NOAA retired its billion-dollar disaster count in 2025, leaving 1980-2024 as the official record

On May 8, 2025, NOAA's satellite and information service posted a notice that its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product would be retired, with no updates beyond calendar year 2024. The database, kept by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), counted every weather and climate event in the United States since 1980 that caused at least $1 billion in damage, and NCEI's annual climate assessment for 2024 still featured its totals. The final edition lists 403 such disasters from 1980 to 2024, with a combined cost of more than $2.915 trillion in 2024 dollars. The notice said all past reports and their data remain authoritative and archived. It gave no reason for the decision.

What the database measured

Each entry is an event whose overall damages or costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. NCEI also adjusted every cost by the Consumer Price Index so that older events can be compared with recent ones, and some early events appear only because they cross the threshold after that adjustment. The estimates aim to capture an event's total cost, meaning costs that would not have been incurred had it not happened, and they include both insured and uninsured losses.

NCEI drew on the National Weather Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Agriculture, state emergency management agencies and climate centers, media reports and insurance-industry estimates. It warned that the figures were likely to change as damage assessments became more complete, and it grouped events into seven types: drought, flooding, freeze, severe storm, tropical cyclone, wildfire and winter storm. Its methods, data sources and possible biases were set out in research articles published in 2013 and 2015, and the final list names its authors as Adam Smith, Neal Lott and Tom Ross.

The last full year

The series ended on one of its worst years. In its annual assessment of January 10, 2025, NCEI counted 27 separate billion-dollar disasters in 2024, the second-highest number in a calendar year after the 28 of 2023. They comprised 17 severe storms, five tropical cyclones, two winter storms, one flood, one drought and heat wave, and one wildfire. Together they cost $182.7 billion, the fourth-highest annual total, and were associated with at least 568 deaths. NCEI cautioned at the time that the year's total could rise by several billion dollars as more costs were reported.

Hurricane Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida's Big Bend region on September 26, 2024, was the costliest, at an estimated $78.7 billion and at least 219 deaths. Hurricane Milton, which came ashore near Siesta Key, Florida, on October 9, followed at $34.3 billion. NCEI added that 2024 was the 14th consecutive year with at least 10 billion-dollar disasters, and that the 190 such events of 2015-24 killed at least 6,300 people and cost about $1.4 trillion.

Our totals add up NCEI's rounded yearly figures, so they differ slightly from its own overall total; NCEI lists no billion-dollar event in 1987. The count of disasters per year roughly doubled from the 2000s to the 2010s and rose again in 2020-24, by our arithmetic.

Severe storms make up the largest number of entries, 203 of the 403, but $514.4 billion of the cost, by our count of the list. Tropical cyclones are far fewer, at 67, yet together cost $1.54 trillion, more than half of the total. The seven costliest single entries are all hurricanes, led by Katrina in 2005 at $201.3 billion, Harvey in 2017 at $160.0 billion and Ian in 2022 at $119.6 billion, in 2024 dollars. The costliest year was 2017, when 19 disasters, among them Harvey, Irma and Maria, cost $395.9 billion.

What applies now

There is no official NOAA count for 2025 or later. NCEI's annual assessment for 2025, published on January 13, 2026, describes the year's extremes, among them the Eaton and Palisades fires, the second- and third-most destructive wildfires in California's records, and a July flood in the Texas Hill Country that killed at least 135 people. Unlike the 2024 edition, it gives no billion-dollar tally and no dollar estimates, by our reading of the two reports.

The 1980-2024 record remains available. NCEI's page for the product is still online and asks users to cite it as its 2025 edition, and its full event list, with a description of each disaster, can still be downloaded. The retirement notice directs users to NCEI's archive for the past reports and data and lists an NCEI contact for questions. Billion-dollar disaster figures for any year after 2024 therefore do not come from NOAA.