States Safest from Disasters, Maryland Leads (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 blend two numbers from FEMA's National Risk Index county table, and neither grows with the size of the county, so a big county never reads as riskier just for being big. The first is FEMA's expected annual loss rate, the share of a county's buildings, people and crops that FEMA's 18 hazards, from floods and hurricanes to wildfires and earthquakes, take in a typical year, as a percentile of every US county. Zero is the lowest rate in the country and 100 the highest, and it's the number we show you. A state's figure is the population-weighted average of its counties' percentiles, our math, not a FEMA number. The second is FEMA's community risk factor, which weighs how vulnerable the people are against how well the community recovers. Each ranks every place against every other place that has it and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list. A city uses its own county. In Virginia an independent city such as Richmond or Virginia Beach is its own county in FEMA's table, so it reads its own row, not the county around it. 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 Maryland, that means population-weighted mean across 24 counties in Maryland of FEMA NRI expected annual loss rate percentiles.

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/Jon Bilous · Shutterstock.