With hurricane season just days away, property insurance providers will be without a critical piece of information this year that they use to inform their pricing decisions.
Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it would stop tracking the cost of extreme weather. Commercial property insurers rely on federal weather data to assess risk and price coverage, especially as weather events become more severe, industry insiders say. They warn that without access to NOAA’s data, it could disrupt underwriting, drive up premiums or lead to no coverage at all.
“When in doubt, I think the carriers are going to model for the worst, because they have to protect their assets,” Tri Pack Insurance Services founder William Lindsay III said. “What that translates to in the marketplace would be an increase in pricing and/or a decrease in capacity, where you just have less carriers that are willing to take on the risk.”
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Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast in September, doing nearly $80B in damage, according to NOAA. Asheville, North Carolina, was hit especially hard, with thousands of businesses and properties destroyed.
NOAA said the change stems from evolving priorities, statutory mandates and staffing changes. President Donald Trump has increasingly targeted the agency, with the Department of Government Efficiency firing more than 800 NOAA employees.
The Trump administration also let go of researchers and scientists working on the nation’s climate assessment and has proposed a $1.5B budget cut for 2026, The New York Times reported.
The 55-year-old agency, which oversees the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, has released damage estimates for storms that cause more than $1B in damages for decades.
Last year, it tracked 27 billion-dollar storms that did a combined $180B in damages, the fourth-highest total on record, when adjusted for inflation. In 2023, NOAA tracked 28 billion-dollar climate disasters that caused $92.9B in damage.
Between 1980 and 2024, the U.S. averaged nine such disasters per year, adjusted for inflation. Over the past five years, the average is 23.
NOAA is predicting an above-average hurricane season in 2025, with three to five major hurricanes and 19 named storms, because of, among other reasons, higher ocean temperatures.
As the frequency and intensity of storms have increased, so has insurance companies’ need for reliable data to model risk and price their coverage plans accordingly.
The potential loss of federal data could push carriers to invest heavily in private research, driving up costs that would ultimately trickle down to policyholders, said Mark Rafail, a Houston-based insurance broker and founder of Rafail Insurance Agency.
“Every dollar out does affect insurance,” Rafail said. “So when more dollars are going out for research, for claims, for employees, then in turn, it’s going to come back to bite us on insurance premiums.”
Lindsay said he expects the impacts of the absence of reliable government data could start trickling in within the next 30 to 60 days. The 25-year industry veteran said many insurers are weighing costly private data alternatives to replace trusted public information — a move that could reshape how risk is modeled and priced.
“There are going to be other sources of data outside of NOAA, but it’s going to be more costly,” said Danielle Lombardo, managing director and chair of the real estate, hospitality and leisure division at WTW.
The average cost to insure an apartment surged 132% in 2023 compared to the 15-year prepandemic average, according to Moody’s. Between 2017 and 2023, commercial property insurance costs rose by about 10% every year.
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Marshall, North Carolina, was one of the towns hit hardest by Hurricane Helene in September. Even months later, it remains abandoned because of the scale of destruction.
Property owners grappling with the soaring costs have had to look for alternatives to traditional insurance.
USI Insurance Services Executive Vice President Christine Chipurnoi said she uses Alternative Insurance Resources and RMS Programs LLC, which help insurance brokers and risk management consultants find affordable alternatives to traditional benefit plans.
Their computer systems run models that take in all kinds of private and public data to give information on estimated loss for specific properties, Chipurnoi said, allowing brokers and their clients to make informed decisions on insurance premiums in regions they may otherwise be unfamiliar with.
One of her clients, based in Kansas, is located in a hot spot for tornadoes. Without the modeling tools, she wouldn’t have known just how vulnerable the property was, she said. Yet even these models are vulnerable if they don’t have NOAA data to pull from.
“You really need these tools to help you figure out what their huge exposures are, and then talk to them about how to mitigate,” Chipurnoi said. “You will have something, even if NOAA is cut back, you will still have some data, and we’ll have historical data, so we should be able to find out.”
Not everyone thinks the decision will have a significant impact. Mark Friedlander, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, said the group doesn’t expect the decision to stop tracking storms to affect the availability of commercial or residential property insurance.
“It will also not impact how claims are processed by insurers after a storm or other natural catastrophes, so it’s not going to have a direct impact on the policyholder, which is really critical,” Friedlander said.
Friedlander said that while day-to-day operations and claims won’t suffer, he acknowledged that the loss of NOAA’s tracking data may cause “some bumps in the road” in the short term.
“Long-term, there could be issues,” he said.
Beyond insurance costs, the budget and personnel cuts to NOAA also limit property owners’ access to data that informs disaster preparedness, risk planning and resilience, Lombardo said.
The lack of data can hinder outreach and education for landlords and their tenants about hurricane formation, intensity and frequency.
“From a real estate perspective, there’s a lot of prework that’s done when we know a hurricane is hitting,” Lombardo said. “There’s a lot that’s done to prevent extensive damage. Obviously, you can’t prevent everything, but there are things that you can do, so if we don’t have the proper information, that creates an issue.”
