How to bulk-check FEMA flood zones for a list of US addresses (no API key)

Japan Open Data — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:22:15 +0000

If you underwrite mortgages, screen insurance portfolios or evaluate rental properties, "is it in a flood zone?" usually means opening the FEMA Flood Map Service Center and clicking one address at a time.

For a list of 50 or 500 properties, that does not scale. Here is a way to get the official FEMA flood zone for every row in one run.

What you get per address: the FEMA zone (A, AE, VE, X…), whether it is inside a Special Flood Hazard Area (where flood insurance is mandatory for federally backed mortgages), the base flood elevation, the FIRM panel and its effective date, and whether a Letter of Map Revision (LOMR) changed the map there. Data comes straight from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer; addresses are geocoded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Steps

Open the US Flood Zone Lookup on Apify (free account).
Paste your addresses (with ZIP code) or "latitude,longitude" pairs, one per line — up to 1,000 per run.
Click Start and download the result as CSV or Excel.

Example row

A point in Miami Beach:

{"status": "ok", "floodZone": "AE", "inSpecialFloodHazardArea": true,
 "baseFloodElevation": 8, "verticalDatum": "NGVD29",
 "firmPanel": "12086C0317L", "firmPanelEffectiveDate": "2009-09-11", "hasLomr": false}

From code

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("japan-open-data/us-flood-zone-lookup").call(
    run_input={"locations": ["1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500"]})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(row["floodZone"], row["inSpecialFloodHazardArea"])

Cost: $5 per 1,000 locations checked; addresses that can't be matched are free.

Limits worth knowing: this is screening, not a certified flood determination (SFHDF). Zone X does not mean zero risk. Addresses are placed along the street, so for properties near a zone boundary, pass coordinates instead.

I'd love feedback on what columns would make this more useful for your workflow.

DEV Community: Japan Open Data

How to bulk-check FEMA flood zones for a list of US addresses (no API key)

Steps

Example row

From code