San Antonio · Bexar County & surrounding
Water through a ceiling does not wait for business hours. One call connects you with an independent licensed roofing contractor working your side of the metro — leak traced, contained, repaired.
GPS Rain Leak Repair is a referral service, not a roofing contractor. Calls are connected to independent licensed roofing contractors serving San Antonio.
Start here
Move what you can out of the way, get a container under the drip, kill the power to any circuit running through the wet area, and call a roofer. If the ceiling is bulging, pierce it at the lowest point of the bulge so the water drains in one controlled place instead of bringing a whole sheet of drywall down. That is the first ten minutes.
The reason to call rather than wait out the storm is simple: the opening in your roof is not getting smaller. Water that gets past the shingles soaks the decking, runs along framing, saturates insulation and spreads sideways through the attic. Wet insulation stops insulating long before it starts dripping, and the stain on your ceiling is the last part of the problem to appear, not the first.
If water is moving right now, go straight to emergency roof leak repair. If it has stopped and you want the cause properly identified instead of guessed at, start with roof leak detection — because the single most expensive mistake in this whole process is sealing the wrong spot and believing it is fixed.
Wet shingles and wet flashing metal are slick, and a hail-bruised roof is damaged further by footfall. Look from the ground with binoculars and from inside the attic with a flashlight. Everything else waits for a roofer with the right equipment.
What we connect you with
Nearly every call is one of these. Which one you need depends on two things: whether water is moving right now, and whether anybody has actually found where it starts.
The core job. Find where water is getting in, open up only what needs opening, replace what failed, and put the roof back so the repair sheds water the way the rest of the slope does. Most leaks are one detail, not a whole roof.
Roof Leak Repair in San AntonioFor water that is moving right now. The priority order changes: stop the intrusion, protect what is below it, then diagnose properly once the roof is not actively dumping water into your ceiling.
Emergency Roof Leak Repair in San AntonioBefore anyone seals anything. Attic tracing, directional water testing, moisture readings and thermal scanning are used to pin the actual entry point, which is often several feet uphill of the stain.
Roof Leak Detection in San AntonioSpring is the busy season here. Hail fractures the shingle mat and strips granules; the wind that comes with it creases shingles and breaks sealant strips. Both get assessed and documented.
Storm & Hail Damage Repair in San AntonioSectional work beyond a single leak: soft decking, failed valleys, nail pops, a slope that has taken damage across a wide area. The goal is the smallest repair that genuinely solves it.
Roof Repair in San AntonioA proper dry-in over battens, lapped over the ridge so water cannot run underneath. It buys the days or weeks you need for materials, weather or a claim — and it is not a repair.
Roof Tarping in San AntonioStep flashing, counter-flashing, kick-outs, pipe boots, skylight curbs and individual shingle courses. This is where most leaks actually live, and where caulk is most often used as a substitute for metal.
Flashing & Shingle Repair in San AntonioRoof surface and attic, documented. Useful before you buy, after a storm, or when you want to know what condition you are really in before the next round of weather.
Roof Inspection in San AntonioNarrow it down
Pick the symptom that matches what you are seeing. Each one points at a different part of the roof, and a different first move.
A ring with a defined edge means water arrived, sat, and dried more than once. The staining is tannin carried out of the drywall paper and the framing above it, and each new soaking pushes the edge further out.
The hole is almost never directly above the ring. Water lands on the decking, runs down the slope, then drops off the first rafter or duct that interrupts it. Expect the entry point to be uphill of the stain, sometimes by several feet.
First move: get the entry point confirmed with roof leak detection before anyone seals anything. Sealant applied to the wrong spot hides the evidence and the leak comes back.
This is wind-driven rain, and it is one of the most misdiagnosed leaks there is. Nothing is missing from the roof. Water is being pushed sideways and uphill, under shingle courses, behind a sidewall, past a lifted counter-flashing or straight through a gable vent.
Because there is no hole, a visual check from the ground finds nothing, and a hose test aimed straight down will not reproduce it either. It takes a directional water test on the suspect elevation.
First move: flashing and shingle repair is where this usually lands, because the fix is a detail, not a patch.
Hail damages a roof in two ways that matter. It fractures the asphalt mat so the shingle can no longer flex without splitting, and it knocks the granule layer off, which exposes the asphalt to the sun and ages it fast. Neither one necessarily leaks on day one.
The same storms carry straight-line wind, which creases shingles and breaks the sealant strip that holds each course down. A creased shingle lies flat again when the wind stops and looks fine from the ground.
First move: have the roof looked at for storm and hail damage and get the condition documented while the cause is still recent.
Chimneys and skylights interrupt the roof plane, so water has to be routed around them by metal rather than shed by shingles. That takes step flashing up the sides, counter-flashing cut into the masonry or the curb, and a kick-out at the bottom edge to throw water into the gutter instead of behind the siding.
Any one of those pieces being short, loose, caulked instead of flashed, or missing entirely will leak. A missing kick-out is a classic, because the damage shows up inside the wall rather than on the ceiling.
First move: flashing repair. Caulk on a flashing failure is a delay, not a fix.
Good news and bad news. You have found it before the drywall did, which is the cheap end of this problem. But dark sheathing, rusty nail points and damp insulation mean water has been arriving for a while.
Worth ruling out condensation first. In humid shoulder weather, warm attic air hitting cold duct metal or cold sheathing will sweat and drip in a pattern that looks exactly like a leak. Condensation is even across a wide area; a leak concentrates along one path.
First move: a proper roof inspection covering both the roof surface and the attic, so the two causes get separated.
Stop reading and make the call. Put a container under the drip, move furniture and electronics clear, and if the ceiling is sagging or bulging, pierce it at the lowest point of the bulge so the water drains in one controlled spot instead of bringing a whole sheet of drywall down.
Do not go up on a wet roof. Wet shingles and wet metal flashing are slick, and nothing you can do up there in the rain improves the situation.
First move: emergency roof leak repair, usually with roof tarping to dry the opening in before the permanent repair.
The long version
If you want to understand the problem rather than just book somebody, this is the part worth reading.
San Antonio is hard on roofs in a specific way. Summers are long, hot and high in ultraviolet, which drives the volatile oils out of asphalt shingles and makes the neoprene collars on plumbing vents go brittle and split. A boot that was flexible for a decade cracks in one season, and the crack sits right at the base of the pipe where water concentrates.
Then there is how it rains. The region sits in what is widely called Flash Flood Alley, and rain here tends to arrive hard and fast rather than steady and light. A roof detail that handles a drizzle fine will be overwhelmed by the volume coming down a valley in a short, violent downpour. Add straight-line wind and the water is no longer falling — it is being pushed sideways and uphill under the shingle courses.
Spring brings the hail. Impacts fracture the asphalt mat so the shingle can no longer flex without splitting, and they knock the granule layer loose, which exposes the asphalt underneath to the sun and accelerates everything. A hail-damaged roof often does not leak for months, which is why people connect the leak to the wrong storm.
Underneath all of it, expansive clay soils are common across the region. Soil that swells when wet and shrinks when dry moves the structure sitting on it, and that movement telegraphs up into the roofline. Separated flashing at a chimney, opened joints at a ridge, and nails backing out of the decking are all things that show up on houses that have been flexing with the seasons for decades.
A competent diagnosis works backwards from the water, and it starts inside. The attic is where the evidence is: dark staining on the underside of the decking, rust rings around nail points, matted insulation, and daylight where there should not be any. The highest wet point in the attic is the clue, because water runs downhill from where it entered.
From there the roof surface gets checked against that evidence — the penetrations, valleys and transitions uphill of the wet area rather than the whole roof. Moisture meters put numbers on how wet the framing and sheathing actually are, which separates an active leak from an old stain that dried out years ago. Thermal imaging can show where trapped moisture is holding temperature differently to the material around it.
The confirmation step is a water test. Someone runs water on the roof in controlled sections, starting low and working uphill, while a second person watches the suspect area from inside. When the water hits the failed detail, the leak reproduces, and the guesswork ends. For a leak that only appears in blowing rain, the water has to be directed sideways at the elevation in question, because a hose pointed straight down will never reproduce it.
The repair gets opened up only as far as the damage goes. Shingles come off above the failure so the new work can be layered in properly rather than surface-patched, and anything soft underneath gets replaced before new material goes over it. Putting a perfect shingle repair over rotten decking brings the roofer straight back, and a roofer who skips that check is not doing you a favour.
Failed metal gets replaced with metal. This matters more than any other single point on this page. Sealant is a finishing material, not a flashing material — it has a service life measured in a few years under this sun, and a flashing detail that depends on it will fail again. Step flashing goes back in woven with the shingle courses, counter-flashing goes back into the masonry, and the kick-out at the bottom of a sidewall gets reinstalled so water is thrown clear instead of running behind the siding.
Then the repair gets tied back into the surrounding field so water sheds across it the way it does everywhere else on the slope, and the inside damage gets assessed separately. Wet insulation needs to come out rather than dry in place, and stained drywall is a different trade. A roofer stops the water; the ceiling is a second conversation. See roof repair for how sectional work is scoped, and flashing and shingle repair for the detail work that most of these jobs come down to.
Photograph the stain with a tape measure next to it and note the date and the weather. Two photos a week apart tell a roofer whether the leak is active or historic, and that single piece of information changes how the diagnosis starts. If you can get into the attic safely, photograph the wet sheathing too — that is the picture that actually locates the problem.
Start to finish
Five steps, and the first one takes about two minutes.
Where the water is showing, when it started, and whether it is moving right now. That is enough to route the call correctly.
Attic first, then the roof surface uphill of the wet area, then a water test to confirm it. No sealant goes anywhere until the entry point is known.
If weather or materials mean the permanent fix has to wait, the opening gets tarped properly first so nothing worsens in the meantime.
Scope, condition of the surrounding roof, and whether this is a repair or the start of a replacement conversation — with the evidence to back it up.
Why the timing matters
A roof leak is one of the few household problems where the delay is more expensive than the repair. The hole does not grow much. Everything downstream of it does.
Start with the insulation. Blown or batt insulation that gets wet compresses and stops working, and it does not recover when it dries. You are paying to cool a house through a dead spot for as long as it sits there. Next is the decking: plywood or OSB that stays damp loses its grip on fasteners, goes soft, and turns a shingle-and-flashing repair into a carpentry job. That is the single biggest jump in scope between calling early and calling late.
Then the framing, the drywall and the paint, in that order. A ceiling that has been soaked repeatedly sags, and the joint tape lets go. And in a humid attic, organic material that stays wet long enough grows mould, which is a remediation trade rather than a roofing one.
There is a storm-season angle too. Spring here brings the hail and the heavy wind, and an already-open roof going into that is exposed. A tarp costs a fraction of what another band of weather through the same opening will. If you are weighing it up, roof tarping is the cheap insurance, and a roof inspection is how you find out what you are dealing with before the next round.
Before you ask for a number
Nobody can price a roof leak over the phone, and anybody who does is guessing. These are the things that genuinely move the figure, so you know what the quote is responding to.
| Factor | Why it moves the number |
|---|---|
| Where the water enters | An accessible pipe boot in open field is the simple end. A chimney or skylight perimeter means removing and reinstalling multiple metal components in sequence. |
| How long it has been leaking | The difference between replacing shingles and replacing decking, framing and insulation as well. This is usually the largest single variable. |
| Pitch and height | A steep or multi-storey slope needs fall protection and slows every task down. A walkable single-storey slope does not. |
| Roof covering | Asphalt shingle, metal, tile and low-slope membrane are four different repair methods with different materials and different skills. |
| Number of existing layers | A second or third layer of old roofing has to come off before the repair, and it changes how the detail gets rebuilt. |
| Deck condition | Soft or delaminated sheathing has to be cut out and replaced. It is rarely visible until the shingles come off. |
| Access and obstructions | Solar panels, satellite mounts, HVAC equipment, tight side yards and mature trees all add removal, protection or handling time. |
| Whether a claim is involved | Documentation, measurements and an adjuster meeting are work in their own right, and they change the sequence rather than the repair. |
Two practical notes. Ask for the scope in writing before work starts, with the failed component named rather than described as "roof repair" — you want to see the words pipe boot, step flashing or decking on the page. And if a quote arrives without anybody having been in your attic or run water on the roof, it is a price for a guess. Proper leak detection comes first for a reason.
Where we cover
Roofs fail differently depending on where they sit. Tree cover, housing era, hail track and build quality all change what goes wrong first — so the areas below are not the same page with the name swapped out.
Out in the Hill Country northwest of the city, Boerne roofs face a different mix than the suburbs do. Metal and tile are far more common, mature oaks hang over the roof plane and drop debris straight into the valleys, and limbs abrade the surface every time the wind blows. On metal, the leak is usually a fastener, a panel lap or a penetration boot rather than a worn-out covering.
Cibolo is newer housing almost end to end, which means whole subdivisions went up inside a few years with the same materials and the same crews. Roof problems arrive in waves here: a run of pipe-boot failures across a neighbourhood, or sealant strips giving up at a similar age. If your neighbours are getting roof work done, it is worth having yours looked at too.
Converse mixes housing eras on the same block, so two neighbouring roofs can be two decades apart. Older homes here often carry layers of past repairs, and a previous patch is one of the more common entry points we hear about. Where somebody has caulked over a flashing problem instead of replacing the metal, the leak comes back a season or two later.
The creek corridors on the northwest side have the heaviest tree canopy in the city. Shade keeps roof slopes damp long after a storm, leaf litter dams up valleys and gutters so water backs up under the shingle edge, and overhanging limbs scuff granules off the surface. Drainage, not shingle age, is usually the story on these roofs.
Kyle has grown fast along the I-35 corridor, so most roofs there are recent. New roofs do leak, but they leak for a different reason: it is workmanship at the details rather than wear. A short piece of step flashing, a nail driven high, a boot that was never sealed properly. The shingles can look brand new while a transition quietly lets water in.
The Medical Center, UTSA and Loop 1604 side of town covers everything from 1970s ranch homes to recent townhome blocks. Two things come up repeatedly: roof systems from the 1980s and 1990s now well past their service life, and shared or adjoining roofs on condo and townhome buildings, where the leak above your unit may start over somebody else's.
San Marcos carries a large rental population alongside owner-occupied homes, and that changes what matters. Tenants need the water stopped and a landlord or property manager needs something in writing. Deferred maintenance is common on long-term rentals, so a leak often turns out to be the visible end of a roof that has needed attention for years.
Schertz sits on the northeast side where hail tends to track, and its subdivisions went up in identifiable waves. A lot of roofs there are now in the fifteen-to-twenty-year range, which is exactly the window where the repair-or-replace question gets real. Storm damage on a roof already near the end of its life is a different decision than the same damage on a newer one.
Seguin has a genuinely old core, and old houses bring complicated roofs: more planes, more valleys, more penetrations, and often more than one layer of roofing stacked up over the decades. Original decking, older framing and historic detailing all mean a repair there takes more investigation before anybody starts pulling shingles.
Much of Universal City is mid-century housing, and that era shows up in the roof geometry: low-slope carports, flat-roofed additions and patio covers tied into a pitched main roof. Those transitions between a steep plane and a near-flat one are the single most common leak point on this housing stock, along with original ventilation that was never sized for the way we live now.
Plain terms
GPS Rain Leak Repair is a referral service. We are not a roofing contractor, we do not perform roofing work, and we do not set prices or hold materials. When you call the number on this site, the call is connected to an independent licensed and insured roofing contractor who serves San Antonio and the surrounding areas.
What that means for you in practice: the contractor who shows up is the one responsible for the inspection, the quote, the schedule, the workmanship and any warranty on the repair. You are hiring them, not us. We are the routing layer that gets a leak in Kyle or Universal City in front of somebody who actually works that area, instead of leaving you to call down a list at nine at night.
We are deliberately careful about what this site claims. You will not find review counts, star ratings, award badges, years-in-business figures or response-time promises anywhere on it, because we are not in a position to verify any of that on behalf of an independent contractor. Credentials belong to the contractor and they are the right party to show them to you — ask for the licence and the certificate of insurance before work begins, and ask to see the damage before you agree to the scope.
Everything written here is general guidance about roofing and water intrusion. It is not an inspection of your roof and it is not a diagnosis. The point of the roof inspection is that somebody qualified looks at your specific roof and tells you what is going on with it.
Two minutes of prep
None of this is required. All of it makes the call shorter and the first visit more productive.
Straight answers
Ten of the questions that come up most often on these calls.
Treat it as the same day. A roof leak is not a plumbing drip that stays the same size. Water follows framing and insulation, so the wet area inside the house grows every hour the roof stays open, and wet insulation stops insulating long before it starts dripping. If water is moving right now, call and get a contractor out for emergency roof leak repair or a tarp before you start thinking about the permanent fix.
Most single leaks are repairs, not replacements. A cracked pipe boot, a failed valley detail, lifted step flashing or a handful of wind-damaged shingles are all sectional work that leaves the rest of the roof alone. Replacement becomes the better decision when the shingles across the whole roof are at the end of their life, when there is widespread hail bruising, or when the decking under several areas has gone soft. A roofer should show you which of those you are looking at before quoting either one.
That pattern almost always means wind-driven rain, and it points at a detail rather than a hole. Falling rain runs down the roof surface and off the edge. Rain pushed sideways at thirty or forty miles an hour gets under shingle courses, behind siding at a sidewall, past a loose counter-flashing or through a gable vent. Nothing is missing from the roof, so a quick look from the ground finds nothing, which is exactly why this kind of leak gets diagnosed wrong so often.
Have a roofer look at the roof first so that you know what is actually up there. Hail leaves a mix of real damage and cosmetic marks, and the two look similar from a driveway. A contractor can show you whether the impacts fractured the shingle mat and knocked granules off the asphalt, or whether they only scuffed the surface. That tells you whether there is anything worth filing on. Storm and hail damage repair is a common reason people call after a spring storm here.
A tarp is a dry-in, not a repair. Fastened properly over battens and lapped over the ridge so water cannot run underneath, it keeps the weather out of an opening while the real repair gets scheduled, materials get ordered or the next band of storms passes. It buys weeks, not seasons. Sun and wind break tarps down, and a tarp left up for months becomes its own problem.
Penetrations and transitions, far more often than open field shingles. Plumbing vent boots, furnace and bathroom-fan flashings, chimney and skylight perimeters, valleys where two planes dump water into one channel, and the point where a roof plane runs into a wall. Those are the places where two different materials have to be made watertight, and they are the places that fail first.
Usually not. Water that gets past a shingle lands on the underlayment or the decking and then runs downhill until something stops it, which is often a rafter, a truss plate, a duct or a run of wiring. It can travel several feet sideways before it soaks through the ceiling. The stain marks where the water left the attic, not where it entered the roof. Finding the entry point is the whole job of roof leak detection.
Look from the ground and from inside the attic, not from the roof. Binoculars from the yard will show you missing shingles, a crooked vent cap or a sagging line in the roof plane. From the attic with a flashlight you can see wet sheathing, rusted nail points and daylight. Walking on a wet or damaged roof is how people get hurt, and footfall on a hail-bruised roof causes damage of its own.
No. GPS Rain Leak Repair is a referral service. We do not perform roofing work, hold the materials or set the price. Calls placed to the number on this site are connected to independent licensed and insured roofing contractors who serve San Antonio and the surrounding areas. The contractor you hire is responsible for the work, the quote, the schedule and any warranty.
The city itself and the surrounding metro: Boerne, Cibolo, Converse, the Huebner and Leon Creeks area, Kyle, Northwest San Antonio, San Marcos, Schertz, Seguin and Universal City. Tell whoever answers the phone where you are and what the water is doing, and the call gets routed to a contractor who covers that side of town.
Talk to a roofer now
One number. You describe what the water is doing, and the call is routed to an independent licensed roofing contractor working your area.
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