OpenFEMA Frequently Asked Questions

The disaster number will relate to the incident. A list of disasters and disaster names are available in the OpenFEMA dataset FEMA Web Disaster Declarations.

Not all "Amount" values are actual payouts. The rental, replacement, and repair amounts are the award amounts. The "Total Approved IHP Amount" field is the Total IA award. The reports for Individuals and Households Program and Housing Assistance Program Data provide this data.

There may be inspector errors, but some high values are legitimate. For instance, values for flood height may include measures for dwelling types of boats. Boat dwellings that have sunk to the bottom of a lake may be recorded as an estimate of the deepest lake depth.

Individual Assistance records are not available at the registration level to protect Personally identifiable information (PII). Geolocation data identifying a specific individual is considered personal information as well. To protect PII, OpenFEMA sets the minimum geographically aggregated values as x >5.

This data is not available in OpenFEMA data and would have to be requested through the Freedom of Information Act or Privacy Act (FOIA).

Yes, valid registration = Applicant. An application is for a household. The occupants in that household are recorded separately.

Personal identifiable information (PII) is redacted, and data is anonymized to the census tract, reported zip code, and to one decimal point (.1) digit of latitude and longitude. If mapped, flood insurance policies and claims may appear to be clustered at a particular location due to this anonymization.

The NFIP does not track flood insurance claims based on the FEMA’s disaster declarations. The NFIP uses a separate Event Designation Number (EDN) or Flood Insurance Claims Office (FICO) number to do this. If an EDN was not assigned for a particular disaster, the NFIP can still search for flood insurance claims records using a state(s) and a date of loss range(s). Record level information may be subject to exemptions under the FOIA.

The dataset page indicates the update frequency. The frequency of update depends on the specific dataset. Most of the disaster related datasets are updated every 20 minutes. When accessing the datasets through the OpenFEMA API, the OpenFemaDataSets endpoint can be used to determine the last refresh time.

For example, the following URL displays metadata for the DisasterDeclarations Summaries dataset, indicating the last update in the “lastRefresh” field: https://www.fema.gov/api/open/v1/OpenFemaDataSets?$filter=name eq %27DisasterDeclarationsSummaries%27

You should be able to join Public Assistance Funded Projects Details - v1 | FEMA.gov with the Public Assistance Applicants - v1 | FEMA.gov using the applicantId field to get the level of detail you want.