Mold Risk Index 2026: U.S. States Ranked by Paid NFIP Flood Claims

Mold Risk Index 2026

Methodology in one sentence. Lookmold ranks U.S. states by total paid claims in FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, the largest single public dataset that measures cumulative water exposure across U.S. housing stock. Paid NFIP claims correlate strongly with the post-flood mold conditions homeowners actually face: a paid NFIP claim almost always means a building got wet enough to need drying or remediation work. Real numbers, public domain, no surveys.

Total paid NFIP claims in the FEMA dataset (all states): 2,675,792. The top 10 ranked states below account for 77.0% of that total.

Top 10 states ranked by paid NFIP flood claims

The 10 states below account for 77.0% of every paid NFIP claim in the FEMA FimaNfipClaims dataset. These are the states where homeowner mold risk after water events is most concentrated, by a wide margin.

  1. Louisiana with 484,942 paid NFIP claims
  2. Florida with 448,381 paid NFIP claims
  3. Texas with 393,613 paid NFIP claims
  4. New Jersey with 202,151 paid NFIP claims
  5. New York with 175,218 paid NFIP claims
  6. North Carolina with 109,530 paid NFIP claims
  7. Pennsylvania with 76,905 paid NFIP claims
  8. Mississippi with 64,247 paid NFIP claims
  9. California with 53,542 paid NFIP claims
  10. Illinois with 52,700 paid NFIP claims

Full state ranking

RankStatePaid NFIP claimsFlood-mold guide
1Louisiana484,942Open guide
2Florida448,381Open guide
3Texas393,613Open guide
4New Jersey202,151Open guide
5New York175,218Open guide
6North Carolina109,530Open guide
7Pennsylvania76,905Open guide
8Mississippi64,247Open guide
9California53,542Open guide
10Illinois52,700Open guide
11Missouri51,243Open guide
12Virginia50,564Open guide
13South Carolina49,601Open guide
14Alabama44,864Open guide
15Massachusetts35,366Open guide
16Connecticut29,423Open guide
17Ohio28,155Open guide
18Kentucky27,846Open guide
19West Virginia27,830Open guide
20Maryland25,353Open guide
21Georgia24,404Open guide
22Indiana19,281Open guide
23Tennessee17,648Open guide
24Washington16,053Open guide
25Michigan14,901Open guide
26Iowa14,748Open guide
27North Dakota13,307Open guide
28Oklahoma12,968Open guide
29Minnesota12,470Open guide
30Arkansas10,249Open guide
31Wisconsin9,470Open guide
32Kansas7,857Open guide
33Rhode Island7,022Open guide
34Delaware6,334Open guide
35Hawaii6,233Open guide
36Oregon6,095Open guide
37Nebraska6,067Open guide
38Colorado5,778Open guide
39Maine5,671Open guide
40Arizona5,323Open guide
41New Hampshire4,422Open guide
42South Dakota4,017Open guide
43Vermont3,725Open guide
44Montana2,217Open guide
45Nevada1,960Open guide
46New Mexico1,925Open guide
47Utah1,204Open guide
48Idaho1,111Open guide
49Alaska804Open guide
50Wyoming561Open guide
51District of Columbia493Open guide

Why NFIP claims are the right proxy

Mold remediation work in U.S. homes is most often triggered by water exposure: roof leaks, plumbing failures, and floods. Of those three, flooding is the only one that has a comprehensive, public-domain dataset measuring actual building exposure. The FEMA OpenFEMA FimaNfipClaims dataset records every paid NFIP claim since the program’s records begin. That makes it the cleanest available signal of cumulative homeowner mold risk by geography.

Caveats matter:

  • NFIP coverage rates vary by state. Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and the Northeast have higher NFIP participation. Inland states often see flood damage on private homeowners insurance instead, which is not captured here. Inland-state rankings should be read as a floor, not a ceiling, on actual mold exposure.
  • The data is cumulative across decades. A state ranked #5 with 50,000 claims may have its claim history concentrated in a few specific events (Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Ida) rather than spread across a baseline of frequent flooding.
  • Mold risk is also driven by humidity, building age, and HVAC adequacy beyond flood exposure. A separate humidity-based ranking would weight Gulf and Atlantic coastal states differently.

How to use this ranking

If you live in a top-10 state, your area has a deep contractor pool with flood-and-mold experience and an insurance ecosystem that has paid out hundreds of thousands of claims for water-related damage. That is the good news. The bad news is that severe-event recovery in those states often runs months or years; contractor availability tightens after major events; and homeowners insurance carriers in some of those states have adjusted coverage in ways that affect mold-related claim outcomes.

If you live in a lower-ranked state, your local contractor pool has less day-to-day experience with mass-scale post-flood remediation, but a localized event in your area may still produce significant mold exposure. Look at the per-state guide for the most recent FEMA-declared events for your state.

How this ranking pairs with the rest of Lookmold

Need a mold pro after a flood event?

Mold growth typically begins within 24 to 48 hours of water exposure, so the timeline matters more than the cleanup method. Call 866-871-0209 for a no-obligation phone consultation, available 24/7. We connect homeowners with vetted local mold pros.

Sources & methodology

  • FEMA OpenFEMA, FimaNfipClaims dataset. Public domain. Updated regularly by FEMA. https://www.fema.gov/about/openfema
  • FEMA OpenFEMA, DisasterDeclarationsSummaries. Used in the per-state flood-mold guides for the most recent declared events.
  • Per-state claim counts are pulled directly from the OpenFEMA API (filtered by state code) and cached locally. The page is rebuilt from the same data that powers the /flood-mold/{state}/ per-state guides, so the totals on this page and on the per-state pages always match.

This page is informational. The ranking is a research tool, not a real-estate recommendation, an insurance recommendation, or a contractor referral.