Flood Insurance Claims: Australian Data

What flood and extreme weather cost Australian insurers each year, and how NSW compares, from the insurance industry and NSW SES published figures.

These figures come from the insurance industry's own catastrophe reporting and from the NSW State Emergency Service (SES), not from any single insurance claim. If you are working out your own claim, our guide to how to claim water damage on your insurance and our water damage restoration cost guide cover that directly. What follows is the bigger picture: how much flood and extreme weather cost Australian insurers as a whole, and what the pattern looks like in New South Wales.

Adjusted for inflation, Australian insurers have incurred an average of $3.9 billion a year in extreme weather claims over the past seven years; flood losses alone have grown from an average of $129 million a year in the 2000s to around $2 billion a year since 2020, roughly a fifteen-fold real increase, according to the Insurance Council of Australia's newest Catastrophe Report.

Flood is the costliest weather peril since 2019

Since 2019, the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has declared 29 extreme weather events, totalling $20.7 billion in insured losses from more than 760,720 home and building claims. Flood accounts for 16 of those 29 events, and more than half of all claims and total cost. The single biggest event was the 2022 floods, which generated around $6.1 billion across more than 191,000 claims, the costliest extreme weather event in Australia's history.

The table's Storms and hail row combines two figures the ICA reports separately; the combination is exact arithmetic against the report's own totals, but the underlying data does not let us say how much of that $6.13 billion nationally is storm versus hail specifically. Nationally, flood's own average claim cost is $23,611, sitting between the extremes: bushfire has the highest average claim cost of any peril nationally at $114,888, reflecting how often a serious fire destroys a home outright, while earthquake has the lowest nationally at $5,268, reflecting a large volume of minor, largely cosmetic damage.

New South Wales: smaller share, bigger individual losses

Nationally, NSW is not where most of this cost lands. Between 2022 and 2026, Queensland accounted for 60% of all declared-catastrophe claims and just over half of the national insured cost. In NSW, the pattern is different: it shows up less in how many claims are lodged and more in how large individual claims are. The Northern Rivers electorates of Richmond and Page made up just 15% of the state's claims over that period but 38% of its insured cost, with average claims exceeding $60,000 in Richmond and $76,000 in Page.

Richmond and Page cover the Northern Rivers region on the NSW north coast, not Sydney. We have not found a published, Sydney-specific breakdown of claims severity from either the ICA or the NSW Government.

Across NSW, the SES responded to more than 54,000 incidents in the 2024-25 financial year, including more than 1,000 flood rescues. In March that year, Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred alone brought flooding to the Northern Rivers and Mid North Coast and generated more than 14,000 calls for help. Again, this is a whole-of-state and Northern NSW figure, not a Sydney one.

What this data does not cover

All of the figures above are about declared, large-scale catastrophes, the kind that make the news. They do not include the burst pipe, failed shower membrane or ageing roof behind the water damage claims an individual Sydney homeowner actually lodges, since those are not declared events at all.

Sources

• Insurance Council of Australia, Catastrophe Report 2025-26
• NSW State Emergency Service, Annual Report 2024-25