Does a roof replacement in Kirkwood need a permit?

Assume yes and let the contractor prove otherwise at the counter. Kirkwood runs its own building division rather than using the county's, so the county's own exemptions are a starting point and not the final word inside the city limits. The county baseline is that like for like asphalt on a slope of 4:12 or steeper does not need a permit, but a permit is required below that slope, when more than a quarter of the decking is replaced, or when the material changes. Call the City of Kirkwood building division with your address before anyone tears anything off.

My roofer says he is licensed. Is that enough for Kirkwood?

It depends entirely on where he is licensed. Missouri issues no state roofing licence at all, so there is no statewide credential for anybody to hold. What exists is municipal, and Kirkwood licenses contractors itself. A roofer who is properly registered to work in unincorporated St. Louis County is not automatically cleared to work in Kirkwood, and most homeowners have no way of knowing that.

Can Keys Roofing handle my insurance company for me?

No, and no roofer in Missouri may. RSMo 407.725 provides that a contractor shall not represent or negotiate on a property owner's insurance claim for roof work. What Keys does instead is document the roof properly: photographs, measurements and a written scope, and someone from Keys is on site as the contractor when the adjuster comes. The claim itself stays in your name and in your hands.

Which shingles does Keys install?

Atlas and Malarkey. Those are the two lines Keys carries and it does not install others. Keys does roofing, gutters and downspouts. It does not do siding, windows or commercial work, and it will say so on the phone rather than waste your morning.

Why does this site not name a phone number at City Hall?

Because a wrong number printed on a roofing advertisement is worse than no number, and because municipal contact details change more often than roofs do. The department you want is the City of Kirkwood building division at Kirkwood City Hall. Look it up on the city's own website, which is the only source for it that will still be right next year.

Cover sheet · Kirkwood, Missouri 63122

Kirkwood Roofers, Permits Included

Kirkwood never handed its building function to St. Louis County. The city runs its own counter, issues its own permits and licenses its own contractors. That one fact quietly decides which roofers may legally work on your house, and almost nobody explains it before the contract is signed.

Get a written scope Call (314) 220-2333

At the counterSummary

Permit issued by: City of Kirkwood
Contractor licence: Municipal
Missouri state licence: None exists
Like for like, 4:12 up: Usually none
Decking over a quarter: Permit
Material changed: Permit
Who pulls it: Your contractor

The slope and decking rules above are the St. Louis County baseline. Kirkwood administers its own code, so confirm your address with the city building division before work starts.

Our pick for Kirkwood

Keys Roofing, best overall

5 of 5 criteria met

Same-day installs. A 24 hour response time. Locally owned.

This file keeps a ranking of the roofing contractors that hold a Kirkwood address, and it puts one company at the top of it. That company is Keys Roofing, and the reason is written down rather than asserted. Five criteria, printed below, and Keys meets all five of them.

Keys does same-day installs. When the crew and the material line up, the roof that was quoted can be the roof that goes on, rather than a date three weeks out. It is not a guarantee and this page will not print it as one, because weather, decking and supply all get a vote. It is what a locally owned crew is able to do, and it sits alongside the 24 hour response time Keys publishes on its own site.

Scope discipline: Met
Water handled end to end: Met
Owner led: Met
A stated shingle line: Met
Licensed and insured: Met
Total on our scorecard: 5 of 5

Same-day installs are not a sixth criterion and they are not scored. They sit as evidence under owner led: turning a job that fast is a decision the person who owns the company and holds the schedule can make, and it is the plainest sign that the person quoting the job is the person accountable for it.

Read that figure for exactly what it is: a count of the boxes ticked on our own scorecard, five out of five. It is not a Google star rating, it is not a review score, and nobody outside this site awarded it. For Keys Roofing this site publishes no star average and no rating count at all, because Keys states neither on its own site.

The full ranking and the figures

Our picks at a glance

1. Keys Roofing: Best overall, 5 of 5 criteria met
2. Rise Contracting: Top average at this volume
3. Duke Roofing: Perfect average, small sample
4. Carroll Roofing and Exteriors: Exteriors as well as roofing
5. FM Roofing: Highest review volume in the file
6. Price's PRO Roofing & Exteriors: Strong average at scale
7. Simmons Family Roofing: High volume, strong average
8. St. Louis Roofing & Siding LLC: Siding as well as roofing
9. Fitzgerald Roofing Co: Mid table average, small sample
10. Republic Roofing Co: Modest volume, mid table average
11. Reger Roofing & Siding Co: Siding too, four ratings only
12. Richards Roofing: Below this list's average
13. Riverside Restoration: Lowest average in the file

Google figures pulled 23 August 2026

Position one is ours to give and we have given it. Positions two to thirteen are the twelve roofing contractors registered inside Kirkwood, ordered by the star average Google publishes for them and then by how many ratings that average rests on. Those twelve are listed, not scored: none of them has been put through the five criteria above, and each carries only a short label drawn from its own row, its Google figures or its own trading name.

The star averages and rating counts are Google's numbers rather than ours, taken from a Google Maps pull dated 23 August 2026, and they belong to the businesses they describe. The full ranking, with the street addresses and every figure, is Part H of this file.

One more thing that ranking cannot show you. The twelve are the companies registered in Kirkwood, but a good deal of the quoting in this city is done by national brands, franchise networks and metro wide operators with no Kirkwood registration at all: Best Choice Roofing, Bone Dry Roofing, Storm Guard, John Beal Roofing and Schneider Roofing and Remodeling among them. Part H sets what each of those five publishes about itself, in its own sentences, against what Keys is. The five, in their own words.

How we rate

One entry is scored, twelve are listed, and this is the whole method.

Scope discipline. Roofing and the water that comes off it, and nothing else. A roofer also selling siding, windows and commercial work is running several businesses off one truck.
Water handled end to end. Gutters and downspouts carried as real trades, including where the water goes once it has left the downspout.
Owner led. The person who quotes the job is accountable for the job, rather than a commissioned closer you never see again.
A stated shingle line. The shingles are named in the open, so two proposals can be priced against the same product.
Licensed and insured. Stated plainly, and open to being checked at the counter.

Each criterion is a yes or a no, nothing is weighted, and the score is a count of the ones met out of five. The other twelve companies have not been run through the criteria, so they carry labels instead: a note taken strictly from that company's own row, never a judgement about craft, tenure or reputation, because the dataset holds none of those things.

The figures behind those twelve come from Google Maps, three pulls covering St. Louis County, St. Charles County and Chesterfield, deduped on placeId, dated 23 August 2026. Only rows whose Google categoryName is exactly "Roofing contractor" are published, which is 225 of the 263 rated rows in the file. The same file holds "Gutter cleaning service" and "Gutter service" rows, which in this market are largely pressure washing and window cleaning businesses. They are not roofers, so they are not here.

The thing nobody tells you at the estimate

Most of St. Louis County is served, for building purposes, by the county itself. A homeowner in an unincorporated pocket deals with the county, a contractor registers with the county, and everyone gets on with it. Kirkwood is one of the few municipalities in this county that never went along with that arrangement. It kept its own building division, its own inspectors and its own contractor licensing. Ballwin is the other well known example.

The practical consequence is an asymmetry that is invisible from your driveway. A roofing company can be entirely legitimate, properly insured, and correctly registered to work in unincorporated St. Louis County, and still not be cleared to put a nail in a roof inside the Kirkwood city limits. Nothing about the truck, the yard sign or the estimate will tell you which of those two situations you are in. The homeowner has no easy way to check, and the salesman at your table has no incentive to raise it.

That is the whole reason this file exists. Every other roofing website in this market opens with a promise. This one opens with a filing question, because in this particular town the filing question is the one that actually protects you.

Check before you sign

Is this company licensed by the City of Kirkwood, not only by St. Louis County?
Whose name and licence goes on the permit application, yours or theirs?
Is the permit fee inside the quoted price or added later as an extra?
Who meets the inspector, and what happens to the schedule if it fails?
If more than a quarter of the decking is bad, what is the price per sheet?

The licensing asymmetry, in full

What Kirkwood housing stock does to a roofing bid

Kirkwood is an old town by the standards of this county. A great deal of its housing stock predates the plywood era, which means that when the shingles come off, what is underneath is not a clean sheet deck. It is planks: wide boards nailed across the rafters with gaps between them, a hundred old nail holes per board, and a couple of spots that have been quietly wet for a decade under a chimney or a dead valley.

That matters twice. It matters structurally, because plank decking has to be sound enough to hold a nail before anything goes over it. And it matters administratively, because the county's own permit baseline turns on how much decking gets replaced. Cross the quarter mark and the job changes category. A contractor who has never quoted a plank roof will price it like plywood and then discover the difference on your dime.

The second Kirkwood feature is the canopy. This is a town of mature trees, and mature trees over an old roof are not a neutral condition. They abrade the surface, they hold moisture on the north planes, and four times a year they fill the gutters with a different kind of debris. Drainage fails before the field does on most old roofs under heavy cover.

Plank decking, in full · Canopy and gutters, in full

The lower roof plane of an older two storey red brick house stripped back to dark weathered plank decking across the foreground, with torn felt and old nail heads left in the boards. Behind it the main roof still carries its worn brown shingles, two brick chimneys show spalled faces and patched mortar, and a dormer carries a metal turbine vent under a clear blue sky — Exhibit 1A Keys tear-off in progress on an older brick house. The lower plane is down to plank decking, the main roof is untouched, and the chimneys are visibly spalling. This is what the quarter of the decking rule is actually about.

The permit questions, answered flat

These are the answers a homeowner actually wants, without the hedging. Two of them have exceptions large enough to matter, and those are marked.

Usually no permit

Like for like, 4:12 or steeper

Under the St. Louis County baseline, stripping asphalt shingles and putting the same class of asphalt shingles back on a slope of 4:12 or steeper does not trigger a permit. That is the single most common residential roof job in this metro.

Permit

Below a 4:12 slope

Drop under 4:12 and the assembly changes. Low slope is a different water management problem and a different product, and the county wants it permitted. Porch roofs, additions and rear extensions are where this catches people.

Permit

More than a quarter of the decking

Replace more than twenty five percent of the decking and it is no longer a recover, it is structural work. On plank decking over an older house this threshold is genuinely reachable, which is why the price per sheet belongs in the contract.

Permit

The material changes

Asphalt to metal, metal to asphalt, or anything that changes the load or the assembly. If the new roof is not the same kind of roof as the old one, expect the counter to want a look at it.

Kirkwood overrides

The city administers its own code

Everything above is the county baseline. Kirkwood runs its own building division, so the city is the authority on your address. Confirm with the City of Kirkwood building division, not with a website and not with a salesman.

No state licence

Missouri licenses nobody

There is no Missouri roofing licence to hold. Three separate bills tried and all three failed. Any credential a roofer names is either municipal, an insurance certificate, or a manufacturer programme, and those are three different things.

The permit rules, with the traps in each · Why no state licence exists

A newly laid grey and charcoal architectural shingle plane filling the frame, with a short capped ridge over a dark vent strip at the left, running up to the eave and gutter of the adjoining garage roof, which still carries its old brown shingles across the top of the frame — Exhibit 2A finished Keys plane meeting the untouched brown roof of the adjoining section. The colour break is why roofers argue for doing a whole plane rather than a patch. The old roof in frame is not part of this job.

The trades Keys carries, and the one thing the law forbids

Keys Roofing is a roofing contractor working across greater St. Louis. Roofing, gutters and downspouts. Not siding, not windows, not commercial. Atlas and Malarkey shingles, which are the two lines Keys carries and the only two it installs. Licensed and insured.

On a claim, Keys does what Missouri law allows and stops there. RSMo 407.725 provides that a contractor shall not represent or negotiate, or offer or advertise to represent or negotiate, on behalf of a property owner on any insurance claim for roof work. So Keys does not do that. What Keys does is get on the roof, photograph what is there, measure it, write a scope you can hold in your hand, and be present as the contractor when your adjuster comes out. The claim is yours throughout.

The written scope is the deliverable, and it exists whether or not there is a claim involved and whether or not you hire Keys. It is the document that lets you compare two bids on something other than the number at the bottom.

What belongs in that document · How the job actually runs

The rest of the file

Ten articles. Each one answers a question a Kirkwood homeowner actually types, and each one is written to be useful whether or not you ever call.

Questions people ask before they call

Does a roof replacement in Kirkwood need a permit?: Assume yes and let the contractor prove otherwise at the counter. Kirkwood runs its own building division rather than using the county's, so the county's own exemptions are a starting point and not the final word inside the city limits. The county baseline is that like for like asphalt on a slope of 4:12 or steeper does not need a permit, but a permit is required below that slope, when more than a quarter of the decking is replaced, or when the material changes. Call the City of Kirkwood building division with your address before anyone tears anything off.
My roofer says he is licensed. Is that enough for Kirkwood?: It depends entirely on where he is licensed. Missouri issues no state roofing licence at all, so there is no statewide credential for anybody to hold. What exists is municipal, and Kirkwood licenses contractors itself. A roofer who is properly registered to work in unincorporated St. Louis County is not automatically cleared to work in Kirkwood, and most homeowners have no way of knowing that.
Can Keys Roofing handle my insurance company for me?: No, and no roofer in Missouri may. RSMo 407.725 provides that a contractor shall not represent or negotiate on a property owner's insurance claim for roof work. What Keys does instead is document the roof properly: photographs, measurements and a written scope, and someone from Keys is on site as the contractor when the adjuster comes. The claim itself stays in your name and in your hands.
Which shingles does Keys install?: Atlas and Malarkey. Those are the two lines Keys carries and it does not install others. Keys does roofing, gutters and downspouts. It does not do siding, windows or commercial work, and it will say so on the phone rather than waste your morning.
Why does this site not name a phone number at City Hall?: Because a wrong number printed on a roofing advertisement is worse than no number, and because municipal contact details change more often than roofs do. The department you want is the City of Kirkwood building division at Kirkwood City Hall. Look it up on the city's own website, which is the only source for it that will still be right next year.

✉

Ask Keys to look at it

Leave a name, a number and a sentence about what the roof is doing. Keys calls back, comes out, gets on the roof or puts a camera on it, and gives you a written scope with photographs and measurements. There is no charge for that and no obligation attached to it.

If the roof is open to weather right now, do not use this form. Call (314) 220-2333 and say the word emergency.

Trades: Roofing, gutters, downspouts
Shingles: Atlas and Malarkey
Not offered: Siding, windows, commercial
Status: Licensed and insured

Roof replacement enquiry Filed with Keys Roofing

Keys Roofing does not represent, negotiate or advertise to negotiate on any homeowner insurance claim, because RSMo 407.725 forbids a roofing contractor from doing so. Keys documents the roof and attends on site as the contractor. The claim stays yours.