Flood insurance cost by ZIP code: what homes pay now and what is still to come

Why the national averages you read elsewhere disagree

Search for the cost of flood insurance and you will find figures from about $700 to about $1,000 a year, often with no date or source, sometimes taken from a FEMA fact sheet written before the current pricing method started in October 2021. They disagree because they measure different things: an average or a median, the premium alone or the full amount paid, all policies or only houses, and a year that is rarely stated.

This site uses one definition and keeps it everywhere: the median total cost of a single-family policy in force on a stated date, premium, Reserve Fund Assessment, HFIAA surcharge and Federal Policy Fee included. That is the amount on the bill, and it is the definition FEMA itself used in its single-family cost tables (3,149,679 policies in force on August 31, 2023, median $786). The 2026 figures come from the OpenFEMA policy file, which lists every policy term with its ZIP code, county, flood zone and cost; the claims come from the OpenFEMA claims file.

This site does better than the first Google result because it gives the flood insurance cost of your own ZIP code or county, read in the federal program's own 2026 policy files and dated, and counts the 18 % renewals left before the full-risk price, where the first result, last updated in January 2025, gives one national average taken second-hand from a comparison site and no calculator.

How the price of a federal flood policy is built

Since the pricing method FEMA calls Risk Rating 2.0, each building gets a full-risk premium computed from its own exposure: distance to the coast or a river, the type of flooding (rain, river, storm surge, Great Lakes, erosion), elevation, foundation and what rebuilding would cost. The flood zone on the map no longer sets the price. Your declarations page must always show that full-risk premium, even when you pay less (Flood Insurance Manual, Appendix I).

Most older policies pay less than their full-risk premium because the law caps each yearly increase. FEMA's own count: about 38 % of single-family policyholders were already paying a risk-based price in August 2023, while the others were climbing toward it. The cap comes from 42 U.S.C. 4015(e): 18 % a year for most properties. It is 25 % a year for the properties listed in 42 U.S.C. 4014(a)(2): homes that are not the owner's main residence, business properties, severe repetitive loss properties and buildings substantially damaged or improved since July 2012.

On top of the premium come charges that the cap does not cover. The FloodSmart page on premium costs lists them: a Federal Policy Fee of $47, an HFIAA surcharge of $25 for a main home and $250 for any other building, and a Reserve Fund Assessment of 18 % of the discounted premium. In the 2026 file the median premium alone was $838 and the median assessment $151.

What the 18 % cap means for your next five bills

A cap is not a price freeze. If your bill is below the full-risk price, it goes up at each renewal by up to 18 % on the capped part until it reaches that price, then follows FEMA's yearly rate changes. The number of steps is easy to work out once you know both amounts: from $1,000 to $2,000, 5 renewals; from $1,000 to $4,000, 9. A bill already above the full-risk price comes down at the next renewal instead.

The cap also has edges. It applies to the policy, not to the house: a policy that lapses for 30 days or more after its expiry loses the cap, and the next policy is priced at full risk. A buyer can take over the seller's discounted premium by assignment, or buy a new policy within a year of the sale and keep the statutory discounts, but the cap is then recalculated on the buyer's own situation, so a buyer who will rent the house out moves to the 25 % track.

Where flood insurance costs the most

By number of policies, flood insurance is above all a matter for Florida, Texas, Louisiana. By price, the gap between places is far larger than the gap between states: in FEMA's 2023 tables, 37 % of single-family homes had a full-risk price under $1,000, and 30 % had one of $2,000 or more. Homes in V zones, exposed to waves, had a median bill of $1,796 in 2026, against $1,197 in A zones and $958 in X, B and C zones.