Sources
Every report is built on official, public US government data. We do not layer our own scoring on top of it. Here are the two sources, and what each one gets you.
The National Risk Index is FEMA's own national model of natural-hazard risk, the same one used by planners, emergency managers and local officials to compare communities. Every rating in your report, the overall risk, the national percentile, and each of the 18 hazards, comes straight from it. That means the number you read is the government's own classification, cited on the page, not a risk figure we invented to make a sale. If your realtor or insurer wants to check it, they can look up the same index for the same tract in a few minutes.
One thing to keep in mind about this source: the National Risk Index scores expected annual loss, not the likelihood of a disaster. It blends hazard frequency, what is exposed, community vulnerability and community resilience. So the value tells you about potential loss for the area, not the odds of the next event, which is exactly why your report shows every hazard's own rating rather than a single headline.
The Census Bureau's geocoder converts your street address into a precise latitude and longitude, and tells us which census tract your home falls in. It is the official US mapping service, so the location we pull FEMA's ratings for is fixed to your address rather than a rough ZIP-code guess. This is the step that makes the report about your neighborhood instead of your whole city.
That is the entire source list. FEMA's model for the risk, the Census Bureau's geocoder for the location. Public data, presented straight, with the caveats shown right beside the numbers.
Reviewed 1 July 2026.
