What is the difference between gutter apron and drip edge?
Both are strips of metal that cover the edge of the roof deck. Drip edge has a short face with a kick at the bottom that throws water clear of the edge. Gutter apron has a longer face that reaches down into the gutter.
They go on different edges. We install gutter apron at the eaves, the low edges where the gutters hang. We install drip edge at the rakes, the sloped edges at the gable ends, where there are no gutters.
What is a gutter apron?
Water doesn't always fall straight off the edge of a shingle. Some of it clings and runs back along the underside. Where there's a gap between the roof edge and the gutter, that water runs down behind the gutter and soaks the fascia.
Gutter apron closes that gap. Its long face hangs inside the back of the gutter, so the water lands in the gutter. The fascia behind it stays dry, and fascia is what the gutters hang from.
What is drip edge?
At the rake there's no gutter to reach into. Drip edge covers the exposed edge of the decking and kicks water away from the trim board below it.
Is drip edge required by code in Ohio?
Ohio's residential code does not spell it out. Its drip edge section is one sentence long, and that sentence points to two other sections of the code.
Those sections say a roof has to be installed according to the code and the shingle manufacturer's installation instructions. So the answer comes from the manufacturer. Greene County's building department says it plainly in its shingle roof guidance (opens in a new tab): drip edge "is required only when the roof covering manufacturer's installation instructions requires its use." Owens Corning's instructions for RhinoRoof Granulated (opens in a new tab), the ice and water shield we install, say it "should be applied over the metal drip edge at the eaves," and along the rakes to "install drip edge over the underlayment."
We put edge metal on every roof we replace.
Does gutter apron go over or under the ice and water shield?
Under. The gutter apron goes on the bare deck first, the ice and water shield laps over its flange, then the synthetic underlayment. Water that gets under the shingles runs over the metal and into the gutter, never under it. At the rakes it's the other way around: underlayment first, drip edge on top.
What happens when the edge metal fails?
On Spaulding Rd in Dayton, in May 2026, the old shingles had curled over a rusted strip of edge metal above the gutter, and water had been running behind it. We tore the roof off to the deck and replaced it, with new gutter apron at the eaves and drip edge on the rakes.
Do you need both?
Yes, on a roof with gutters. Gutter apron goes on the eaves and drip edge goes on the rakes, so each edge gets one or the other.
If the fascia behind your gutters is already soft or stained, the metal at the eave is one of the things we look at. A free roof inspection covers the roof edge along with the rest of the roof. It's worth settling before new seamless gutters go up.
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