Is Orleans Parish, LA in a flood zone?
FEMA's National Risk Index puts Orleans Parish's flood hazard at the 93.5th percentile nationally — well above the national norm for flood hazard — driven by inland rivers and flash flooding rather than the coast — FEMA's model puts a flood event here at about 2.7 times a year. That's a county-wide figure, not a per-address one — FEMA's parcel maps are a live lookup, not a bulk file.
Who actually carries the flood insurance FEMA requires
The raw NFIP numbers for Orleans Parish would imply over 100% of mandated homes carry a policy, which just means FEMA's structure-count denominator for this county is wrong, not that compliance is unusually good. This is flagged rather than clipped to look normal — details in the data quality guide. Across all residential structures in Orleans Parish, not just the ones FEMA mandates, 51.8% carry an NFIP policy — most flood damage nationally happens outside the mapped high-risk zone, so that broader number matters too.
Orleans Parish against the rest of the country
Orleans Parish sits at rank 221 of 3144 counties on FEMA's flood hazard scale (1 is worst) and rank 211 of 3144 by population (1 is biggest). Orleans Parish, Louisiana is home to about 362,701 people across 169.578 square miles of land.
What to do next if you own or are buying in Orleans Parish
Across all of Orleans Parish's 108,361 residential structures, 56,109 carry an NFIP policy today — a county-wide count that still can't tell you one address's own mapped zone.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly which FEMA and Census tables feed Orleans Parish's numbers. See the data quality guide for why Orleans Parish, like hundreds of other counties, doesn't get a clean compliance percentage.