About FloodHawk

FloodHawk explains flood zones, flood insurance and flood recovery in plain English, and shows how often each state and county has flooded. It's an independent site, not affiliated with FEMA, the National Flood Insurance Program or any insurer, and it's supported by ads.

How guides are checked

• Guides use only official sources: FEMA, FloodSmart.gov (the NFIP's own site), federal regulations and laws, the National Weather Service, EPA, CDC, state insurance regulators and similar public agencies.
• Every paragraph links to the sources that support it. Numbers, deadlines and dollar limits are checked against the source's exact wording.
• Each guide is reviewed again by a second, independent check before it's published, and shows the date it was last reviewed.
• We don't use insurer, contractor or blog articles as sources, and we don't recommend specific companies.

Where the numbers come from

State, county and disaster pages are calculated from FEMA's public OpenFEMA datasets:

• NFIP Redacted Claims (v3) (FEMA (OpenFEMA))
• NFIP Residential Penetration Rates (v1) (FEMA (OpenFEMA))
• Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2) (FEMA (OpenFEMA))
• NFIP Redacted Policies (v3) (FEMA (OpenFEMA))

Some things to know about the data:

• Claims are NFIP claims only. Private flood insurance and homeowners policies aren't included.
• Claims are counted by the year of the flood and the county FEMA's data assigns. Some records lack a county; they count toward state totals only.
• "Paid" adds the building, contents and Increased Cost of Compliance amounts FEMA's data lists as paid. Amounts are in the dollars of the time, not adjusted for inflation.
• "Outside high-risk zones" means the claim's rated flood zone was B, C or X. Claims without a rated zone aren't counted in that share.
• "Homes insured" divides FEMA's count of residential NFIP policies in force by its count of residential buildings.
• Disaster declarations are counted as flood-related when FEMA lists flooding or a dam or levee break as the incident type or a designated incident type, or the title mentions flooding.

Data last downloaded: claims 2026-10-08, policies 2026-10-08, declarations 2026-10-08.

Found a mistake?

Please tell us at web@floodhawk.com. We fix errors as soon as we can confirm them.