Home › About the data

About the data

ZipFactbook is a free, independent reference site. We take large public U.S. datasets and reorganise them so you can look things up by county and ZIP code.

Flood claims: source

Flood figures come from FEMA’s OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (v3) dataset, which lists claims made under the National Flood Insurance Program from 1978 onward. FEMA redacts personal details and reduces location precision before publishing. As a work of the U.S. federal government the data is not subject to copyright; we follow the OpenFEMA terms, and FEMA does not endorse this site.

Coverage

Currently 1,328,565 claims for Florida, Louisiana and Texas — 348 counties and parishes — from FEMA’s release dated 2026-09-07. Pages were last rebuilt on 2026-10-20. We add states one at a time and refresh as FEMA publishes new monthly releases.

What we change

We do not add, estimate or interpolate anything. Processing is limited to:

• Grouping claims by state, county (FIPS code), ZIP code, year of loss, month of loss and flood event name.
• Summing the three paid amounts FEMA publishes per claim — building, contents and Increased Cost of Compliance — into one “paid” figure.
• Grouping the rated flood zone into four bands: A zones (high risk), V zones (coastal high risk), B / C / X (moderate or low risk), and not recorded.
• Labelling FEMA’s cause-of-damage codes with the descriptions from FEMA’s data dictionary.
• Matching county FIPS codes to names using the U.S. Census Bureau 2020 county list.

Limits you should know about

• Insured properties only. Only buildings with an NFIP policy can file these claims. Most U.S. homes have no flood insurance and private flood policies are not included, so actual flood damage is larger.
• Claims, not floods. A claim means an insured building reported flood damage. Areas with few policies can look safer than they are.
• Area, never address. FEMA removes addresses. A ZIP code with claims does not mean every street in it floods, and nothing here describes a specific property.
• Nominal dollars. Amounts are as paid at the time, not adjusted for inflation, so older payouts look smaller than they were.
• Zone at the time of rating. The flood zone is the one used to rate the policy, which may differ from the current FEMA map.
• Reporting gaps. Some claims lack a ZIP code, county or flood zone; they are counted in totals and shown as “not reported”. FEMA updates and corrects records, and states that this dataset is not an official federal report.

Do not use this for

Buying, selling or pricing a specific property, insurance decisions or disputes, legal filings, or engineering work. For a specific property, ask the seller for its flood disclosure, ask the owner to request the property’s NFIP loss history, and check the current map at the FEMA Flood Map Service Center. This site is general reference only and comes with no warranty.

Corrections

Spotted something wrong? Tell us via contact with the page and the figure. If the error is in FEMA’s data we will say so; if it is ours, we fix it on the next rebuild.