Data · Flood insurance claims
Flood insurance claims by county and year
How many National Flood Insurance Program claims are filed in each county and state, how many are paid, how much FEMA's program pays, and which storms drove them, year by year since 1978. The counts come from FEMA's own public NFIP claims file, and the total is checked against FEMA's record count for the file.
FEMA's file records 586,148 NFIP flood insurance claims with a loss in 2016-2025, with $36.8 billion paid.
What is in this dataset?
Every National Flood Insurance Program claim in FEMA's public NFIP claims file, counted for the nation, each state and territory and each county by the year of the loss: claims, claims with a payment and dollars paid (building, contents and increased cost of compliance), over all years since 1978, the ten full years 2016 to 2025, the latest full year and the current, partial year, with the flood event that brought the most claims since 2016 in each state. Counts and sums only; no policy, address or claimant detail is kept.
Use it to size flood and property insurance claim work where it happens: which counties file the most flood claims, how much the program pays there, which storms drove them and how recent years compare with the long record, as context for insurance-claim disputes, bad-faith and property-damage practices. Agents can look up a state and its counties, compare states, or search by county, year or storm name.
- Records
- 2,988
- Look up by
- 57
- state
- Primary-source records
- 2,988
The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.
Where does the data come from?
FEMA publishes every NFIP claim since 1978 through the OpenFEMA API, without policyholder details, refreshed about monthly. The selected fields (state, county code, year and date of loss, amounts paid, flood event) of all claims are read one page at a time at FEMA's crawl-delay and summed by state, county and year of loss. A gate ties the row count to FEMA's own record count for the file, checks that every claim id appears once, re-asks the API for each state's claim count and re-derives 50 random records from the cached pages.
- Period covered
- January 1, 1978 to September 8, 2026
- Places
- The whole US, all 50 states and DC and counties
- How often we refresh it
- Every month
- Records read
- October 31, 2026
Official sources
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, OpenFEMA, by official API. A work of the U.S. government (17 U.S.C. 105) published through the OpenFEMA API under FEMA's OpenFEMA Terms and Conditions (cite the endpoint and access date; the non-endorsement statement in the disclaimer).
The sources the records cite most
What does a record look like?
-
Florida: 448,618 NFIP flood insurance claims since 1978, 313,638 of them paid, $19.4 billion in all; 199,277 claims and $15.5 billion paid in 2016-2025, 721 claims in 2025; the most claims since 2016 came from Hurricane Helene (54,676) (FEMA OpenFEMA, data as of 2026-09-08).
Status P · checked October 31, 2026 · source: FEMA OpenFEMA API, NfipClaims v3 (NFIP flood insurance claims)
-
Louisiana: 485,743 NFIP flood insurance claims since 1978, 388,590 of them paid, $21.0 billion in all; 71,293 claims and $4.3 billion paid in 2016-2025, 606 claims in 2025; the most claims since 2016 came from Mid-summer severe storms (30,019) (FEMA OpenFEMA, data as of 2026-09-08).
Status P · checked October 31, 2026 · source: FEMA OpenFEMA API, NfipClaims v3 (NFIP flood insurance claims)
-
United States: 2,725,989 NFIP flood insurance claims since 1978, 2,117,326 of them paid, $89.9 billion in all; 586,148 claims and $36.8 billion paid in 2016-2025, 13,143 claims in 2025; the most claims since 2016 came from Hurricane Harvey (92,398) (FEMA OpenFEMA, data as of 2026-09-08).
Status P · checked October 31, 2026 · source: FEMA OpenFEMA API, NfipClaims v3 (NFIP flood insurance claims)
The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.
What each of the 27 main columns means
jurisdiction- Two-letter state or territory code, or US
level- us, state or county
area- US, the 2-digit state FIPS code or the 5-digit county FIPS code
areaName- County and state, state name, or United States
stateName- State name (United States on the national record)
status- P: FEMA's own file
value- Claims with a loss in the ten full years (the same as claims_10y)
firstYear- First year of loss with a claim for this place
dataThrough- FEMA's as-of date for the file
claims_total- NFIP claims, every year of loss in the file
paid_claims_total- Claims with a payment above zero
paid_usd_total- Dollars paid: building, contents and increased cost of compliance
tenYears- The ten full years of loss counted in the _10y columns
claims_10y- Claims with a loss in those ten years
paid_claims_10y- Of them, claims with a payment
paid_usd_10y- Dollars paid on them
latestYear- The latest full year of loss
claims_latest- Claims with a loss in the latest full year
paid_usd_latest- Dollars paid on them
currentYear- The current year (partial: losses to the as-of date)
claims_current- Claims with a loss so far this year
paid_usd_current- Dollars paid on them so far
claims_in_counties_pct- State and US records: share of claims whose county code in FEMA's file is a current county of the state
top_event_10y- State and US records: the named flood event with the most claims since the first of the ten years
top_event_10y_claims- Its claims
years- Per year of loss: claims, claims with a payment, dollars paid (order in yearFields)
claims_in_states_pct- US record: share of claims whose state code in FEMA's file is a state, DC or territory (the rest count in the national total only)
How do I use it in my own tools?
floodclaims_lookup- For one two-letter state or territory code (or US): NFIP flood insurance claims, paid claims and dollars paid by year of loss since 1978, over ten years and the latest year, for the state and every county, with the top storm since 2016.
floodclaims_compare- The records of up to 10 states (or US) side by side: NFIP claims and dollars paid by year of loss and over ten years.
floodclaims_search- Records whose text matches the words given, such as a county name ("Lee County"), a storm ("Hurricane Ian") or a state name.
How to cite this dataset
You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.
- Version
- 1.0.0, released October 31, 2026
- Every version
- 10.5281/zenodo.23845800 (always points to the newest)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Download the data
- CSV: flood-claims.csv 1986 KB · one row per record (columns in README.txt)
- JSON: flood-claims.json 5706 KB · every record with its sources
Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.
Suggested citation
Probative. (2026). Flood insurance claims by county and year (FEMA NFIP, OpenFEMA), 1978 to 2026 (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23845801
Credit line for a chart, table or article
Source: Probative, Flood insurance claims by county and year (FEMA NFIP, OpenFEMA), 1978 to 2026, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23845801, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)
Not legal advice. These are counts of claims in FEMA's public NFIP claims file, not findings about any claim or insurer; private flood insurance is outside the file. This product uses the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s OpenFEMA API, but is not endorsed by FEMA. The Federal Government or FEMA cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from the Agency's website(s).
What changed recently?
- 2026-10-31 · FEMA NFIP flood insurance claims by county, state and year of loss, 1978 to 2026, for the nation, 50 states, DC and 5 territories and 2,931 counties: 586,148 claims with a loss in 2016-2025, $36.8 billion paid. (source)
The full log is in changes.json.
What are the limits?
- A claim is a row of FEMA's NFIP claims file, counted in the year of the loss; private flood insurance and uninsured losses are outside the file.
- Dollars paid add building, contents and increased cost of compliance payments, in the dollars of the year they were paid, not adjusted for inflation.
- County is FEMA's county code for the insured property; claims whose code is not a current county of the state count in the state and national totals only.
- The current year is partial and runs to FEMA's as-of date; FEMA refreshes the file about monthly and later payments change recent years.
- This product uses the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s OpenFEMA API, but is not endorsed by FEMA. The Federal Government or FEMA cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from the Agency's website(s).
- Records older than 60 days since their last check are marked
stalein the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.
Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.
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