California Is the Most Exposed to Disasters of Any State (2026)

1. FEMA National Risk Index, county table · December 2025 release

How we got this. The Disaster Score is The Honest Local’s own recipe. Each source ranks every place on its own from 0 to 100 and the score is the average, so a place has to do well on all of them to lead. We don't lean on one FEMA number alone, so we blend two from the same National Risk Index county table. FEMA's overall risk score, which folds expected loss, social vulnerability and community resilience across eighteen hazards into one figure, and FEMA's expected annual loss score, a different lens that reads what those disasters cost in dollars when they hit. Each source ranks every place against every other place that has it and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list. The plain risk score is still what we show you. A city uses its own county. For a state we never hand you one county's reading and call it the state's. We weight every county in the state by population, for each source on its own. It refreshes once a year, on FEMA's release cycle. For California, that means population-weighted mean of RISK_SCORE across 58 counties in California, weighted by each county's NRI POPULATION figure.

Rankings by The Honest Local from public data, one page per list, refreshed on each source’s own cycle. Places with no reading are left out rather than estimated. Every value on this page carries its source in the page’s structured data.

Photos Shutterstock/UladzikKryhin · Shutterstock/Pisaphotography.