2025 marks the 15th consecutive year during which the United States recorded an above-average number of billion-dollar disasters. Clearly, such a trend confirms a permanent shift in the country’s susceptibility to severe weather events.
This study will provide a ‘storm stress index’ by uncovering which states bear the brunt of routinely seismic weather circumstances. We’ll also look at what type of damage has been (and continues to be) caused, and focus on the financial consequences of weather disasters.
First, let’s emphasize how much (and how rapidly) things have changed when it comes to severe U.S. weather.
U.S. Weather: Increasingly Disastrous
The U.S. weather trajectory over the past few decades offers a stunning illustration of how quickly things have changed. The country was subject to just three billion–dollar events per year during the 1980s; that number has rapidly risen, with the average over the last decade shifting to 20 billion–dollar events per year.
That represents a nearly sevenfold increase and reflects a combination of intensifying weather patterns, rising property values, and expanding development in high-risk areas.
2023 and 2024, respectively, logged 28 and 27 billion–dollar disasters, numbers that currently represent record levels. 2025’s 23 events means it ranks third in the all-time list, with the record likely to be broken again during the next few years.
Another metric that underscores how dramatically America’s weather risk has shifted is the shrinking intervals between events. In the 1980s, a billion-dollar disaster struck the U.S. roughly every 82 days.
That relatively widely spaced level of intermittency meant that communities had sufficient time to respond, recover, and rebuild before the next disaster struck.
During the last ten years, that interval was down to an average of 16 days. By 2025, it was down to just 10 days between weather disasters.
The practical consequence of such progressively shortening gaps between disasters can’t be underestimated. When billion-dollar disasters arrive in rapid succession (as they did in spring 2025), the financial, logistical, and human resources available for recovery are stretched before the previous disaster has been fully dealt with.
And the problem is worse in some states than others, as the following data confirms.
Where Most U.S. Weather Events Happen
If we measure states by the frequency they experience billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, Texas was the clear 2025 leader. According to Climate Central’s U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Texas suffered 21 of 23 U.S. billion-dollar disasters recorded during the year (91.3% of all events).
That figure reflects the state’s uniquely broad susceptibility to all manner of weather hazards, from hailstorms and tornado outbreaks to flooding and drought.
The scale of Texas‘s exposure is no anomaly. The Lone Star State has long been the most disaster-struck state in the U.S., a distinction rooted in its sheer geographic size, its place at the intersection of multiple severe weather corridors, and its unique vulnerability to frequent, devastating convective storms.
Beyond Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee each recorded 10 billion–dollar disaster impacts in 2025, covering 43.5% of all U.S. extreme weather events. Pennsylvania’s place in this five-state group is particularly notable, as it signals how much Tornado Alley boundaries are widening.
Pennsylvania‘s inclusion reflects the gradual eastward expansion of billion-dollar damage weather activity. And this trend is reshaping risk assumptions for commercial property owners in the Mid–Atlantic and Northeast who have historically assumed geographic exemption from Tornado Alley. That assumption no longer applies.
Alabama was also badly hit by extreme weather in 2025, suffering 9 events (39.1%), while Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia each recorded 8 events (34.8%), further reinforcing the picture of a broadening severe weather map. As with Pennsylvania, the inclusion of these four states has direct implications for commercial property insurance markets, claims environments, and risk management strategies in many parts of the U.S. relatively unfamiliar with such concerns.
Overall, extreme weather events now involve nearly every region of the eastern United States, from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains to the Mid–Atlantic. For businesses operating in any of these states, the 2025 severe weather event data offers a forward-looking risk signal for anyone with a financial stake in the built environment.
And as the following data confirms, extreme weather in the U.S. can be extremely costly.
The Financial Toll of Weather Disasters
If we shift our focus from the frequency of billion-dollar disasters to how much they cost, California emerges as by far the top-ranking state. While Texas overwhelmingly dominated the frequency rankings in 2025, California’s estimated $75,000,000,000 disaster-related burden represented 53.5% of the U.S.’s $116.1 billion disaster cost total for the year.
That staggering figure is almost entirely attributable to a single event: the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, which ravaged the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and many other communities over the course of three harrowing weeks.
The wildfires destroyed over 16,000 homes and businesses, forced over 200,000 evacuations, and produced what Climate Central confirmed as by far the costliest wildfire event in U.S. recorded history.
For California’s commercial property owners, insurers, and lenders, the January 2025 wildfires were a stress test of the state’s property insurance infrastructure. And it was a test that exposed the fragility of available coverage in high-risk markets.
Texas ranked second with an estimated $7,500,000,000 in disaster costs, a 7.73% share of the national total. That figure, while much smaller than California’s wildfire-driven burden, reflects the financial reality of being subject to 91% of the country’s billion-dollar events in a single year.
Unlike California’s compounded, single-event cost profile, Texas’s financial hit was spread across a wide range of events. They included the catastrophic Hill Country flooding in July 2025 that killed more than 130 people and caused an estimated $18 billion in damage. There were also repeated hailstorm outbreaks across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to cover, plus severe convective storm systems that devastated multiple regions.
For Texas commercial property owners, that distributed damage profile means there’s no recovery window, no off-season, and no part of the state that’s exempt from storm-related financial exposure.
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Alabama all had to cover around $3,500,000,000 in disaster costs, reflecting the concentrated financial damage wrought by tornado and storm outbreaks during the spring and early summer of 2025 across the central United States.
Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee completed the ranking top 10, all suffering an estimated $1,500,000,000 burden in disaster costs and shares. Although such figures are comparatively small, they still represent significant damage in states where commercial property insurance markets were already under huge strain.
Overall, storm-related financial risk in the U.S. in 2025 was dominated by California and the growing threat of low-probability, extreme-severity events in markets where insurance availability has already been severely compromised by years of escalating wildfire losses.
Texas‘s profile is different. The question for commercial property owners in this case (and in others suffering routine but less frequent or damaging weather events) is not whether a billion-dollar weather event will strike, but when it will happen, how often, and what sort of recovery period is available.
And a key factor when assessing year-long risk is the season in question.
Seasonal Weather Event Factors
While there’s no completely safe weather season in the U.S., there are seasons that are significantly more dangerous than others.
Of the 23 confirmed billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that struck the United States in 2025, 10 occurred during the spring months of March, April, and May – that’s almost half of the year’s disaster total packed into a 92-day window.
The spring surge was driven almost entirely by a relentless series of severe convective storms across central and eastern states. They included six billion-dollar tornado outbreaks and multiple extreme hail and derecho events that gave communities, emergency responders, and commercial property owners very little time to recover between events.
The worst of these was the two-day Central Tornado Outbreak (March 14-16), which produced an estimated 182 tornadoes, caused $11 billion in damage, and killed 43 people across Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Within weeks, it was followed by the North Central and Eastern Tornado Outbreak (May 15-17), which featured around 60 tornadoes, caused $6.3 billion in damage, and produced several violent EF-4 tornadoes with winds up to 190 mph.
For commercial property owners in the spring storm corridor, from Texas and Oklahoma through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, and eastward into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mid–Atlantic, the 2025 spring season was not a series of isolated weather events. It was a sustained assault that tested the limits of insurance coverage, claims capacity, and business continuity planning across a huge section of the country.
Summer was subject to 8 billion–dollar events, reflecting the continuation of severe storm activity through the warmer months in tandem with the ongoing toll of the Western drought and heat wave, which covered 16 states, killing 89 and causing $3.1 billion in damage.
The aforementioned Texas Hill Country flooding occurred on July 4: 130 dead and $18 billion in damage made it one of the deadliest inland flood events in U.S. history, and clear evidence of summer weather threat.
Fall saw less extreme weather than usually anticipated. A comparatively low fall count of 4 billion–dollar events was a direct consequence of 2025 marking the first year since 2015 in which no hurricane struck the U.S. mainland. Typically, hurricane season would account for a large share of Gulf Coast and Atlantic coastal state disaster costs.
The fact that the hurricane risk didn’t materialize partly explains why the 2025 annual event total didn’t reach the record-breaking levels of 2023 and 2024.
And although winter recorded just 1 billion–dollar event, it was the single most financially devastating disaster of the year. The LA wildfires of January 7-28 caused $61.2 billion in damage, killed 31 people, destroyed more than 12,000 structures, and forced more than 200,000 evacuations. In doing so, it accounted for more than 53% of the nation‘s 2025 disaster costs.
For commercial property owners, the LA wildfires shattered any assumption that winter represents a low-risk window for property damage. The climate environment is now such that off-season wildfire conditions can produce losses that dwarf an entire hurricane season in a matter of days.
Ultimately, the American disaster calendar no longer enjoys a quiet period during which commercial property owners can rely on for recovery or reduced vigilance.
In terms of individual state vigilance, what follows is the ‘Storm Stress Index’, which combines annual weather event costs with weather event risk to provide a composite ranking.
The 2025 Commercial Property Storm Stress Index
The Commercial Property Storm Stress Index synthesizes two key storm-related risk factors into a single, composite score. That gives commercial property owners, risk managers, lenders, and insurers a rounded picture of where the greatest combined exposure to storm activity and its financial consequences lies. Neither cost nor frequency alone can define severe weather risk.
A state regularly struck by moderate storms represents a very different risk profile than a state susceptible to a single catastrophic event. A combined ‘Storm Stress Index’ score can accurately indicate risk for commercial property owners in a way that a single-metric ranking might misconstrue.
Texas and California emerge as the index’s two ‘Extreme-tier’ states. The states are separated by just 2.4 points, and yet represent very different risk profiles.
Texas’ index-leading Storm Stress Score of 57.2 is driven by its uniquely high severe weather frequency score (21 of the 23 billion-dollar disasters recorded nationwide in 2025). For Texas commercial property owners, the index score reflects a relentless series of storms that leave virtually no recovery window between events.
California’s ‘Extreme’ rating is due to its 54.8 score, a number that tells a very specific story: one predominantly attributable to the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which cost $61.2 billion. So, despite a low frequency score, a single catastrophe (and the high potential of a similar future event) is sufficient to propel California into the Extreme tier alongside Texas. This two-state upper-tier ranking is key to understanding the index’s core design principle: that maximum frequency and maximum severity are equally dangerous risk profiles for commercial property owners.
Beyond the two Extreme-tier states, eight states share a ‘High’ ranking, with stress scores ranging from 16.5 to 27.4.
Missouri leads the ‘High’ tier with a score of 27.4, due to both a high frequency score (10 billion-dollar disaster events) and the highest cost share among the central states (3.87%). The latter factor reflects the catastrophic March tornado outbreak that cut a nearly 120-mile EF-4 path from northern Arkansas into southeastern Missouri, causing widespread commercial and infrastructure damage across the region.
Oklahoma and Georgia are next on the index (25.7 and 25.4, respectively). Each recorded 10 billion-dollar impacts but with lower overall cost shares, reflecting damage broadly distributed across multiple storm events.
Pennsylvania’s prominent presence (25.3) represents clear proof that billion-dollar storm risk has now expanded well beyond Tornado Alley to reach the Mid-Atlantic corridor, with clear repercussions for local property owners and developers and insurance companies.
Tennessee (25.3) and Alabama (23.1) are next in the rankings, with Illinois (19.4) and Indiana (16.5) rounding out the top 10, both reflecting the damage wrought by the spring storm season across the central U.S. corridor.
Taken together, the ten states in the 2025 Commercial Property Storm Stress Index represent a national risk landscape that’s bigger than ever (and which will continue to expand) and more financially consequential than at any point in recorded history. Risk is no longer confined to traditionally associated regions, nor driven exclusively by hurricanes. As such, insurance and property pricing models (as well, potentially, as construction methods) will continue to evolve accordingly. As each year passes, the Storm Stress Index should prove to be an invaluable tool for those looking to amend their risk data.
Methodology
The Commercial Property Storm Stress Index is a composite ranking that measures the combined storm-related risk burden facing commercial property owners across the United States. The index is built from two equally weighted metrics, each normalized to a 0-100 scale, which is then averaged and converted into a final Storm Stress Score.
The first metric, storm frequency, measures the number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that struck each state in 2025 (using data courtesy of Climate Central’s U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database). Each state’s raw event count is normalized against the highest-scoring state to produce a frequency score between 0 and 100.
The second metric, disaster cost share, measures each state’s proportional share of the total $116.1 billion U.S. disaster costs recorded during 2025 (again, sourced from Climate Central’s mapping tool). Each state’s cost share percentage is normalized against the highest-scoring state to produce a cost score between 0 and 100.
The two normalized scores are then averaged equally (at 50% each) to produce the final Storm Stress Score. States are subsequently assigned a risk tier:
Extreme (for a score above 50), High (for a score between 15 and 50), or Elevated (for a score below 15), depending on their final composite score. Cost share figures represent midpoint estimates of Climate Central’s reported state-level cost ranges.
Part of the risk factor for both homebuyers/property developers and insurance companies is the level of coverage available, and the associated costs should disaster strike. The following data considers the costs both covered by and not covered by insurance coverage.
The U.S. Storm Coverage Gap
In 2025, natural disasters caused $133 billion in total economic losses across the United States (this figure covers losses beyond the scope of earlier billion-dollar disaster data), but insurers covered only $93 billion of that damage. That left a $40 billion coverage gap that property owners, businesses, and communities had to cover due to the fact that their policies did not.
Even in a year when no hurricanes made landfall on U.S. soil, a fact that kept overall loss totals well below their worst-case potential, the coverage shortfall still reached $40 billion, driven almost entirely by the severe convective storms, wildfires, and flooding events that define storm season for commercial property owners across the country’s most exposed states.
And as weather worsens, the shortfall may well rise, without policy adjustments (which would inevitably lead to higher premiums).
Insured losses from natural catastrophes have been rising at an average annual rate of 5 to 7 percent in real terms, a trend that has held steady for decades.
What makes that trajectory especially worrying for commercial property owners is the fact that premium increases and coverage restrictions have moved in the opposite direction, with insurers tightening policy terms and raising deductibles in the very markets where storm exposure is highest.
Hail, tornadoes, and straight-line winds don’t announce themselves weeks in advance, as is the case with hurricanes. They’re sudden events that cause concentrated damage, and which subsequently generate claims that insurers are increasingly motivated to dispute, delay, and underpay.
The result is a claims environment where the burden of proof falls on the property owner, settlement offers routinely fall short of damage costs, and getting fair compensation is usually an arduous process.
For commercial property owners operating in Extreme and High-tier Storm Stress states, the math is clear: storms are increasingly costly, policies are often out of date, and the distance between promised coverage and what’s actually delivered following a disaster has never been more consequential.
To illustrate this, it’s worth looking closely at how commercial insurance has evolved over just a few years.
Commercial Insurance
For commercial property owners in storm-heavy states, building insurance is increasingly less a means of absorbing disaster costs and more a rising operating cost with diminishing returns.
According to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, average commercial real estate insurance costs have almost doubled over the past decade: from $1,558 per building per month in 2013 to $2,726 by the end of 2023.
In states carrying the heaviest storm burden, that trajectory is even steeper. Commercial buildings in the ten states suffering the highest expected annual loss totals have been subject to up to a 31% year-over-year increase in insurance costs and a 108% increase over five years.
Deloitte projects those same high-risk states will see monthly per-building costs climb from $3,077 in 2026 to $6,062 by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 10.2%. Texas, top-ranked on the 2025 Commercial Property Storm Stress Index, and second-placed California, can expect such staggering insurance rises.
The Future for U.S. Storm States
The 2025 Commercial Property Storm Stress Index arrives at a key moment: the United States is subject to a rapidly evolving natural disaster environment. And commercial property owners in the country’s most storm-exposed states are increasingly bearing the financial consequences of that evolution.
2025 marked the fifteenth consecutive year that the U.S. recorded an above-average number of billion-dollar disasters: 23 confirmed events costing a combined $115 billion, striking on average every 10 days, the shortest gap ever recorded, and a massive change from the 82-day average of the 1980s.
And this change is clearly permanent, with 2023 recording 28 events, 2024 recording 27, and 2025 adding 23 more, collectively establishing the most sustained period of billion-dollar disaster activity on record.
“The Lone Star State has long been the most disaster–struck state in the U.S., a distinction rooted in its sheer geographic size, its place at the intersection of multiple severe weather corridors, and its unique vulnerability to frequent, devastating convective storms.”
The change is primarily defined by two distinct, equally consequential risk profiles. California suffered an estimated $75 billion in losses (53.5% of the nation’s disaster total), driven almost entirely by the January Los Angeles wildfires, the costliest wildfire event in U.S. recorded history.
Texas, in many ways, represents a more operationally challenging story. The state was subject to 21 of the year’s 23 billion-dollar disasters (91.3% of all national extreme weather events), featuring a year-round wave of hailstorms, tornado outbreaks, severe convective systems, and the catastrophic Hill Country flooding of July 4 that killed more than 130 people and caused $18 billion in damage.
For Texas commercial property owners, that distributed damage profile means incessant storm-related financial exposure.
Both Texas and California anchor the ‘Extreme’ index tier, despite representing almost diametrically opposed risk profiles. The remaining eight states share the ‘High’ tier: Missouri, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, and, most significantly, Pennsylvania, whose presence in the rankings signals that billion-dollar severe weather activity has expanded well beyond Tornado Alley.
The defining story of 2025’s disaster season was that severe storms, not hurricanes, drove the year’s damage. The spring months of March through May alone produced 10 billion-dollar disasters in a 92-day window that tested the recovery capacity of communities, insurers, and commercial property owners.
The financial infrastructure designed to absorb disaster losses is falling behind. In 2025, natural disasters caused $133 billion in losses, with insurers covering only $93 billion, leaving a $40 billion shortfall. That coverage gap was bridged by property owners and businesses with no adequate coverage policy to fall back on.
To compound matters, according to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, average commercial real estate insurance costs have nearly doubled over the past decade, from $1,558 per building per month in 2013 to $2,726 by the end of 2023. Even worse, buildings in the ten highest-risk states have seen a 108% cost increase over a five-year period, with Deloitte projecting monthly per-building costs in those markets to nearly double again by 2030.
Insurers have responded not by paying claims more efficiently but by narrowing coverage terms, raising wind and hail deductibles, and in some markets withdrawing from commercial property lines.
For commercial property owners operating in Extreme and High-tier states, the data offers a clear, forward-looking risk signal that reveals a future in which storms are more frequent, damage is more geographically widespread, insurance is more expensive (and less comprehensive), and the window between the last disaster and the next one is shorter than ever. Ultimately, commercial property owners have already weathered too much of the storm.
At Barcus Arenas, PLLC, we don’t chase small claims—we take on the biggest battles. Our firm is dedicated to complex, high-value property damage disputes, representing commercial property owners, large residential clients, and businesses facing catastrophic losses.
We are the insurance claims lawyer in Houston. We understand the tactics insurance companies use to delay, underpay, or deny valid claims.
That’s why we built a firm focused on strategic litigation, expert negotiation, and relentless advocacy. When insurers refuse to pay fairly, we don’t just push paper—we go to war.
