Flood claims are extremely concentrated: 2.5% of NFIP policies (repeat-loss properties) account for 48% of all claim dollars

Summary

Federal flood claims are extremely concentrated in a small share of properties that flood repeatedly. According to GAO (citing FEMA), properties with two or more paid NFIP claims -- "repetitive loss" properties -- make up only about 2.5% of all NFIP policies, yet as of December 2021 they had received 48% of all NFIP claim dollars ever paid -- roughly 19 times their share of the policy base. A live pull from FEMA's own OpenFEMA API today (2026-09-27) found 240,651 properties currently on FEMA's repetitive/severe-repetitive-loss roster, of which 227,469 are unmitigated -- almost exactly matching GAO's independently reported 2026 figure of about 227,000, and confirming the concentration is real, current, and getting worse, not a stale artifact of the 2021 dollar-share figure.

The headline concentration figure and where it comes from

GAO's March 2026 testimony (GAO-26-109045), drawing on its 2023 report (GAO-23-105977), states plainly: "unmitigated repetitive loss properties make up about 2.5 percent of NFIP policies, but such policies have accounted for a disproportionate share of claims... as of December 2021, 48 percent of NFIP claims by dollar value had been paid to properties with two or more losses." This was fetched and read directly from the primary document (the House Financial Services Committee's PDF of Cackley's testimony), not a secondary summary.

GAO also reports the size of the unmitigated repetitive-loss population growing over time: about 131,000 properties in 2009, 176,000 in 2018 (a 73% increase), and about 227,000 in 2026. It separately reports 112,640 NFIP-insured repetitive-loss properties as of January 2026, equal to about 2.5% of the 4.58 million NFIP policies in force as of December 2025 -- the same 2.5% figure holding steady even as the raw count of at-risk properties keeps climbing.

Live verification against FEMA's own current data

askamerica's own property-level repetitive-loss table (disasters.nfip_multiple_loss_properties -- built specifically to answer this question) is currently unqueryable: every query and even describe_table against it fails with an S3 'key does not exist' 404 error. This was confirmed live on three separate calls today and reported as a data defect rather than silently worked around.

To answer the question anyway, FEMA's own OpenFEMA API (the same source that table is built from) was queried live and directly, as of 2026-09-27 (data as-of date 2026-08-02):

• 240,651 total properties currently flagged NFIP Repetitive Loss, NFIP Severe Repetitive Loss, or the equivalent FMA grant-eligibility categories
• 227,469 of those are unmitigated (never acquired, elevated, relocated, or floodproofed) -- reconciling almost exactly with GAO's independently-derived ~227,000 figure for 2026
• 105,004 are currently NFIP-insured -- about 2.3% of the ~4.58 million policies in force, close to GAO's 2.5%
• 34,996 meet the stricter Severe Repetitive Loss threshold (4+ claims each over $5,000 totaling more than $20,000, or damage exceeding the structure's value twice) -- about 15% of the whole repeat-loss population
• Claim-count distribution among the 240,651: 123,737 have exactly 2 paid claims, 57,305 have 3, 27,319 have 4, roughly 28,565 have 5-9, and 3,049 have 10 or more paid claims since 1978

This live check matters for the same reason a prior run in this harness flagged: the 48%-of-dollars figure is frozen at a December 2021 snapshot in the literature. The live property-count numbers show the underlying concentration has not eased since then -- the unmitigated repeat-loss population kept growing through 2026 -- so the 2021 dollar-share figure is very unlikely to have improved and is a reasonable current estimate, corroborated rather than merely repeated.

Caveats

The 48%-of-dollars figure itself is FEMA's/GAO's own computation (as of December 2021); it could not be independently recomputed here because the one askamerica table that carries property-level claim history is currently broken, and NFIP's public claims file (disasters.nfip_claims, which was queryable and returned 2,755,527 total claims 1978-2026) has no property identifier -- FEMA's own documentation notes that latitude/longitude rounded to 1 decimal and census tract are both too coarse to reliably reconstruct which claims belong to the same structure. The property-count figures (240,651 / 227,469 / 105,004 / 34,996) are exact, live counts from FEMA's authoritative property-level file, not estimates.

Every query behind this report

1 warehouse call ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT count(*) as total_claims FROM disasters.nfip_claims