An active hurricane season is on the horizon — is the US prepared?

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This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has arrived, and forecasters are predicting yet another active season of storms.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expects between 13 to 19 named storms to arrive from now until Nov. 30, which could make the number of storms this year above the average of 14 storms between 1991 to 2020.

Warmer ocean temperatures are driving more storms because heat powers hurricane activity, NOAA said. Storms that don’t evolve into hurricanes can still create significant flooding, which can be devastating and deadly, experts say. And climate change is bringing more heavy rains and flooding to communities further inland that may not be accustomed to preparing for such extreme weather — like Hurricane Helene brought to rural North Carolina communities last year.

“Hurricanes can have significant inland impacts,” Michael Brennan, director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, said during a press conference on May 30. “It’s important to get that message out to inland communities, especially in flood-prone areas, because that freshwater flooding has been such a significant source of fatalities in recent years.”

Potential hurricane impact on properties in 2025

With the potential for up to 19 storms on the horizon, many properties are at risk of sustaining damage this hurricane season. From Texas to Maine, 33.1 million residential properties face at least a moderate risk of sustaining damage from hurricane-force winds, with an estimated reconstruction cost value of $11.7 trillion, according to a report released last week by global property analytics and data-enabled solutions provider Cotality.

When it comes to flooding as a result of storm surge, more than 6.4 million residential homes with a combined reconstruction cost value of $2.2 trillion are at a moderate or more risk of sustaining flood damage in response to storm surge, according to Cotality.

The firm’s data shows that the impacts of hurricanes continue to become more costly and expand to wider swaths of geographical areas. And those growing impacts are ultimately causing more pressure to consumers’ wallets.

“Our data shows that the coastline is evolving, with the impacts of hurricanes extending not only further — both in cost and distance — but on a more consistent basis,” Maiclaire Bolton-Smith, vice president of insurance product marketing at Cotality, said in the firm’s report. “This is being reflected in insurance pricing, which in some cases can actually price people out of what had previously been thought of as less-risky markets.”

The double whammy for people who live in hurricane-prone markets of increasing insurance premiums and elevated mortgage rates can cause serious affordability challenges, Tom Larsen, Cotality’s assistant vice president of product marketing for insurance, told Inman. And finding an insurer that can cover the necessary payouts after a disaster is also a real concern.

“So there is a challenge about getting a well-capitalized insurer,” Larsen said. “As a property owner, you’re seeking a very well-capitalized insurer. And it’s more competitive and more challenging to do it in the California and Texas markets. In Florida, it seems to be settling, so you can get more competition and have more choice as a property owner.”

Even though it’s becoming more costly to become insured, there are positives homeowners can look to this year, especially in Florida, Larsen added. Those include stricter regulations that will ultimately better prepare residents and their homes for hurricane season.

“There are some new regulations for stronger homes and we should start being able to see — about five years ago, Florida implemented their fortified roof [regulation],” Larsen said. “It’s a strong mitigation, it’s a higher cost when you re-roof your house, but it’s much stronger and much better for eliminating damage.”

Threats from federal cuts

President Trump has repeatedly threatened to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as it stands in its current form while already having cut billions of dollars and hundreds of staff from the agency’s various programs. The current administration has also moved to sunset various equity programs that had been established to ensure the government equally serves all Americans in federal relief programs.

At the end of March, FEMA stopped enforcing the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS), which applied to federally funded construction projects, Cotality’s report pointed out. “Although this change may not directly affect private residential developments, it could weaken national flood risk mitigation efforts and jeopardize the integrity of future infrastructure projects,” the report stated.

Americans concerned about ongoing changes to the agency were not likely amused when on Monday, the acting head of FEMA, David Richardson, allegedly joked that he was unaware the U.S. had a hurricane season. Two anonymous individuals who overheard the remark told The New York Times it was not clear whether or not the comment was made in seriousness or as a jest. Afterwards, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, released a statement saying Richardson’s comment was a joke.

For those who are impacted by it regularly, however, hurricane season is no laughing matter. Last year, Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida at the end of September, led to at least 250 fatalities in the U.S., at least 176 of which were direct deaths, according to the National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Cyclone Report. It was the deadliest hurricane in the contiguous U.S. since Katrina hit in 2005.

Severe weather is also influencing homebuyer behavior. According to a Bank of American Homebuyer Insights survey of 1,000 homeowners and 1,000 renters conducted March 20-April 22, 2025 by Sparks Research, 62 percent of homeowners and prospective buyers are worried about severe weather and natural disasters when it comes to owning a home. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents think it’s important to buy in areas of lower risk, and 38 percent have changed their minds about where they want to buy a home because of severe weather in the area.

Although the National Hurricane Center (NHC), which is a branch of the NOAA that tracks hurricanes across the Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean, has avoided federal cuts thus far, scientists and weather officials are concerned by a series of job cuts that have taken place at NOAA and proposed budget cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars for 2026. Reduced staffing numbers have resulted in weather balloons launching only once per day in some areas, down from the typical twice per day. Those balloon launches gather data about steering currents, which is essential for predicting storms.

A lack of adequate data can also have impacts on insurance costs for developers and property investors, chief of insurance at WTW Danielle Lombardo told Inman.

“The issue is that insurance carriers need data in order to address what the exposure is,” Lombardo said. “So if they don’t have data from NOAA, which is really a data set that’s pretty unique in the industry — there isn’t a private company solution that can just jump right in and take over from where NOAA left off in terms of tracking these events — So insurance carriers, when they lack data about storms in particular, they will default to the worst-case scenario.”

More limited forecasting could also lead to communities potentially not preparing adequately for weather events, Lombardo added, which could lead to more property and liability claims. Volatility in insurance pricing could also deter investors.

“I don’t think we’re going to see an immediate effect this wind season in terms of rates, but I do think in the longer term, even next year, without that data, it could absolutely increase premiums and really add to the continued volatility in the insurance market.”

Although federal organizations like FEMA play a big role in disaster relief, attorney and Associate Teaching Professor Suzanne Hollander of the Tibor and Sheila Hollo School of Real Estate at Florida International University told Inman that, in her state at least, she is less concerned about how federal cuts might impact the state after a storm because there are so many state-level organizations that are well-practiced in recovery.

“We’ve been through the drill before,” Hollander said. “This is an every year thing in Florida. There’s a whole team in each municipality and there’s a whole protocol of what happens during a disaster. So I think it’s the states where the hurricane is a surprise … I think it’s those states that are going to have a bigger problem [with FEMA cuts].”

The factor she said was more concerning to her this year is the possibility that new residents, as more people have migrated to the state full-time in recent years from other climates that don’t have frequent hurricanes, will not take preparations for storms seriously.

“They may have never been through a hurricane,” Hollander said. “They might not know how serious it can get fast, even with the prior notice from the National Hurricane service … I think they should take it seriously.”

Email Lillian Dickerson