Methodology
Every report is built from two public government sources and nothing else. There is no proprietary scoring, no guesswork, and no house-by-house model of our own. We hand you FEMA's numbers for your location, organized so you can read them correctly. Here is the whole method.
Your street address goes to the US Census Bureau geocoder, which returns a precise latitude and longitude. This is what lets us look up the right neighborhood instead of averaging a whole city or ZIP code. The coordinate then tells us which census tract your home sits inside.
Using the census tract, we read FEMA's National Risk Index. From it your report carries the overall risk rating, the national percentile that shows how that rating compares with every other US community, and a separate rating for each hazard the index covers. You get the composite headline and the components behind it, side by side.
FEMA sorts both the overall risk and each hazard into five tiers. From lowest to highest they are Very Low, Relatively Low, Relatively Moderate, Relatively High, and Very High. Where a hazard cannot meaningfully occur at a location, FEMA marks it No Rating or Not Applicable rather than forcing it onto the scale. Your report uses a green-to-amber-to-red scale so the tiers are easy to scan, but the words are FEMA's own.
This is the part most people misread, so we put it plainly. The National Risk Index does not measure how likely a disaster is. It measures expected annual loss: FEMA combines how frequently a hazard occurs, how much life and property is exposed to it, how socially vulnerable the community is, and how well that community can recover, into one figure. A rating is a statement about potential loss, not about the odds of the next event.
Two honest consequences follow, and we show both on the page. First, a quiet, low-population area can rate "Relatively Low" overall even where a hazard is genuinely present, simply because there is less in harm's way. Second, a high overall rating often reflects a dense or high-value area as much as raw hazard frequency. That is why your report always shows each hazard's own rating, not just the single headline number.
Be clear-eyed about what this can and cannot tell you:
None of this makes the report less useful. It makes it honest. You are getting FEMA's own national model for your location, presented straight, so you can act on it and take it to your insurer or realtor with your eyes open.
Reviewed 1 July 2026.
