Window replacement costs in Beaumont

Southeast Texas has taken a lot of wind. When Rita came ashore just east of Sabine Pass in September 2005, the Southeast Texas Regional Airport recorded sustained hurricane-force winds. In 2020, Laura blew down trees, power lines and poles across Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties and damaged some homes, and that October, Delta sent a 78-knot gust across the same airport.

For windows, which county your Beaumont-area house sits in changes the paperwork. Jefferson County is one of the 14 coastal counties in the state's designated catastrophe area, where most homes need a certificate of compliance before the state's windstorm insurer will write a policy. Orange and Hardin counties aren't on that list.

In Jefferson County, the Texas Department of Insurance lists swapping only the glass in a window as work that skips the windstorm inspection, while most other alterations need one. That inspection can happen while the work is underway, by a TDI inspector or an engineer TDI appoints, or after it's finished, by a licensed professional engineer. TDI notes a finished job is harder to inspect.

Some 46 percent of the Beaumont-Port Arthur metro's housing predates 1980, per Census figures, so plenty of these houses have ridden out Rita and Laura both.