Federal government stops tracking weather disaster losses, ending benchmark used by insurers and emergency managers

NOAA retired its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters dataset in May 2025, halting updates beyond 2024. The product, which had recorded 403 disaster events exceeding $1 billion each since 1980, served as the federal standard for measuring extreme-weather economic losses. Insurers, emergency managers, and congressional appropriators relied on the consistent, year-over-year accounting to track disaster cost trends. The historical record remains intact, but the running tally that informed policy and disaster response planning has ended.