If you felt a cold draft at the front of the house this week, you have about ten days to decide what to do about it. The National Weather Service office in Wilmington puts the normal first 32°F reading at Lunken Airport on October 25, with a ten percent chance of it arriving as early as October 12 and a ninety percent chance it has happened by November 5, based on the 1991–2020 record. Most drafty entry doors in Greater Cincinnati do not need replacing before then. Some do, and the ones that do take longer to order than homeowners expect. This is how to tell which you have, what the energy label on a new door has to say, and the two things that changed for 2026 that a quote may not mention.
Find out where the air is actually getting in
A draft you feel standing in the hall is usually not coming through the door. It is coming around it. Four checks, in daylight, take about five minutes.
Stand inside with the door closed and the interior lights off and look at the perimeter. Any daylight you can see is a gap, and the location tells you the cause. Daylight along the latch side means the door is not pulling tight against the stop, which is usually a strike-plate or hinge adjustment. Daylight along the hinge side means the frame has moved or the hinges have sagged. Daylight under the bottom corner is a threshold problem, and most aluminum thresholds have adjustment screws under the cap that raise the center section to meet the sweep.
Next, close the door on a dollar bill and pull. If it slides out with no resistance, the compression seal at that point is dead. Work your way around the frame doing it every foot or so, including the top corners, which are the ones people skip and the ones that leak most on a windward elevation. On exposed hilltop and ridge lots in places like Indian Hill, wind-driven rain and pressure differences will find a top-corner gap long before you feel it from inside.
Then look at the bottom rail and the sill from outside, on your knees. Press a screwdriver into the wood at the bottom edge of the slab and at the sill ends. If it sinks, you have rot, and rot at the bottom rail is the one finding that moves a door from the repair column to the replacement column. Finally, check the inside face of the door on a cold morning. Condensation or frost on the interior surface of a metal door, especially near the edges, means the slab is conducting heat straight through, which no amount of weatherstripping fixes.
When sealing and adjusting is the whole job
If the slab is straight, the frame is sound, and the only problem is gaps, you are looking at roughly an hour of work and parts that cost less than dinner. Vinyl-clad foam is the usual choice for the side jambs and head, cut to length and pressed against the jamb with the door closed, then fastened with one-inch nails without compressing the foam so tightly that the door will not latch. The threshold is a different product: an aluminum strip with a vinyl flap holds up to foot traffic where foam will not. Pile weatherstripping belongs on sliding patio doors rather than swinging doors, and felt is a stopgap that will be flat again by spring. Pull the old stripping with a utility knife, clean and sand the jambs, then open and close the door several times and look for daylight again. This Old House documents the sequence and the products in more detail than most product packaging does.
Doing this in mid-October rather than December matters for a reason specific to the Ohio Valley. Our freeze-thaw cycling is not a single hard winter but dozens of crossings back and forth through 32°F, and a seal that is already compressed flat lets water sit in the gap where it expands overnight and works the joint wider. Sealing now means the joint spends the winter closed.
When the door itself is the problem
Five findings mean you are buying a replacement rather than a seal kit. Rot through the bottom rail or the sill. A slab that is visibly bowed, so the latch side touches the stop at the top and stands off at the middle. A frame that has racked, which you see as a reveal that tapers from a quarter inch at one end to nothing at the other. A split or delaminated skin on a steel unit, common on builder-grade doors from the 1990s and early 2000s subdivisions around West Chester, where the foam core has absorbed water and the skin can no longer hold a fastener. And failed insulating glass in a lite, which shows as permanent haze or moisture between the panes.
Size is the other thing worth checking early. Many 1960s ranches in Blue Ash and Montgomery were built with 30-inch or narrow 32-inch slabs and non-standard rough openings. A current egress door has to provide a clear width of 32 inches and a clear height of 78 inches, which is why a like-for-like swap on an older narrow opening sometimes turns into framing work. Older housing in the Milford village core frequently has original wood units in openings that have settled out of square. None of that is a reason to avoid the project; it is a reason to get the opening measured before anyone promises a date. Our rundown of door types and materials covers what each one handles well, and if the opening changes size, the trim and flashing have to be reintegrated with the siding system rather than caulked over.
Read the label, not the brochure
Every exterior unit carries a performance label, and the numbers on it are comparable between brands in a way marketing language is not. Under the current ENERGY STAR Version 7.0 specification, which took effect October 23, 2023, a qualifying opaque swinging door has to come in at a U-factor of 0.17 or lower, and a door with half-lite glazing or less has to hit 0.23 or lower with a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.23 or lower. Those two thresholds are national. Doors with more than half-lite glazing are judged on a regional basis, so check the climate zone before comparing a mostly-glass unit against the number on a catalog page.
The number worth your attention on a draft problem is air leakage, and it is separate from U-factor. ENERGY STAR caps a swinging door at 0.5 cubic feet per minute per square foot, and a sliding glass door at 0.3. A unit can post a respectable U-factor and still leak, which is exactly the complaint most people start with. Ask for the air leakage figure in writing. The same label logic applies next door on the window side of the house, and if your doors and windows are the same age, you are usually diagnosing one problem in two places.
The federal credit is gone for 2026
This is the change most likely to show up in a quote as a discount that no longer exists. The Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit under section 25C, which covered exterior doors, was ended by Public Law 119-21. The IRS states plainly that the credit “will not be allowed for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.” A door installed this month does not qualify, and neither does one installed in January. If a contractor’s price sheet still shows a credit offsetting part of the cost, that is a stale sheet, and you should look at the rest of the numbers with the same skepticism. The IRS guidance on the change is short and worth reading before you sign anything. This is general information rather than tax advice; your accountant is the one to ask about your own return.
The city’s exemption list names windows, not doors
Here is the detail that catches people. The City of Cincinnati exempts a long list of exterior work from permits on one, two and three family dwellings, and window replacement is on it, specifically “repair and replacement of windows” with no increase in opening size. So are roof coverings up to two layers, siding, and gutters and downspouts. Doors are not named anywhere on that list. The guide requires permits for major repairs and alterations, so a door project that changes the opening is not covered by the window exemption and should not be assumed into it. Two further points from the same residential permit guide: if the property is locally designated as historic, a Certificate of Appropriateness is required before work proceeds even where a permit is not, and where a permit is required for work involving Energy Code items, an energy report comes with it.
If you are outside the city limits, in West Chester or Milford or any of the municipalities that run their own departments, none of the above applies to you, because the exemption list belongs to the city. The permit question goes to your own building department, and in township jurisdictions a zoning certificate is often a separate step that comes first. The call takes five minutes and is worth making before you order a door rather than after.
Budget and calendar
For scale, NerdWallet’s 2026 figures put exterior doors at close to $1,500 on average, with entry doors ranging from about $150 for the most basic unit to $3,000 for custom materials, and installation labor at $40 to $90 per hour. A standard-size prehung unit from stock is a different timeline from a custom slab, a non-standard opening, or anything with sidelights, and mid-October is when the lead times on the second group start running into the holidays. If the diagnosis above landed you in the replacement column, order now and seal the gaps in the meantime. Nothing about a temporary weatherstrip job prevents a proper installation later.
If you want the opening measured and the label numbers put in front of you rather than described, call us at (513) 685-8055 and we will come look at the door and the frame before the first freeze does.
