Where Hurricane Costs Land

By Stephen Doyle

This follows 43 U.S. hurricanes from 2002 to 2023 through four questions. Where did they hit, what did they cost, who paid, and did state economies notice? All dollar amounts are adjusted for inflation.

to
Strongest category

Florida is hit the most often, but Louisiana gets the most money.

Where storms land and what they cost are different maps. A few seasons drive most of the costs, and 2005 and 2017 contain 45% of all the damage.

Where
Shade states by
You can hover over a state to see its storms. Click one state to filter the page, or click two to compare them. Click a state again to remove it. The circles are landfall points, and they're bigger or smaller depending on the category.
When
The bars are NOAA damage per year in dollars. There's one square per hurricane, colored by its strength. Storms that cost under $1 billion don't have a damage bar.

Stronger storms usually cost more, but that's not always the case.

Sandy was a Category 1 and cost $88 billion. That's much more than Michael, which was the only Category 5 in this period. Flooding, people, and property damage matter just as much as wind speed.

Storm strength vs. damage

FEMA aid and flood insurance covered about 17% of the costs.

The rest fell on private insurers, other programs, and the people who were hit. Flood insurance hardly touches wind damage.

Who pays
FEMA aidFlood insurance (NFIP)Everything else

State economies weren't noticeably impacted by the storms.

The big exception was Katrina, which raised Louisiana's unemployment rate by 6.3 percentage points. Statewide numbers can miss damage that's packed into just a few counties.

Before vs. after, each storm in each state
Measure
Context

Insurance prices roughly doubled, and they went up steadily

This is the national homeowners insurance price index from the BLS, shown monthly. The small tick marks along the bottom are Category 3+ landfalls. Prices didn't jump after the big hurricane seasons, and one national index can't tell us if hurricanes had anything to do with it.

Bottom line. The economic impact of hurricanes is real, but it's concentrated in a few storms and a few places. It mainly shows up in damage and who pays, not in statewide jobs or GDP.

Method and notes

assumptions, limitations, sources, storm records

Assumptions

  • What counts as a hurricane. I used NOAA's list of U.S. hurricanes. It includes storms that brought hurricane winds to the coast without the center crossing land, like Alex in 2004 and Ophelia in 2005.
  • Category by state. Each state gets the category it actually felt. Katrina was a Category 3 in Louisiana and Mississippi but only a Category 1 in Florida and Alabama.
  • Per resident. In the state comparison, aid per resident is each storm's FEMA aid divided by the state's population that year, added up across storms.
  • Inflation. All dollar figures are in 2024 dollars so storms from different years can be compared fairly. NOAA's damage numbers come already adjusted, and I adjusted FEMA aid and flood claims using the CPI for the month of landfall.
  • Before and after windows. Unemployment compares the month before to 3 months after. GDP compares the quarter before to the quarter after. Home prices compare the quarter before to a year after. GDP and home prices are shown relative to the U.S.
  • Coverage. The data starts in October 2002 because no U.S. hurricanes made landfall in 2000 or 2001.

Limitations

  • Damage is per storm, not per state. NOAA doesn't split damage out by state, so it can't go on the map.
  • Ten storms have no damage estimate. They came in under NOAA's $1 billion threshold, so they show as "under $1B" instead of zero.
  • Flood insurance only covers floods. Private wind insurance claims aren't public.
  • Two states are missing. Sandy's impact on New Jersey and Isabel's on Virginia fall outside the nine states here.
  • The grey bars in step 4 are rows where something else probably drove the change, like COVID, the 2008 recession, or back-to-back storms.
  • This shows association, not causation. It's a small sample of 43 storms with no statistical tests.

Sources

About the data

Every number comes from the sources listed here. I combined them into one workbook of storms, FEMA aid, flood claims, and state economic data, and checked each storm record against NOAA, FEMA, and FRED.

Storm records in the current filter ()