Measuring the Cost of Disasters Act of 2025

Measuring the Cost of Disasters Act of 2025 would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to create and publicly maintain a database and webpage that list every billion-dollar disaster that occurs in the United States each year. The database would be updated at least biannually as new information becomes available. For each disaster, the database would include the estimated cost, the type of disaster, location, date(s), and any other relevant information the Administrator chooses to add. It would also include visual graphs and maps showing trends over time and the distribution of disaster types nationwide, modeled after the visualization features NOAA previously made available for the Billion-Dollar Disasters data from 1980 through 2024. NOAA would use data available to it and could collaborate with federal and non-federal partners as needed, including partners it has worked with before. The bill also allows including disasters that are not billion-dollar disasters if appropriate, and it requires NOAA to maintain and update the pre-existing disaster database hosted by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) for archiving and research. A disaster qualifies as a “billion-dollar disaster” if it results in $1 billion or more in combined direct costs and market costs, as determined by NCEI.