would be exactly the behaviour this site criticises elsewhere. So: contact the St. Charles County Division of Building and Code Enforcement, or your own city hall if you are inside an incorporated municipality such as St. Charles, St. Peters, O'Fallon, Wentzville or Cottleville, and ask directly whether your work requires a permit. Ask specifically about slope, about material change and about decking replacement, because those are the three thresholds that usually govern.
The contract
What Missouri gives a homeowner regardless
Two protections are worth knowing about, independent of licensing.
- Home solicitation
- Missouri's home solicitation sale rules give a buyer a right to cancel certain contracts signed away from the seller's normal place of business within a set period, and require notice of that right. If a contract was signed at your kitchen table after a knock at the door, this is the first thing to look for on the paperwork.
- Merchandising practices
- The Missouri Merchandising Practices Act covers deception, false promises and unfair practices in connection with a sale, and a violation of the roofing statute at RSMo 407.725 is treated as an unfair practice under it. The Attorney General's office takes consumer complaints.
Neither of those is a substitute for reading the contract before signing it. Both are worth knowing about in a market where a large storm brings a large number of doors being knocked on inside a fortnight.