Last year began with the costliest wildfires in American history. Fires broke out in Los Angeles almost all of January. This was followed by a parade of other disasters: severe storms in the south and northeast of the United States, tornadoes in the central states, drought and heat waves in the western expanses of the country.
In total, the U.S. experienced $23 billion in weather and climate disasters in 2025, killing 276 people and causing $115 billion in damage, according to new analysis from the research group Climate Central. Only 2023 and 2024 saw more such events recorded, and 2025 marked the 15th consecutive year with above-average numbers. (There have been an average of nine $67.6 billion events each year since 1980. During that time, the country has had 426 billion-dollar-plus disasters, costing more than $3.1 trillion.) Last year was the ninth most expensive billion-dollar disaster on record.
The clear signal here is climate change. intensification of forest firescalling heavy rains and floodsAnd forcing hurricanes. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters occurred every 82 days on average, but that window has shrunk to 16 days over the past decade, according to the analysis. In 2025, Americans experienced one of these events on average every 10 days—a nearly continuous 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, alarming experts who call it is an important tool for identifying risk and adaptation to climate change.
In October Climate Central restored this databaseHence the publication of these figures 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 impact scientist who leads the program and was previously NOAA's top scientist. This, in turn, could provide policymakers and the general public with more information for “better decision-making as we try to learn from these events and recover from these excesses that we know will continue into the future.”
According to the analysis, losses from the Los Angeles fires totaled $61.2 billion. This outbreak brought a public health crisis that's harder to quantify: Hundreds of people probably died from smoke inhalationeven if they were miles away from the fire. Wildfire smoke already aggravates diseases such as heart disease and cardiovascular disease, but this smoke was especially poisonous because the fire burned through houses and cars, melting plastic and metal.
For people who survived smoke inhalation but nonetheless experienced complications, medical costs add even more to that $61.2 billion, Climate Central reports. Add even more when you consider 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 about what is actually lost but cannot be fully measured,” Smith said.
Elsewhere in the U.S., communities battled uncontrollable weather, with hail in Texas and Colorado and severe storms in the South and Northeast. (Of the 23 events, 21 involved tornadoes, hail or high winds. Looking only at severe storms, 2025 was the second costliest year for billion-dollar disasters behind 2023.) Generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture it can hold and then release as rain. In addition, the Gulf of Mexico was very hot in 2025, which further increased the humidity of storms that passed through the southern states. (Scientists still training how climate change could affect tornadoes like the six separate billion-dollar outbreaks that hit the US in 2025.)
In addition to climate change making weather and wildfires more catastrophic, human factors are exacerbating the rising costs of natural disasters, costing billions of dollars. In the West, for example, communities are expanding to the “wilderness-urban interface,” where structures abut forests. So there is still something to burn, and at the same time climate change is making fires worse. “You're overloading some of the ingredients, and when they're aligned in a certain way—given the dryness of the fuel and the almost hurricane-force winds, and then of course some kind of ignition source—it's literally impossible to stop,” Smith said.
But if climate change is making disasters worse, why haven't more billion-dollar events occurred in 2025 than two years before? And why was it the ninth most expensive, and not the first? That's largely due to the fact that for the first time in a decade, no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. last year, thanks to an atmospheric feature over the southeastern states that created some kind of force field which threw storms back into the sea. This was fortunate—both in terms of human lives and economic damage—because hurricanes tend to be the most costly extreme weather and climate events. “If you're talking about major hurricanes making landfall, you could easily approach or exceed $100 billion,” Smith said. “$115 billion could have been $215 billion.”
Although the US was lucky, the hurricane season continued to be extreme. There were only five hurricanes in the Atlantic, but four of them – or 80 percent – reached major strength, compared with 40 percent in a normal year. Additionally, 2025 marked the second year with three or more Category 5 storms, at least in recorded history.
This is where climate change comes in: It makes hurricanes stronger by warming the ocean waters that storms use as fuel. Indeed, in 2025, those temperatures reached record levels: Hurricane Melissa, which devastated the Caribbean, was fed by waters created hundreds of times over. most likely due to climate changewhich increased wind speeds by 11 mph and heavy rainfall by 16 percent. All this ocean fuel helped survive the storm “extremely rapidly intensifying,” with maximum sustained winds jumping from 70 mph to 140 mph in 18 hours.
Just because hurricanes didn't hit the U.S. last year doesn't mean storms won't get more powerful from here. To prepare, Smith said Climate Central will be improving its billion-dollar disaster database, for example by revisiting historical data to look more deeply at individual events such as wildfires. “By this time next year,” Smith said, “if we have the conversation, I think it will even be a much more valuable and useful data resource.”
