OpenFEMA NFIP Flood Insurance Claims Scraper API

Search more than 2.7 million official, privacy-redacted National Flood Insurance Program claim transactions for property-insurance underwriting, mortgage and collateral risk, catastrophe analytics, flood-loss research, community risk analysis, and due diligence.

Filter by state, five-digit county FIPS, ZIP code, NFIP community, named flood event, event designation, year of loss, flood zone, cause of damage, or exact OpenFEMA record ID. Results include reported payments, damage, insurance coverage, building and occupancy characteristics, flood depth/zone fields, source freshness, and direct official-record URLs.

No API key is required. FEMA updates the source approximately monthly.

Privacy and evidence limits: FEMA redacts policyholder identity and reduces latitude/longitude precision to 0.1 degree. Approximate coordinates can fall in the wrong county or state. Use state and countyFips for geographic aggregation—not property-level identification. FEMA also says this lagged dataset is not intended to be and should not be considered an official federal report.

Fast start

Empty input returns a deterministic, non-empty sample of high-value paid Hurricane Ian claims in Florida during 2022. Equivalent explicit input:

{
  "state": "FL",
  "yearOfLoss": 2022,
  "paidOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "buildingPayment",
  "maxResults": 25
}

Search one flood event:

{
  "floodEvent": "Hurricane Ian",
  "state": "FL",
  "paidOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "buildingPayment",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Search a county and flood zone:

{
  "countyFips": "12071",
  "floodZone": "AE",
  "yearOfLoss": 2022,
  "paidOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Search a reported ZIP code:

{
  "zipCode": "33931",
  "yearOfLoss": 2022,
  "sortBy": "buildingDamage",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Exact-record lookup:

{
  "claimId": "89a94ce9-777e-4492-80d9-9e47dc1d35fe"
}

claimId takes precedence over every other field and returns at most one source record.

Inputs

Field	Purpose
claimId	Exact OpenFEMA record UUID; highest precedence
state	Two-letter state or territory abbreviation
countyFips	Exact five-digit county FIPS
zipCode	Exact five-digit reported ZIP code
communityId	Exact current NFIP community identifier
communityName	NFIP community-name substring
floodEvent	Named-event substring, such as Hurricane Ian
eventDesignationNumber	Exact FEMA event code, such as FL0222
yearOfLoss	Calendar year when flood water entered the building
causeOfDamage	Exact FEMA cause code (1 tidal, 2 river/lake, 4 rainfall/snowmelt, etc.)
floodZone	Exact current or rated NFIP flood zone
paidOnly	Require a positive building, contents, or ICC payment
sortBy	latest, oldest, buildingPayment, contentsPayment, buildingDamage, or coverage
maxResults	Total response cap, 1–500

At least one search field is recommended. If none is supplied, the actor uses the Hurricane Ian fallback above so automated and first-run evaluations receive useful output.

Output

Every matching record has stable, normalized fields covering:

• source claim ID, loss date/year, flood event, and event designation
• state, county FIPS, reported ZIP, and NFIP community
• privacy-reduced coordinates with an explicit precision warning
• cause of damage, flood characteristics, water depth/duration, and flood zones
• building type, occupancy, floors, basement/crawlspace, and construction dates
• primary-residence, rental, elevation, Post-FIRM, and floodproofing indicators when reported
• building, contents, and Increased Cost of Compliance coverage
• building, contents, and ICC payments plus computed totals
• reported damage, property value, replacement cost, deductibles, and non-payment reasons
• source effective date, dataset version/update frequency, dataset URL, and exact official API URL

No-match searches return an explicit NO_MATCHING_CLAIMS evidence item instead of an ambiguous empty dataset. Temporary OpenFEMA failures return SOURCE_UNAVAILABLE after bounded retries and do not claim a search conclusion.

Use cases

• P&C flood-risk and underwriting research
• Mortgage, collateral, and portfolio risk analysis
• Catastrophe-event payment and severity analysis
• County, ZIP, community, and flood-zone loss benchmarking
• Insurance coverage-gap and claims trend research
• Floodplain management and mitigation planning
• Real-estate and property-risk due diligence
• Source-backed data enrichment for analytical models

Official source

• OpenFEMA FIMA NFIP Redacted Claims v2
• National Flood Insurance Program
• OpenFEMA terms, citation, and usage guidance

The source is privacy-redacted, updated approximately monthly, and can lag FEMA's underlying NFIP system of record. Results are transaction evidence for analysis—not proof about a named person, policyholder, or exact street address.