OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk Data Scraper

Export more than 2.7 million privacy-redacted National Flood Insurance Program claim records from the current OpenFEMA API. Results include loss date, flood event, state, county and ZIP geography, payment and damage amounts, coverage, flood zone, property characteristics and approximate coordinates.

The Actor is designed for insurance, mortgage, real-estate, climate-risk, catastrophe modeling and public-policy research. It uses OpenFEMA's current v3 NfipClaims source—not the deprecated frozen v2 endpoint—and requires no FEMA API key.

What can you do with this Actor?

• Analyze historical flood-loss frequency and severity by state, year, county, ZIP or flood event.
• Compare paid amounts, reported damage and insurance coverage.
• Build risk features for property, mortgage, portfolio and catastrophe analytics.
• Study occupancy, residence, rental, basement and building-characteristic patterns.
• Identify communities and flood zones with significant historical claim activity.
• Feed bulk, normalized public records into data warehouses, maps or BI dashboards.

Input

Field	Type	Description
states	string[]	Two-letter state or territory abbreviations.
yearOfLossFrom	integer	Earliest loss year, inclusive.
yearOfLossTo	integer	Latest loss year, inclusive.
floodEventContains	string	Case-insensitive event-name filter.
countyFips	string[]	County FIPS codes.
zipCodes	string[]	Property ZIP codes.
minTotalPaid	number	Minimum combined building, contents and ICC payment.
primaryResidenceOnly	boolean	Keep only primary residences.
rentalPropertiesOnly	boolean	Keep only rental properties.
maxResults	integer	Maximum unique claims, up to 500,000.

Example for material Florida and Texas losses:

{
  "states": ["FL", "TX"],
  "yearOfLossFrom": 2017,
  "yearOfLossTo": 2025,
  "minTotalPaid": 50000,
  "maxResults": 25000
}

Output

Each dataset item represents one redacted NFIP claim.

Field group	Included fields
Identity and time	claimId, loss date, reported year, flood event and as-of date.
Geography	State, county FIPS, ZIP, NFIP community, census tract, flood zone and approximate latitude/longitude.
Money	Building and contents payments, ICC payment, combined totalPaid, damage amounts and coverage amounts.
Property	Occupancy, primary residence, rental, basement, floors, construction date, condominium and building descriptions.
Risk	Rated and current flood zone, base flood elevation and elevation differences when available.
Lineage	OpenFEMA source URL and export timestamp.

{
  "claimId": "9876543",
  "dateOfLoss": "2017-08-27",
  "floodEvent": "HURRICANE HARVEY",
  "state": "TX",
  "countyFips": "48201",
  "zipCode": "77084",
  "currentFloodZone": "AE",
  "totalPaid": 86420.55,
  "buildingDamageAmount": 92000,
  "primaryResidence": true,
  "rentalProperty": false,
  "latitude": 29.8,
  "longitude": -95.6
}

Privacy and interpretation

FEMA intentionally anonymizes or generalizes the public records. Coordinates are approximate and are not property-level locations; personally identifying policyholder information is not included. Dollar fields reflect what FEMA publishes and can include nulls, zeroes, caps, adjustments or program-specific rules. Never use a single historical claim as the sole basis for underwriting, lending or an individual property decision.

Scaling and data quality

The Actor pushes records in batches, paginates the official API and deduplicates by claim ID. Server-side filters reduce transfer size for state, year, county and ZIP selections. Event-name and calculated total-payment filters run on normalized results. For broad filters with a high payment threshold, the Actor may scan more source records than it ultimately saves.

Large exports can be scheduled to produce repeatable portfolio snapshots. Use claimId for downstream deduplication and retain asOfDate to understand source currency.

Integrations and API

Download results as JSON, JSONL, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS. Connect runs to schedules, webhooks, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, databases or cloud ETL. The Actor is callable through the Apify REST API and official clients.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/logiover~openfema-nfip-flood-claims-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"states":["LA"],"yearOfLossFrom":2020,"maxResults":10000}'

Apify MCP can expose it as a structured flood-risk research tool for AI workflows.

FAQ

Does it use the deprecated FEMA API? No. It uses the current OpenFEMA v3 NFIP claims endpoint.

How many claims are available? The source currently contains more than 2.7 million records and changes over time.

Does it need an API key? No.

Are exact property locations included? No. Public geography is anonymized or generalized.

What is totalPaid? The Actor-calculated sum of building, contents and increased-cost-of-compliance payments when present.

Why can damage differ from payment? Damage, coverage and program payment are separate concepts and may be affected by policy terms.

Can I filter Hurricane Harvey or another named event? Yes, use floodEventContains; source naming may vary.

Can I request all 2.7 million in one run? A run is capped at 500,000 items. Split full-history work by state or year.

Is this an underwriting decision engine? No. It is a public-data extraction and normalization tool.

Responsible use

This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by FEMA or the NFIP. Use the data in accordance with OpenFEMA terms and applicable law. Verify critical risk and financial decisions with authoritative, current sources.

How much OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk data can you extract in one run?

A single run returned 1,000 rows in 2 seconds on the example input, and it was still going when the measurement stopped — raise the result limit and it keeps paginating. That is roughly 10,000 rows a minute.

There is no hard ceiling built into this Actor. What bounds a run is the result limit you set, the breadth of the input you give it, and how much OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk itself publishes. Because billing is per result, a wider run costs proportionally more and a narrow one costs almost nothing — so it is worth starting small and scaling once the output looks right.

OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk scraping — frequently asked questions

Do I need a OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk API key, account or login?

No. This Actor reads publicly available pages and feeds, so there is nothing to register for and no credentials to manage.

How do I export OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk data to CSV, Excel, JSON or Google Sheets?

Open the Storage tab after a run and pick the format you want — CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or an HTML table. For Google Sheets, Airtable or a database, use the dataset URL or the Apify API so the sheet refreshes itself on every run.

Can I schedule this OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk scraper to run daily or hourly?

Yes. Use the Schedules tab and pick a cadence. Daily is enough for most tracking work; pick hourly only if the rows you care about really do change that fast.

How many rows can I get, and what does it cost?

See the volume section above for a measured figure. Billing is per result, so you pay for the rows you actually receive and a run that finds nothing costs nothing.

Is scraping OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk legal?

This Actor collects only information that OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk publishes publicly. It does not log in, does not defeat access controls and does not touch private data. You remain responsible for how you use the output, including under GDPR and similar rules where personal data is involved.

What happens if OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk blocks the run or changes its layout?

A refused exit IP is swapped for a fresh one within a quarter of a second and retried, and rate limiting is waited out rather than fought. If nothing gets through, the run fails with the reason instead of reporting success with zero rows — so an empty result always means "no matches", never "the source would not answer".

Can I use this with an AI agent, LangChain or an MCP client?

Yes. The Actor is callable over the Apify API and through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can run it and read the dataset back as a tool call.

How to scrape OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk without an API

OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk has no public bulk export for this data, which normally leaves copy-and-paste or a custom crawler. This Actor is the second one, already built and maintained: it reads the public pages, follows the pagination, and hands back clean rows.

1. Fill in the input below — the example is prefilled, so Start works straight away.
2. Watch the log name each page it walks and how many rows each one returned.
3. Export from Storage, or pull the dataset over the API into your own pipeline.

No API key, no account, no browser extension, no manual copying.

Changelog

2026-08-04

• Initial release on the current OpenFEMA v3 NfipClaims dataset.
• Added state, loss-year, event, county, ZIP, payment and property filters.
• Added normalized claim, payment, damage, coverage, risk and property fields.
• Validated high-volume pagination, stable claim-ID deduplication and source lineage.

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*Maintained: last verified 2026-09-01 — checked end-to-end against live run history (reliability, output fields and types, and time/memory budgets).

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Use cases

• Export records in bulk and analyse them in a spreadsheet or database.
• Track how the data changes over time by scheduling repeat runs.
• Feed records into a dashboard, CRM or internal tool through the Apify API.
• Build a research dataset without writing or maintaining a scraper.
• Monitor OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk Data for new entries and alert your team when they appear.

Pricing

This Actor is pay per result: you are charged for the rows it writes to your dataset, not for the time it spends running. There are no platform fees to calculate on top, and higher Apify plans pay a lower rate per result. A run that returns nothing costs nothing.

Is it legal?

This Actor collects only publicly available data — the same content any visitor to OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Claims & Risk Data can see without logging in. It does not bypass authentication and does not gather private information. How you use the output is your responsibility: respect the source's terms, applicable copyright, and data-protection law such as GDPR where personal data is involved.

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• NOAA Storm Events, Damage & Weather Risk
• Pisos.com
• Immoweb
• Habitaclia.com Spain