DISASTERSIn 2025, the US Suffered a Billion-Dollar Disaster Every 10 Days
A new analysis finds that in 2025 major catastrophes took 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damages. It could have been much worse.
Last year began with the costliest wildfires in American history, as a series of blazes tore across Los Angeles for nearly all of January. A parade of other catastrophes followed: severe storms across the southern and northeastern United States, tornadoes in the central states, drought and heat waves through the western expanse of the country.
All told, the U.S. notched 23 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025, which claimed 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damages, according to a new analysis from the research group Climate Central. Only 2023 and 2024 recorded more of these events, and 2025 was the 15th consecutive year with an above-average number. (Since 1980, the annual average has been nine events costing $67.6 billion. In that time, the country tallied 426 total billion-dollar disasters, costing more than $3.1 trillion.) Last year was the ninth most expensive on record for billion-dollar disasters.
The clear signal here is climate change: It’s worsening wildfires, causing heavier rainfall and flooding, and supercharging hurricanes. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters happened on average every 82 days, according to the analysis, but over the last decade that window has tightened to just 16 days. In 2025, Americans endured one of these events every 10 days on average — an almost nonstop cavalcade of suffering.
Last May, the Trump administration announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would no longer update the federal government’s own billion-dollar disaster database, to the alarm of experts who call it an essential tool for determining risk and adapting to climate change.
In October, Climate Central revived that database, hence its release of these figures for 2025. “The continuation of this dataset, like other datasets, is important because it helps demonstrate the economic impact of extreme weather and climate events,” said Adam Smith, senior climate impacts scientist with the organization, who’s leading the program and was formerly the lead scientist for NOAA’s version. That, in turn, can give policymakers and the general public more information for “a more enhanced decision-making process, as we try to learn from these events and rebuild after these extremes that we know will continue into the future.”
