FEMA's National Risk Index (NRI) assigns natural hazard ratings to counties and census tracts across the country. A “Relatively High” rating can be useful in a property report, but check what it measures before using it in a submission. The index includes population and agricultural losses as well as building damage, and its headline rating reflects community vulnerability and resilience. For property underwriting, the individual hazard and building-loss fields deserve a closer look.
All figures below come from FEMA's current release, v1.20.0 (December 2025), which we pulled from FEMA's public data services on October 30, 2026.
What the National Risk Index is
The NRI is a nationwide baseline of natural hazard risk, built by FEMA with academic, government and private-sector partners. FEMA's version documentation lists the public releases:
| Version | Released | What changed for users |
|---|---|---|
| v1.17.0 | Nov. 16, 2020 | Phase 1 launch: risk, expected annual loss, social vulnerability and resilience for every county and tract |
| v1.18.0 / v1.18.1 | Aug. and Nov. 2021 | Tornado model overhaul, longer loss histories, agriculture losses for more hazards, hurricane loss-ratio fix |
| v1.19.0 | Mar. 23, 2023 | New risk equation with the Community Risk Factor; dollar risk values added; scores redefined as national percentiles |
| v1.20.0 | December 2025 | "Riverine Flooding" becomes "Inland Flooding" (adds pluvial flooding); tsunami, landslide, earthquake and wildfire updates; new social vulnerability source |
The standalone NRI map application has been retired. FEMA's National Risk Index page says the application "is no longer available." The data now lives in FEMA's Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT) and on FEMA's public ArcGIS feature services. Old links to hazards.fema.gov/nri now redirect to the RAPT page. The methodology is set out in the 400-plus-page Technical Documentation, which is the source for the methodology sections below.
- 18
- Natural hazards
- 85,154
- Census tracts
- 3,232
- Counties and equivalents
- $153.8B
- Expected annual loss
The 18 hazards
FEMA picked the hazards in 2016 by reviewing every state hazard mitigation plan. A hazard made the list if at least half the plans included it, or if it was "regionally significant," meaning capable of catastrophic damage (hurricane, tsunami, volcanic activity) but affecting fewer than 25 states. Subsidence met the criteria but had no reliable national dataset. Dam and levee failure were left out because they aren't natural hazards.
Flooding and water
- Inland floodingIFLD42.5% of EAL
- Coastal floodingCFLD0.6% of EAL
- TsunamiTSUN0.7% of EAL
Wind and storms
- HurricaneHRCN9.2% of EAL
- TornadoTRND7.5% of EAL
- Strong windSWND2.1% of EAL
- HailHAIL2.1% of EAL
- LightningLTNG1.1% of EAL
Temperature and winter
- Cold waveCWAV6.4% of EAL
- Heat waveHWAV4.6% of EAL
- Ice stormISTM0.7% of EAL
- Winter weatherWNTW0.4% of EAL
Geologic
- EarthquakeERQK17.2% of EAL
- LandslideLNDS0.4% of EAL
- Volcanic activityVLCN<0.1% of EAL
- AvalancheAVLN0.3% of EAL
Fire and drought
- WildfireWFIR2.5% of EAL
- DroughtDRGT1.7% of EAL
Users of earlier releases should check two changes in interpretation. Inland Flooding (IFLD) replaced Riverine Flooding (RFLD) in v1.20. Its geospatial loss model covers both fluvial (river) and pluvial (rainfall) flooding beyond the FEMA flood map extent, so integrations using RFLD_ fields need updating. On the coast, review Hurricane and Coastal Flooding together. Coastal Flooding includes tidal and surge inundation, drawing on the NFHL, NOAA high-tide probabilities and SLOSH storm surge maps. Hurricane covers the storm itself, including wind.
Which hazards drive the dollars
Inland flooding contributes 42% of total expected annual loss across counties, followed by earthquake at 17% and hurricane at 9%. These totals include more than property damage, as the next chart shows.
View data
| Hazard | Buildings ($M/yr) | Population equivalence ($M/yr) | Agriculture ($M/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avalanche | 0 | 419 | 0 |
| Coastal flooding | 921 | 72 | 0 |
| Cold wave | 33 | 9,332 | 513 |
| Drought | 0 | 0 | 2,678 |
| Earthquake | 17,433 | 9,047 | 0 |
| Hail | 2,518 | 199 | 485 |
| Heat wave | 6 | 7,065 | 54 |
| Hurricane | 12,960 | 779 | 461 |
| Ice storm | 776 | 226 | 0 |
| Landslide | 359 | 185 | 0 |
| Lightning | 99 | 1,520 | 0 |
| Inland flooding | 62,963 | 1,879 | 431 |
| Strong wind | 1,378 | 1,622 | 181 |
| Tornado | 4,670 | 6,865 | 12 |
| Tsunami | 234 | 870 | 0 |
| Volcanic activity | 39 | 21 | 0 |
| Wildfire | 3,675 | 218 | 2 |
| Winter weather | 155 | 395 | 2 |
How the risk score is built
The NRI's risk equation has three parts: a hazard component (expected annual loss), a component that increases consequences (social vulnerability), and one that reduces them (community resilience). The last two are combined into a single multiplier.
Exposure × annualized frequency × historic loss ratio, for each hazard and each consequence type.
Buildings + population equivalence + agriculture, summed across all 18 hazards.
Social vulnerability ÷ community resilience, ranked nationally, then mapped onto a triangular curve.
More vulnerable, less resilient places get a multiplier above 1.
A dollar figure: EAL scaled up or down for the community.
Calculated per census tract; county values sum their tracts.
Expected annual loss
Expected annual loss (EAL) is the average economic loss in dollars a community can expect from natural hazards each year. For each hazard it is exposure × annualized frequency × historic loss ratio:
- Exposure is the building value, population or agriculture value in the area the hazard can reach.
- Annualized frequency is how often the hazard occurs per year, either counted from historical records or taken from probabilistic data (as for earthquake and wildfire).
- Historic loss ratio is the share of exposed value that a typical event destroys. FEMA estimates it from past losses, using Bayesian credibility weighting across county, regional and national levels.
EAL is calculated for three consequence types. Buildings and agriculture are already in dollars. Population losses (deaths and injuries) are converted to dollars using a value of statistical life: $13.7 million per fatality, or per ten injuries, in December 2024 dollars. Agriculture is counted only for hazards where it has historically been more than 1% of reported losses (cold wave, hail, heat wave, hurricane, inland flooding, strong wind, tornado, wildfire and winter weather), plus drought, which counts agriculture only.
- $108.2B
- Buildings
- $40.7B
- Population equivalence
- $4.8B
- Agriculture
Use building EAL (EAL_VALB, or <HAZ>_EALB for an individual hazard) when reviewing potential building losses. About a quarter of the national total EAL represents the monetized value of lives, an important planning measure that falls outside commercial property coverage.
The Community Risk Factor
The second part of the equation scales EAL up or down depending on the community:
- Social vulnerability measures how susceptible residents are to the impacts of a disaster. In v1.20 it comes from the Census Bureau's Community Resilience Estimates Social Vulnerability Measure. That measure uses ten variables, including income-to-poverty ratio, disability, age 65 and over, crowding, no vehicle, no health insurance and no broadband. It replaced CDC/ATSDR's Social Vulnerability Index, which v1.19 used. Earlier versions used the University of South Carolina's SoVI.
- Community resilience comes from a FEMA-modified version of the University of South Carolina's Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC). BRIC has 49 indicators across social, economic, community capital, institutional, housing/infrastructure and environmental resilience. It exists only at the county level: every tract inherits its county's resilience score.
FEMA divides vulnerability by resilience, ranks the result nationally, and maps that percentile onto a triangular distribution with a minimum of 0.5, a mode of 1 and a maximum of 2. That gives the Community Risk Factor (CRF_VALUE).
The risk value is EAL × CRF. You can check this in the data. Miami-Dade County has an EAL of $824.7 million and a CRF of 1.389, which gives a risk value of about $1.15 billion. That is the RISK_VALUE FEMA publishes.
Scores, ratings, and why "Very High" is rare
Every NRI component comes in three forms:
- Value: dollars for risk and EAL; index values for vulnerability and resilience.
- Score: the community's national percentile among all communities at the same level (all counties, or all tracts), from 0 to 100. Since v1.19, a score of 90 means the value is higher than 90% of its peers. It does not mean 90% of some absolute maximum.
- Rating: one of five labels from "Very Low" to "Very High."
Risk and EAL ratings are not quintiles. FEMA takes the cube root of the dollar values to reduce the spread between rural and urban areas, then uses k-means clustering to form five groups. Their sizes depend on gaps in the data, so the rating bands contain very different numbers of counties. Social vulnerability and resilience ratings use fixed quintiles.
View data
| Rating | County scores | Counties | Tract scores | Tracts | SoVI / resilience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Very Low | 0–42.8 | 1,345 | 0–20.2 | 16,947 | 0–20 |
| Relatively Low | 42.8–80.9 | 1,200 | 20.2–55.7 | 29,900 | 20–40 |
| Relatively Moderate | 80.9–94.3 | 420 | 55.7–84.3 | 24,013 | 40–60 |
| Relatively High | 94.3–99.5 | 162 | 84.3–97.5 | 11,141 | 60–80 |
| Very High | 99.5–100 | 17 | 97.5–100 | 2,074 | 80–100 |
View data
| Part | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Very Low | 1,345 counties | 42.8% |
| Relatively Low | 1,200 counties | 38.2% |
| Relatively Moderate | 420 counties | 13.4% |
| Relatively High | 162 counties | 5.2% |
| Very High | 17 counties | 0.5% |
View data
| Part | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Very Low | 16,947 tracts | 20.2% |
| Relatively Low | 29,900 tracts | 35.6% |
| Relatively Moderate | 24,013 tracts | 28.6% |
| Relatively High | 11,141 tracts | 13.3% |
| Very High | 2,074 tracts | 2.5% |
What this means in practice:
- "Relatively Moderate" is not the middle. A county rated Relatively Moderate is somewhere between the 81st and 94th percentile. For a tract it is the 56th to 84th.
- The same score can carry different ratings for different hazards. FEMA's own example: a score of 8.9 rated "Relatively Low" for one hazard and 11.3 rated "Very Low" for another. In our Miami-Dade example below, the county's wildfire score is 96.9 but its wildfire rating is only "Relatively Moderate."
- Everything is relative and moves between versions. A community's score can change because other communities changed or because FEMA changed the model. Note the version (the
NRI_VERfield) in your file. - Several labels aren't ratings at all. "Not Applicable" means FEMA considers the hazard unable to occur there (no avalanche terrain, for example). "No Rating" means EAL is zero. "Insufficient Data" means a source dataset doesn't cover the area. For example, wildfire is Insufficient Data in Puerto Rico, and tsunami is Insufficient Data for the eastern U.S.
County vs tract: same index, different questions
FEMA calculates everything separately at county and tract level, so the two are not comparable. A tract rated "Very High" can sit inside a "Very Low" county, and the reverse is also true.
At county level, the composite rating mostly measures size. All 17 Very High counties are large metro counties: Los Angeles, Cook, Harris, Riverside, Maricopa, San Bernardino, Orange (CA), Alameda, Santa Clara, San Diego, King, Dallas, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia, Clark, San Francisco and Contra Costa. Risk value is a sum of dollars, so a county with a third of a trillion dollars of buildings will rank near the top for almost any hazard mix.
View data
| Expected annual loss | Building value | |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0% | 0% |
| 5% | 50.9% | 48.8% |
| 10% | 64.1% | 63.5% |
| 15% | 71.4% | 71.9% |
| 20% | 76.3% | 77.6% |
| 25% | 80.2% | 81.8% |
| 30% | 83.4% | 85% |
| 35% | 86% | 87.6% |
| 40% | 88.2% | 89.7% |
| 45% | 90.1% | 91.5% |
| 50% | 91.8% | 93.1% |
| 55% | 93.3% | 94.4% |
| 60% | 94.5% | 95.6% |
| 65% | 95.7% | 96.6% |
| 70% | 96.6% | 97.4% |
| 75% | 97.5% | 98.1% |
| 80% | 98.3% | 98.7% |
| 85% | 98.9% | 99.2% |
| 90% | 99.4% | 99.6% |
| 95% | 99.8% | 99.8% |
| 100% | 100% | 100% |
A worked example: one Miami-Dade tract
This is the comparison COPEData puts in every report: the tract's per-hazard scores shown as bars, with the county's scores as tick marks. The data below is real, from tract 12086004406 in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
View data
| Hazard | Tract score | Tract rating | County score | County rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Composite risk | 54.9 | Relatively Low | 99.6 | Very High |
| Hurricane | 85.6 | Relatively Moderate | 100 | Very High |
| Lightning | 36.6 | Relatively Low | 99.9 | Very High |
| Inland flooding | 2.7 | Very Low | 99.7 | Very High |
| Coastal flooding | 99.5 | Very High | 99.6 | Very High |
| Cold wave | 31.8 | Relatively Low | 99.5 | Very High |
| Heat wave | 41.2 | Relatively Low | 99.3 | Relatively High |
| Tornado | 33.1 | Relatively Low | 98.7 | Relatively High |
| Wildfire | 0 | No Rating | 96.9 | Relatively Moderate |
| Hail | 31.1 | Very Low | 96.6 | Relatively High |
| Strong wind | 9.9 | Very Low | 82.4 | Relatively Moderate |
| Drought | 0 | No Rating | 79.1 | Relatively Moderate |
| Earthquake | 0.3 | Very Low | 62.1 | Relatively Low |
| Landslide | 0 | No Rating | 46.4 | Very Low |
| Winter weather | 0 | No Rating | 0 | No Rating |
| Avalanche | — | Not Applicable | — | Not Applicable |
| Ice storm | — | Not Applicable | — | Not Applicable |
| Tsunami | — | Insufficient Data | — | Insufficient Data |
| Volcanic activity | — | Not Applicable | — | Not Applicable |
How to read it:
- Ignore the composite rating at first. "Relatively Low" for this tract hides the fact that it is in the top 1% nationally for coastal flooding, which is exactly what matters for a building there.
- Look at the per-hazard rows for the perils you cover. Coastal flooding is Very High, hurricane is Relatively Moderate (85.6), and inland flooding is Very Low (2.7). That tells you what to ask about: surge and tidal flooding, not river or rainfall flooding.
- Don't read the county tick as the property's exposure. The county's Very High ratings for cold wave, lightning and inland flooding largely reflect its 2.7 million residents and $359 billion of buildings.
- Compare loss rates, not loss totals. The NRI also publishes EAL rates, which are EAL divided by the community's total exposure. FEMA describes them as a measure of "relative natural hazard intensities regardless of the community's exposure value." This tract's building EAL rate (
ALR_VALB) is 0.41% of building value per year. The county's is 0.19%. The tract has the lower rating but more than twice the expected loss per dollar of building.
Where the Very High tracts are
View data
| Category | Value (tracts) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| CA | 913 | 10.0% of the state's 9,106 tracts |
| WA | 136 | 7.7% of the state's 1,772 tracts |
| TX | 95 | 1.4% of the state's 6,883 tracts |
| SC | 76 | 5.8% of the state's 1,317 tracts |
| AK | 75 | 42.4% of the state's 177 tracts |
| FL | 68 | 1.3% of the state's 5,114 tracts |
| NC | 65 | 2.4% of the state's 2,660 tracts |
| LA | 55 | 4.0% of the state's 1,376 tracts |
| UT | 52 | 7.3% of the state's 716 tracts |
| CO | 50 | 3.5% of the state's 1,447 tracts |
Using the NRI in underwriting
Screening a single risk
For an initial review of a property, use the tract data and examine each relevant hazard:
- 1Pull tract, not countyFind the census tract for the address. County ratings are mostly a measure of size.
- 2Read the perils you writeCheck per-hazard tract ratings for the perils on the form. Skip hazards that are mostly casualty-driven, such as heat wave and cold wave.
- 3Compare with the countyA tract well above its county on a hazard is a location-specific signal. One well below may be benefiting from geography.
- 4Confirm at the siteCheck flood zone, elevation, distance to water and the building itself before the rating affects your decision.
Portfolio accumulation
For a book of business, the NRI is a free, consistent way to see where insured value sits relative to each hazard. Join your locations to tract FIPS codes, then compare total insured value with per-hazard tract ratings and building EAL rates. Review concentrations in tracts rated Very High or Relatively High for coastal flooding or earthquake. The data is the same in every state, so it also makes a reasonable common basis for referral rules across offices.
It is not a catastrophe model, and FEMA says as much. The technical documentation says the NRI is "meant for planning purposes only" and should "not be used as an absolute measurement of risk." EAL is an average annual figure, mostly built from historical frequency. There is no event set, no PML and no tail. FEMA notes that of the rare, high-severity hazards, only earthquake has probabilistic source data good enough to estimate EAL accurately.
What not to use it for
| Don't use the NRI to… | Why | Use instead |
|---|---|---|
| Rate or price an individual building | Values are averages over a tract or county, built on aggregate building stock, not your building | Site-level COPE data and your rating plan |
| Decide flood eligibility | Inland flood EAL is a modeled tract average; it tells you nothing about which side of a floodplain line the building sits on | FEMA flood zone, distance to the nearest SFHA, elevation |
| Estimate PML or tail risk | EAL is an annual average with no event set | A catastrophe model |
| Use the composite rating as a rating factor | The Community Risk Factor includes resident demographics, which are not property characteristics | Building EAL or EAL rate per hazard |
| Compare across versions | Scores are relative and the model changes each release; v1.20 rebuilt inland flooding, tsunami and landslide | Re-pull and note NRI_VER |
| Compare counties with tracts | Scores and ratings are calculated separately at each level | Compare tract to tract, or county to county |
How the NRI complements site-level data
Pair the NRI's area-level measures with records for the individual site:
| Question | NRI (tract or county) | Site-level data |
|---|---|---|
| Is this area exposed to coastal surge? | Coastal flooding rating and score for the tract | FEMA flood zone (VE, AE, X), base flood elevation |
| How close is the flood hazard? | Not answered | Distance to the nearest Special Flood Hazard Area, distance to water |
| Is the building above the surrounding terrain? | Not answered | Ground elevation (USGS) |
| What is the multi-peril picture? | All 18 hazards, scored the same way nationwide | Not available from any single site source |
| How does this location compare with its county? | Tract vs county scores | Not answered |
| Will this building burn, and can the fire department reach it? | Wildfire rating (area-level only) | Construction class, protection class, distance to fire station |
A Very High coastal flooding rating is a reason to investigate the site. Check its flood zone, FIRM panel and distance to the nearest SFHA, along with ground elevation and distance to water. The remaining submission details are covered in our guides to COPE data, construction classes, permit history and statements of values.
COPEData puts these side by side. The exposure section of every report shows the tract's composite NRI rating and score, a bar for each of the 18 hazards with the county's score as a tick, and the FEMA flood zone, FIRM panel, distance to the nearest SFHA, USGS elevation and distance to water. Every value links to its source.