In 2025, America suffered a billion-dollar disaster every 10 days
Last year began with the costliest wildfires in American history, as a series of fires ravaged Los Angeles for most of January. A parade of other disasters followed: severe storms in the southern and northeastern United States, tornadoes in the central states, droughts and heat waves in the western part of the country.
In total, the United States experienced $23 billion in weather and climate disasters in 2025, which claimed 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damage, 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 above-average numbers. (Since 1980, the annual average has been nine events costing $67.6 billion. During that time, the country has recorded 426 billion-dollar disasters, costing more than $3.1 trillion.) Last year was the ninth costliest on record for billion-dollar disasters.
The clear signal here is climate change: It’s making wildfires worse, causing heavier rainfall and flooding, and making hurricanes worse. In the 1980s, according to the analysis, billion-dollar disasters occurred on average every 82 days, but over the past decade that window has shrunk to just 16 days. By 2025, Americans endured one of these events every 10 days on average – an almost uninterrupted avalanche of suffering.
Last May, the Trump administration announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would no longer update the billion-dollar federal disaster database, to the chagrin of experts who call it a critical tool for determining risks and adapting to climate change.
In October, Climate Central relaunched this database, hence releasing these numbers for 2025. “Continuing this dataset, like other datasets, is important because it helps demonstrate the economic impact of extreme weather and climate events,” said Adam Smith, the organization’s senior climate impacts scientist, who leads the program and was previously the lead scientist on the NOAA version. This, in turn, can give policymakers and the general public more information for “a more improved decision-making process, as we try to learn from these events and rebuild from these extremes that we know will continue into the future.”
With $61.2 billion in damage, the Los Angeles fires accounted for more than half of the losses from the 23 total events occurring in 2025, according to the analysis. This outbreak caused a public health crisis that was harder to calculate: Hundreds of people likely died from smoke inhalation, even though they were several miles from the flames. Wildfire smoke already exacerbates illnesses such as heart and cardiovascular disease, but this smoke was particularly toxic as the fires ravaged homes and cars, melting plastic and metal.
For people who survived by inhaling the smoke but still experienced complications, medical costs add even more to the $61.2 billion reported by Climate Central. Add even more when you factor in the trauma of surviving such a disaster and the associated mental health costs. “Even though we have a very robust and comprehensive estimate based on the available data, it is still conservative in terms of what is actually lost, but cannot be completely measured,” Smith said.
Elsewhere in the United States, communities grappled with unruly weather: hail events in Texas and Colorado and severe storms throughout the South and Northeast. (Of the 23 events, 21 were related to tornadoes, hail or high winds. Looking only at severe storms, 2025 was the second costliest year for billion-dollar disasters, after 2023.) Generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture it can hold and then release as rain. Additionally, the Gulf of Mexico was extremely warm in 2025, which added even more moisture to the storms that passed through the southern states. (Scientists are still studying how climate change might influence tornadoes, such as the six separate billion-dollar outbreaks that hit the United States in 2025.)
In addition to climate change making weather and wildfires even more catastrophic, human factors are adding to the growing costs of disasters costing billions of dollars. In the West, for example, communities have developed in the “wilderness urban interface,” where structures collide with forests. There is therefore even more to burn, while at the same time climate change amplifies the fires. “You’re overloading certain ingredients that when they’re aligned a certain way — with dry fuels and near hurricane-force winds, and then, of course, an ignition source — it’s literally impossible to stop,” Smith said.
But if climate change is making disasters worse, why hasn’t 2025 seen more billion-dollar events than the previous two years? And why was it the ninth most expensive, and not the first? That’s largely because, for the first time in a decade, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States last year, thanks to an atmospheric quirk over the southeastern states that created a sort of force field that sent storms out to sea. That’s fortunate — both in terms of human lives and economic losses — because hurricanes tend to be the costliest extreme weather and climate events. “If you’re talking about major hurricanes making landfall, you can easily approach or exceed $100 billion,” Smith said. “The $115 billion could have been $215 billion.”
Although the United States was lucky, the hurricane season remained extreme. Only five Atlantic hurricanes occurred, but four of them – or 80% – reached force majeure, compared with 40% in a typical year. Additionally, 2025 was the second year to produce at least three Category 5 storms, at least in recorded history.
That’s where climate change comes in: It makes hurricanes worse by warming the ocean waters that the storms use as fuel. And indeed, in 2025, those temperatures reached record highs: Hurricane Melissa, which ravaged the Caribbean, fed on waters made hundreds of times more likely by climate change, which increased wind speeds by 18 mph and extreme precipitation by 16 percent. All that ocean fuel helped the storm undergo “extremely rapid intensification,” with its maximum sustained wind speeds increasing from 70 to 140 mph in 18 hours.
Just because no hurricanes made landfall in the United States last year doesn’t mean storms won’t get more powerful from here. To prepare, Smith said Climate Central will improve the billion-dollar disaster database, for example by re-examining historical data to dig deeper into individual events like wildfires. “This time next year,” Smith said, “if we have a conversation, I think it will be an even more valuable and useful data resource.”
