Policy period
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
The policy period is the span a policy covers, from its effective date to its expiration, printed on the declarations page. A property policy responds to loss that occurs during the period, so the period is the first filter a claim passes through: a storm on the day before inception is the previous insurer's, a storm on the day after expiration is the next one's, and a roof that has been through both has a question to answer about which storm did what.
The period is rarely a problem when the storm is recent and the policy has been renewed with the same carrier for years. It becomes one when the carrier changed, when the policy lapsed, when the property was bought or sold, or when the damage was discovered long after it happened and more than one period could plausibly contain the storm. Each of those turns the date of loss from a formality into the contested fact.
The record is how the fact is settled. A year in hail country can hold several hail days near a property, and each one falls on one side or the other of an effective date. Listing them with how many independent sources carried each is what lets a file say which period the loss belongs to, rather than which period would be convenient.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report is compiled for a window the requester sets, and a policy period is the usual choice: the masthead or cover prints the start and end dates, every record inside them is listed in the Records section, and nothing outside them is searched. A reader with two periods to compare runs the window across both, or runs one report per period, and reads the storm days against the effective date. The statement of compilation names the period the document searched, so a reader can see that the window and the policy line up.
From the record
A year of hail days, as a policy period would hold them
- Hail days in the last year
- 250
- One independent source
- 23
- Two sources
- 62
- Three or more
- 165
Since 27 August 2025, a span the length of a policy year, the national record holds 250 hail days: 23 carried by one independent source, 62 by two and 165 by three or more. A policy period is a line drawn through a list like that, and every day on it falls on one side.
Measured Detected, not measured
The page these figures come fromRelated
The terms this page uses and the guides that go further. Each is shown against its own example from the record.
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Term
Date of loss
The calendar date a claim says the damage occurred, which the storm record either holds a report for or does not.
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Term
Inception of loss
The moment a loss began, which the standard fire policy uses to start the clock on suit and which a storm claim dates to the storm.
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Term
Prior storm
An earlier storm that reached the same property before the one a claim is about, and the usual reason a hail claim is disputed.
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Term
Storm day
A calendar date on which hail, wind or tornado reports were filed, counted as one day however many reports it carries.
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Guide
How a date of loss is established, and how it is contested
A date of loss is a claim about one calendar day. Most courts have read it as the day the storm fell rather than the day the damage was found, and a policy answers only for days inside its term, so the date is tested before anything else is. This guide states how the date is set, how a carrier checks it, where it is most often wrong, and what a record has to show for the date to hold.
Sources
The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.
The glossary defines the word. The report is what uses it.
Everything above is definition: what the word means in the document, and what it does not. None of it says what reached one roof.
Run the address and the archive is searched at the property: the storm, the date, the measured size, the distance and bearing from the roof, and the federal record each figure came from, in a document that states its own method. Ready in minutes.
How this page is made
- The text
- Written by the editors and last revised 23 August 2026. It explains the record and how the report reads it; it contains no figure of its own.
- The example
- Drawn from the archive when the page was compiled, 27 August 2026, and rebuilt daily as the record deepens. Every figure in the panel marked From the record is computed, not written, and links to the page it came from.
- Measured and detected
- A report from a person or an instrument is measured. A radar-derived size is detected, not measured, and is marked as such, here and in every document we issue. The two are never added together.
- What this is not
- A definition of a word the report uses. It is not a report on any property, and it states no opinion about one. The coverage page states what the record holds, by kind and by year.
About this record
Everything here is reproduced from public federal and volunteer weather records, as the agencies and observer networks that publish them released it. Titan Weather compiles the record; it does not observe the weather, and it is not affiliated with any source it cites.
No archive holds everything. Storms cross places where nobody is standing, instruments and observers cover some areas better than others, sources revise their records, and recent reports can take weeks to arrive and settle. Coverage also thins as the years go back: an early quiet stretch may describe who was watching rather than what the weather did. Where this page shows nothing, nothing was found in the sources searched, within the period and area it states. That is not a finding that no weather occurred.
A record sits where its source filed it. Reports made from the ground are commonly logged against a town, a landmark or an offset from one rather than the spot where the measurement was taken, so any distance shown for one carries that source's own location error. Radar detections and warning geometry are instrument-located and do not.
These pages describe the public record near a place or on a date. They do not establish what reached any particular property, and nothing here is insurance, legal or engineering advice.