AccuWeather says economic cost of Texas Hill Country flooding is at least $18 billion

 Weather forecasting media company AccuWeather estimates that the damage caused by catastrophic Texas Hill Country flooding over the Fourth of July weekend that left more than 100 dead across Central Texas will cost $18 billion to $22 billion.

Although this is not an official cost estimate from federal, state, or local authorities, it’s an early attempt to quantify the scale of the property and economic losses.

The preliminary estimate “accounts for damage to homes, businesses, campgrounds, recreation facilities, disruptions to commerce and supply chain logistics, financial losses from extended power outages and road closures, major travel delays, tourism losses and damage to infrastructure, as well as long-term physical and mental health care costs for survivors, families who lost loved ones in the disaster and others impacted by the catastrophic flooding and recovery efforts in the coming weeks and months,” AccuWeather said in a statement Monday.

The company described its methodology as one that “incorporates independent methods to evaluate all direct and indirect impacts of the storm, includes both insured and uninsured losses, and is based on a variety of sources, statistics, and unique techniques AccuWeather uses to estimate the damage.”

Regardless of how accurate AccuWeather’s estimate is, the storms behind the Texas Hill Country flooding would have undoubtedly joined the ranks of other “billion-dollar disasters” after also flooding urban areas along the Interstate 35 corridor. 

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in May announced it would no longer update its “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database that had allowed the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events.

The disasters database, which has tracked the cost of natural disasters causing at least $1 billion worth of damage since 1980, will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024.

Between 1980 and 2024, the nation recorded an annual average of nine disasters costing at least $1 billion. However, in the past five years, that annual average of billion-dollar disasters has jumped to 24, including a record 28 disasters in 2023 and 27 just last year. Texas led the nation in billion-dollar disasters, having been affected by 20 of the 27 disasters in 2024, including Hurricane Beryl and the Houston derecho.

The database combines public weather and climate data from across various NOAA agencies with loss information from the insurance industry and other private sources. Because the billion-dollar disasters database uses non-public data shared by private companies that guard their methodology for data collection, the NOAA disaster database is unlikely to be replaced easily by university researchers or a think tank.