Flood risk, searches and insurance to check before you buy

Around 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are in areas at risk of flooding, and roughly one property in five is already at risk from rivers, the sea or surface water. The Environment Agency's national flood and coastal erosion risk report expects that to reach one in four by the middle of the century, and records the average flood payout to a homeowner rising by 60% in 2025 to £30,000.

The free check to run before you offer

The government service for checking the long term flood risk for an area in England covers rivers and the sea, surface water, reservoirs and, where data exists, groundwater. It takes a postcode, it's free, and it works before you've spent anything on the purchase.

Read what it doesn't tell you. It reports risk for an area rather than the likelihood that one particular house will flood, and it says nothing about blocked drains or burst pipes. A low area rating doesn't mean the specific plot is safe, and a high one doesn't mean the house has ever taken water.

A separate service covers live flood warnings, river and sea levels and the five-day forecast. That's useful during a viewing in February, but it isn't a substitute for the long term check.

What the searches add

Your conveyancer's environmental search, covered in more detail in our guide to property searches, indicates whether the area is at risk from surface water, groundwater or river and coastal flooding, whether there have been floods in the past, and whether flood defences are in place.

Where the search flags further action, the next step is a flood report drawing on Environment Agency data, and after that an appraisal involving a physical inspection of the property. Each step costs more and tells you more, and most transactions stop at the first.

Search results only arrive after your offer is accepted, typically within the timeframe set out in our guide to how long conveyancing takes. If the postcode looks marginal on the free check, tell your conveyancer to order the environmental search first rather than waiting for the full pack to come back together.

What Flood Re does

Flood Re is a reinsurance scheme that lets insurers pass the flood element of a home insurance policy into a pooled fund, so households in high-risk areas can get cover at a price they can meet. You don't apply to it. Your insurer uses it behind the scenes and you won't usually see it named on the policy.

Flood Re says the scheme will remain in place until 2039. That end date matters more than it looks, because a 25-year mortgage taken out today outlives it, and lenders have said publicly that the scheme's future affects their appetite for high-risk property.

It also funds resilient repair. Under Flood Re's Build Back Better scheme, a household can claim up to £10,000 towards property flood resilience measures when repairing after a flood, over and above the work needed to put the damage right. Each insurer sets its own approach within that, and the policy has to include the option before you buy it, so ask at the quote stage rather than after a flood.

What Flood Re doesn't cover

The exclusions catch buyers. Homes built on or after 1 January 2009 aren't eligible, which was deliberate: the scheme was never meant to subsidise building on floodplains. A new build in a flood area is precisely the property that needs the help and cannot have it.

The table below sets out the main exclusions.

Buy-to-let can qualify, but only where the policy is held by an individual and the owner or their immediate family live there for some of the time, or the property is unoccupied. A conventional let to tenants generally won't meet that, which is a point landlords buying in flood-prone areas should settle before exchange, alongside the wider cover questions in our guide to landlord insurance.

Contents cover is more generous. A tenant's or an individual's contents can be covered even where the building itself isn't eligible, for example in a large block of flats.

Mortgages and insurance

Lenders require buildings insurance as a condition of the mortgage, and flood cover is normally part of it. If no insurer will quote, the purchase stops, regardless of what the survey says.

Some lenders decline high flood risk outright. Nationwide has said it uses mapping to identify homes vulnerable to flooding and will refuse to lend on those it considers high risk, affecting a limited number of properties. Criteria differ between lenders and aren't published in detail, so this is a broker question.

Where a property has flooded before, insurers often exclude flood cover or set a high excess rather than refuse outright. Check the excess and not just the premium, because a large flood excess is how an affordable-looking policy stops being cover for the thing you're worried about.

Ask the seller directly whether the property has flooded, and ask to see the last two insurance renewal notices. The premium and the excess on a renewal tell you what the insurance market already knows about that house, which is usually more than a search will. If the answers are unsatisfactory, get quotes for conveyancing early and line up someone who'll order the environmental search up front rather than at the end.