FEMA Priced Finishing the Nation's Flood Maps at Up to $11.8 Billion. Its Own Budget for the Job Just Fell Again.

A FEMA flood map is the document that decides whether a bank requires flood insurance on your mortgage, whether your county lets you build on a lot, and whether you know your house is at risk at all.▸ Two-thirds of the nation's streams, rivers, and coastlines still don't have one, according to the Association of State Floodplain Managers' July 2025 comments to the Department of Homeland Security — the same fraction the group reported five years earlier. The program that's supposed to close that gap just had its budget cut for a third straight year.

FEMA's flood-mapping program — officially Risk MAP, for Risk Mapping, Assessment, and Planning — runs on two funding streams: a congressional appropriation and a fee tacked onto every National Flood Insurance Program policy.▸ Both are shrinking. Per the DHS/FEMA FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification (published April 2026), the appropriation has held flat at $281.5 million since FY2024, but the policyholder-fee stream has been cut in three consecutive budgets — from $164.6 million in FY2024 to $135.97 million in the current fiscal year, with the FY2027 request cutting it again to $128.8 million. The combined total: $417.4 million for FY2026, on its way to $410.2 million if the FY2027 request holds.

The same budget document shows the program is also short on people: FEMA is authorized 234 positions for Flood Mapping and Risk MAP, but only 176 are actually funded FTE in FY2026 — a quarter of the authorized headcount left unfilled in the very program responsible for closing a nationwide mapping gap.

The gap between what Risk MAP gets and what finishing the job would cost isn't a guess.▸ In 2020, ASFPM built a cost model to the parameters Congress itself wrote into the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, and priced completing flood hazard mapping for every U.S. community at $3.2 billion to $11.8 billion, one time, plus $107 million to $480 million a year afterward just to keep the maps current. Five years later, in its July 2025 comments to DHS, ASFPM reaffirmed the same range as its live estimate — because Congress never appropriated the money to make it obsolete.

Put another way: if every dollar Risk MAP receives this year went solely toward finishing the unmapped two-thirds of the country — none of it toward maintaining the one-third that's already mapped, none toward salaries, none toward anything else the program does — the low-end estimate would still take 7.7 years to fund.▸ The high end would take 28.3 years. In practice, none of Risk MAP's budget is set aside that way; the money is split across new mapping, map maintenance, and community outreach, so the real timeline is longer still.

The consequence of that gap has a headcount.▸ A March 2025 study in Scientific Reports — by researchers at Arizona State University, the University of Utah, First Street Foundation, and flood-modeling firm Fathom-Global, independent of both FEMA and ASFPM — used non-FEMA flood models to identify "federally-overlooked" 100-year floodplains: places at flood risk under peer-reviewed modeling that FEMA's own Special Flood Hazard Area maps don't show. The finding: more than 26 million residents of the continental United States, or roughly one in ten, live in a floodplain FEMA's maps don't capture at all.

Rainfall flooding — the kind that overwhelms storm drains during an intense downpour, independent of any river or coastline — accounts for the largest share, 18 million people, because FEMA's maps are built around river and coastal flood models and generally don't depict pluvial risk at all.▸ The same study found lower-income areas systematically more likely to be federally overlooked across every flood type it examined. None of this is abstract: the Congressional Budget Office's September 2024 report found flood damage in the United States has averaged $46 billion a year over the past decade, in 2023 dollars — and CBO projects that figure to grow a quarter to a third larger by 2050 as flood risk increases.

Funding figures cover FEMA's Risk MAP program specifically, not FEMA's total budget or the National Flood Insurance Program's separate borrowing authority. The 26-million floodplain-population figure and its by-type breakdown come from a single independent academic study using non-FEMA flood models; FEMA has not published a directly comparable nationwide figure for its own maps to net against it.