By FEMA's estimate, natural hazards will cost Maryland's 23 counties and Baltimore City about $1.06 billion in an average year. We built these profiles because that figure, broken down county by county and set beside where mitigation money has actually gone, tells a different story than the one most resilience budgets are written around.
Flooding drives the losses
Inland flooding accounts for $492 million of the statewide total, 46%, and it is the largest hazard in 18 of the 24 jurisdictions. FEMA's December 2025 release rebuilt its inland flooding model to count flooding from heavy rain as well as from rivers, so the figures now reach streets and basements that floodplain maps don't cover.
The Eastern Shore breaks the pattern. Hurricanes lead in Caroline, Kent, Wicomico and Worcester counties, and coastal flooding leads in Dorchester and Somerset, where the land is low and the Bay is rising.
Heat is a Baltimore problem
Heat waves are the second-largest hazard statewide, at about $140 million a year, and they weigh most on the Baltimore region: $42.6 million a year in Baltimore County and $38.1 million in Baltimore City. The city carries Maryland's highest risk score, 95, even though Baltimore County expects larger losses, because FEMA weights the city's losses for its relatively high social vulnerability.
The grant money doesn't follow the risk
FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Assistance programs have funded 441 projects in Maryland since fiscal 1989, worth $141.4 million in federal money. The four jurisdictions with the largest expected losses (Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Montgomery and Prince George's) carry 51% of the state's expected annual loss but received 27% of the grant money that went to specific counties.
The largest single source wasn't a storm. $50.4 million, 36% of the total, came through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program attached to Maryland's COVID-19 disaster declaration, and $33 million of that went to one Annapolis project for floodgates and floodwater storage. In our work with local governments, the communities that win this money are usually the ones with a designed, cost-tested project ready when the application window opens, whatever their risk score says.
That readiness gap is why, through Council Fire Labs, we built Resilient & Ready with the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County: a platform that ranks resilience projects against the criteria that matter and matches them to funding that fits.
How to use these profiles
Each profile shows FEMA's scores for one county, its hazards ranked by expected loss, the mitigation projects FEMA has funded there and the status of its hazard mitigation plan. Read them together: a county whose largest hazard is flooding but whose grants went to generators has a gap worth asking about. County scores compare counties with each other; they can't tell you which neighborhood floods first, which takes tract-level data and local knowledge.
Frequently Asked Questions
About this data
Scores. FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025 release) ranks every U.S. county against all the others. A score is a percentile: a risk score of 82 means a higher value than 82% of counties. The risk index is the expected annual loss scaled up for higher social vulnerability and down for stronger community resilience. FEMA groups risk and loss into five ratings by natural breaks, and vulnerability and resilience into national fifths.
Expected annual loss is FEMA’s modeled average yearly loss from 18 natural hazards to buildings (at replacement value), crops and livestock, and people, whose expected deaths and injuries FEMA converts to dollars. It is an average, not a forecast: a low-risk county can still have a bad year.
Vulnerability and resilience. Social vulnerability comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Community Resilience Estimates. Community resilience is FEMA’s version of the University of South Carolina’s Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (2020), which counts past mitigation spending among its inputs. Vulnerability scores bottom out: 334 of the 3,144 counties scored, 8 of them in Maryland, share the lowest score, 10.6. Population is the 2020 Census count.
Grants are FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance awards in Maryland that are closed, approved, obligated or awarded: the projects in OpenFEMA’s older project file, which FEMA froze on August 31, 2026, plus the grants FEMA has managed in FEMA GO since fiscal 2020, from HMA Subapplications (both retrieved September 30, 2026). Projects FEMA now lists as withdrawn or denied are left out unless money was obligated to them. Amounts are the federal share obligated. Each grant counts toward the county it serves; 103 statewide grants ($24.1M) count toward none.
FEMA describes the index as one source for risk-reduction decisions, to weigh alongside benefit-cost analysis and local knowledge.
National Risk IndexRisk Index data (OpenFEMA)HMA Subapplications (OpenFEMA)Risk Index FAQ (FEMA, PDF)
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