The damage threshold for brittle materials impacted by water drops has been studied by using a combination of analytic and numerical approaches to obtain solutions for the impact stress fields and dynamic stress intensity factors. It has been shown that expressions for the damage threshold, which consists of the activation of preexistent surface microcracks, can be derived from these solutions. The expressions identify three types of behavior, depending upon the adjacence of the preexistent cracks to the impact center, vis‐a‐vis their size, and describe the respective roles of the three important target parameters, the fracture toughness, the elastic wave velocity, and the preexistent flaw size. Anabsolutedamage threshold has also been defined. The conditions at this threshold are demonstrated to be reasonably consistent with available threshold measurements.