Methodology: The whole NFIP flood-claim record
Every figure carrying this label on a county page is computed exactly as described below, from public government data. Nothing is estimated or editorialized.
| What it measures | The whole NFIP record for the county: every claim with a recorded building payment greater than zero, bucketed by year of loss, with no date window at all — the counterpart to the recent-years chart, not a replacement for it, and the two are never mixed. The peak year is the loss year holding the largest share of the record and is called out only when it holds at least 15% of it. Dollar totals sum payments across every year on record and are in nominal dollars: a 1979 payment and a 2024 payment are added together as printed, with no inflation adjustment. Loss years whose claims are still developing carry the same provisional marking here as in the recent chart. |
|---|---|
| Unit | — |
| Source dataset | FEMA — OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims v2 |
| Data version / accessed | through 2026-07 (cube build 2026-07-21b, generated 2026-07-21) |
| Exact source fields | dateOfLoss, amountPaidOnBuildingClaim, countyCode |
| Formula | — |
| Predicates / filters | The whole NFIP record for the county: every claim with a recorded building payment greater than zero, bucketed by year of loss, with no date window at all — the counterpart to the recent-years chart, not a replacement for it, and the two are never mixed. The peak year is the loss year holding the largest share of the record and is called out only when it holds at least 15% of it. Dollar totals sum payments across every year on record and are in nominal dollars: a 1979 payment and a 2024 payment are added together as printed, with no inflation adjustment. Loss years whose claims are still developing carry the same provisional marking here as in the recent chart. |
| Date semantics | — |
| Window boundaries | not date-windowed — every loss year on record for the county; dollar totals are nominal and not inflation-adjusted |
| Rounding | claim counts exact; dollar totals shown to one decimal at billion scale and to the nearest million below that |
| Suppression rule | no whole-record view below 50 claims on record |
| Minimum sample (min_n) | — |
| Geography | US county (FIPS) |
Internal build query
This query runs against our internal data cube (private cube_*/fct_* tables built from the public sources below). It is exact but not runnable by a reader — use the public reproduction recipe that follows.
SELECT year, n_paid FROM cube_county_year_paid
WHERE county_fips = :fips AND n_paid > 0
ORDER BY CAST(year AS INTEGER);
-- dollars: SELECT SUM(claims_paid_usd) FROM cube_county
-- WHERE county_fips = :fips;Reproduce from the public source
This recomputes the figure from the raw public dataset. Public data is live and may run ahead of our snapshot (see the data version above); numbers can differ by rows added since our ingest vintage.
OpenFEMA FimaNfipClaims v2 — fema.gov/api/open/v2:
$filter = countyCode eq '<fips>' and amountPaidOnBuildingClaim gt 0
group by year(dateOfLoss) for counts; sum
amountPaidOnBuildingClaim for the dollar total.Worked example: Harris County: 135,381 claims with a recorded building payment across the whole record — against roughly 1,500 in the recent-years chart. The peak year alone (2017) holds about 31% of them.
Change log
2026-07-21 (r3) — window boundaries corrected (no windowed metric reads "not windowed"); LIMIT/ordering/geography/status predicates documented; the query relabeled the internal build query and paired with a public raw-source reproduction recipe.
2026-07-21 — record published with source URL, exact fields, predicates, window boundaries, rounding, suppression, and a worked example. Prior records disclosed a formula only.
Corrections
Spotted an error? Corrections: support@countyguard.com. We publish the fix and note it in this change log.
Every figure in this record is computed from the public dataset named above and independently re-checked against it before publication. This record documents the data method only; it is not insurance, legal, or engineering advice.
Published by Neha Malik, Publisher — Eldhurst LLC, who is accountable for what this site publishes. Countyguard is not a licensed adjuster, contractor, engineer, or attorney. Corrections and questions: support@countyguard.com.