A repeat storm would cause more damage<\/p>\n
The 1926 Great Miami Hurricane caused an estimated $105 million in damage in 1926 dollars ($2 billion in 2026 money). <\/p>\n
But a similar storm today could cause a lot more destruction. In 1926, the population of Miami-Dade County was a mere 100,000. From 1926 to 2022<\/a>, the population increased by a factor of about 23, while the number of housing units grew by a factor of about 41.<\/p>\n A 2026 paper, Normalized Continental US Tropical Cyclone Damage Estimates From 1900\u20132023: An Updated Methodology and Expanded Data Set<\/a>, studied how increases in wealth and population have combined to increase the damages of historic hurricanes had they hit the U.S. in 2023. Given the increase in population and housing units that has occurred since 1926, and since wealth in the U.S. has increased by at least 3% per year since the 1920s, the authors estimated that if the 1926 Great Miami hurricane were to hit in 2023, its total economic damage (insured plus uninsured) would have been $218 billion in South Florida, making it the costliest weather-related disaster in world history. (The storm also made a second landfall near the Florida\/Alabama border, which would have cost an additional $25 billion.)<\/p>\n But this simple analysis left out many factors that would cause either an overestimation or underestimation of damage. <\/p>\n Factor leading to overestimation: Changes in building codes<\/p>\n The research assumed all housing structures existing in 2023 were built to the same structural integrity that they were in 1926. That’s not true. <\/p>\n Factor leading to overestimation: Improvements in hurricane forecasts<\/p>\n A 2024 study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts<\/a>, found that\u00a0recent advancements in hurricane forecasting for 18 continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes from 2005-2020 led to a 19% reduction in total hurricane-related costs \u2014 an average cost reduction of $5 billion\u00a0per hurricane. The benefits came either by decreasing deaths and damages or by inspiring confidence in decisions not to spend money on pre-storm adaptation measures.\u00a0The 1926 hurricane hit with essentially no warning, and the better hurricane forecasts now available would significantly reduce damages of a repeat storm.<\/p>\n Factor leading to underestimation: Highly urbanized cities<\/p>\n The study authors wrote that they were not able to properly handle \u201chighly urbanized coastal zones such as Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, where exposure is significantly higher in coastal zones as opposed to inland zones within the same county.”<\/p>\n Factor leading to underestimation: the impact of climate change since 1926<\/p>\n There are two main ways\u00a0climate change can increase hurricane damage<\/a> in ways this study did not consider. <\/p>\n Sea level rise. Sea levels have risen about 1.12 feet at the Miami tide gauge<\/a> since it was installed in 1931. So the nine-foot storm tide of the 1926 hurricane at Miami Beach would exceed 10 feet today, resulting in a substantial increase in storm surge damage. As seen in Fig. 3, the area inundated by a Cat 3 storm surge vs. a Cat 4 is considerable. A 1.12-foot rise in sea level is not quite equivalent to this difference, but you get the idea. <\/p>\n In an email, Dr. Sylvie Lorsolo, Director of hurricane winds and storm surge modeling for the catastrophe modeling company Verisk Catastrophe and Risk Solutions<\/a>, described how the company’s software modeled the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane under two sea level regimes: an estimate of 1926 sea level, and a projection of historical data to the near-present climate:<\/p>\n The 1926 sea level simulation produced minor flooding along the Biscayne Bay coastline, up the Miami River, and on Key Biscayne. In the projected sea level simulation, peak water levels in Biscayne Bay were roughly 12-16 inches (30-40 cm) higher than in the 1926 sea level simulation. That difference translated into localized increases in inundation \u2014 most visibly on Key Biscayne and along the inland waterways that already flooded in the 1926 version of the event \u2014 where areas near the edge of the historical flood footprint saw water reach somewhat further inland.<\/p>\n This seemingly small amount of sea level rise that has occurred since 1926 can lead to significant damage during a storm surge event. Why?<\/p>\n To use a sports analogy, it\u2019s because the interaction of a storm surge with a city is a game of inches and thresholds. Coastal cities are generally designed so that it takes a one-in-100-year event (one that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year) to cause substantial flooding. A storm surge must rise to the base height of the city before it can flood large areas. But once the storm crosses that threshold, every inch of additional rise in water levels can flood large areas. And since just one inch of water in a 2,500-square-foot home can cause $27,000 in damage, and 12 inches can cause $72,000<\/a> in damage, a few extra inches of storm surge can add up in a hurry.<\/p>\n To illustrate this point, as much as $8.1 billion of the $62.5 billion in damage (2012 USD) caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut resulted from the 3.8 inches (9.6 cm) increase in sea levels caused by human-caused climate change, according to a\u00a02021 paper<\/a>\u00a0by Climate Central scientists. Without that extra water, the storm surge in the Tri-State area would have affected 71,000 fewer people and 36,000 fewer housing units.<\/p>\n Increased heavy rainfall. Modern hurricanes tend to be wetter because of climate change, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. Hurricanes over land in the U.S. have also trended to be slower-moving, which increases their rainfall potential<\/a>. What\u2019s more, when the increased rains from wetter and slow-moving hurricanes meet higher sea levels, there is a drastically higher risk of compound flooding<\/a>, as we saw with Hurricane Harvey in Texas. <\/p>\n A better way to estimate damage: catastrophe models<\/p>\n A better way to estimate damages is using the sophisticated catastrophe modeling tools<\/a> created by the insurance and reinsurance industry. In an email, Dr. Suz Tolwinski-Ward, a Vice President and Head of Climate Statistics Research at Verisk Catastrophe and Risk Solutions<\/a>, called hurricane damage normalization efforts like the one in the 2026 study described above as \u201cwholly inadequate for the quantitative property-level loss estimates required by industrial re\/insurance risk managers.\u201d<\/p>\n She maintained that the catastrophe risk modeling tools<\/a> that Verisk provides to its insurance and reinsurance clients include information derived from deep economic research and analysis of claims data \u201corders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything I\u2019m aware of within the academic community.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor better or for worse, the data needed to do good research on monetary losses from natural catastrophes are simply not openly available, as they are proprietary to each individual insurer or reinsurer.”<\/p>\n Using Verisk’s catastrophe model, the impact of climate change on hurricane storm surge, is taken into account, for example. Tolwinski-Ward explained that her company’s model has been specifically designed to simulate the amount of flooding that would occur with today\u2019s sea levels, not those of 1926. Tolinksi-Ward said:<\/p>\n U.S.-wide, the Verisk model estimates this historical storm would cause $230 billion dollars (2025 USD) of gross insured losses if it occurred today. Over $220 billion of those losses come from the state of Florida alone. Our model puts these losses at about a 1% annual occurrence probability for Florida (a one-in-100-year hurricane).<\/p>\n An additional $50 billion in damage occurred in the model that could have been insured, but was not (what insurers call the \u201cprotection gap\u201d). Verisk\u2019s $280-billion estimate of total damage did not include losses that would be covered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), nor damage to public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and utilities, which are generally not covered by the private insurance market. Total economic damages from a repeat 1926 Great Miami Hurricane could therefore be reasonably expected to far exceed the estimate of insured loss provided by Verisk’s model.<\/p>\n Two other catastrophe modeling firms have published recent estimates of the damages from a high-end hurricane hitting Miami. A 2025 study by Moody’s<\/a> modeled a Cat 5 hurricane more severe than the 1926 hurricane hitting just south of Miami. That study found that the storm would cause $232 billion in total losses. Karen Clark & Co. found in 2019<\/a> that a Cat 5 hitting Miami could cause\u00a0$200 billion in insured\u00a0residential\u00a0property losses alone.<\/p>\n Taken together, the modeling efforts from the four different groups strongly suggest that a repeat of the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane would easily be the costliest weather disaster in world history.<\/p>\n We’re not ready<\/p>\n A 2025 report by insurance broker Arbol<\/a> estimated that the fraction of\u00a0total\u00a0damage for five major U.S. landfalling hurricanes since 2017 that was\u00a0insured\u00a0ranged from 19-53%. Hurricanes that cause mostly flood damage tend to have higher uninsured damages, since most flood damage is uninsured. <\/p>\n But South Florida\u2019s Hurricane Ian of 2022 was primarily a wind-damage event, with 53% of its damages being insured. Damages from hurricanes hitting Miami also tend to be wind-dominated, since the deep water just offshore tends to limit storm surge height.<\/p>\n A potential total price tag for a repeat Great Miami Hurricane of over $280 billion is truly startling. This amount is about 1% of U.S. GDP, and much higher than the cost (in 2026 USD) of the most expensive weather disaster in world history \u2014 $213 billion from Hurricane Katrina of 2005. And the $280 billion-plus figure is not even for a worst-case hurricane \u2014 it is for a one-in-100-year storm, which can be expected to have a 26% chance of occurring in a 30-year period. (Note that the National Hurricane Center says that the return period for a Cat 3 or stronger hurricane hitting Miami is once every 14 years, or 7% per year, Fig. 5).<\/p>\n But with climate change increasing the odds of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, sea levels rising, and money continuing to pour into Miami to develop this high-risk city, it is likely that a $280-billion-plus hurricane will hit Miami in the next 40 years.<\/p>\n The Florida insurance and coastal property market managed to withstand the $126-billion cost (2026 USD) of Category 4 Hurricane Ian of 2022 (of which 53% was insured), but a $280-billion-plus blow like a repeat of the 1926 hurricane might cause a severe downward spiral in the Florida real estate market from which it might never fully recover. Such a storm would also cause significant multi-year losses to one of the other mainstays of the Florida economy \u2014 tourism. A 2025 study that has not yet undergone peer review, Stress testing insurance market stability under climate risk<\/a>, found about a 4% chance per year (or 34% chance in 10 years) that an extreme hurricane season in Florida could cause multi-billion-dollar losses not covered by insurance that would exceed 1% of the state\u2019s GDP, capable of causing a severe banking crisis.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, developers continue to build in high-risk, flood-prone coastal regions across the Southeast U.S. Moody\u2019s estimated<\/a> in its \u201cmoderate\u201d scenario for a Cat 5 Miami hurricane that in the five years following it, insurance premiums could increase by 60% above recent prices, and nearly triple by the end of 2036.<\/p>\n With this kind of increase, many people would be unable to buy a home, and high insurance prices would cause a spike in mortgage defaults for existing homeowners. This could cause a significant downturn in the real estate market \u2014 and also severely stress the municipal bond market, since cities and states finance much of their operations through property taxes. This risk is particularly acute in Florida, which has no state income tax.<\/p>\n Moody\u2019s estimated that a population decline of seven to 20% could result in Miami in the five years following the Cat 5 hurricane they modeled. In other words, such a catastrophe, like the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane, would cleave Florida history into a “before” and an “after.”<\/p>\n And as we saw during the Great Recession of 2008, a real estate crisis can quickly morph into a\u00a0systemic financial crisis for the entire country, because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate. But unlike\u00a0the great recession of 2008, this hurricane-induced financial crisis could not be fully solved by government intervention, since the underlying causes \u2014 more severe hurricanes and increased sea level rise from climate change \u2014 are only going to get worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bob Henson contributed to this post.<\/p>\n This <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/2026\/09\/a-repeat-of-miamis-1926-hurricane-could-cost-over-280-billion-thats-more-than-hurricane-katrina\/”>article<\/a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org”>Yale Climate Connections<\/a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<img src=”https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/ycc-favicon.png?resize=100%2C100&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”><\/p>\n <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/?republication-pixel=true&post=142412&ga4=1401ERFF5Q” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/2026\/09\/a-repeat-of-miamis-1926-hurricane-could-cost-over-280-billion-thats-more-than-hurricane-katrina\/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } <\/script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/p.js”><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections September 19, 2026 In brief The 1926 Great Miami Hurricane caused profound…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,8250,79],"class_list":["post-854013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-jeff-masters","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Normalized](\"https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/miami-1926-205-population.png\")
Figure 1. Normalized change in population and number of housing units for Miami-Dade County from the time of the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 to 2025. (Image credit: Mooney,\u00a0K. R.,\u00a0Muller,\u00a0J.,\u00a0Klotzbach,\u00a0P. J.,\u00a0Girimurugan,\u00a0S. B.,\u00a0Bhatt,\u00a0D.,\u00a0Bowen,\u00a0S. G., et al. (2026).\u00a0Normalized continental US tropical cyclone damage estimates from 1900\u20132023: An updated methodology and expanded data set.\u00a0Earth and Space Science,\u00a013, e2025EA004869.\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1029\/2025EA004869<\/a>, open access)<\/p>\n![\"Sea](\"https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/slr-miami-1931-2025-1.png\")
Figure 2. Sea level rise at the Miami tide gauge at Virginia Key for 1931-1935 compared to 2021-2025 has been 1.12 feet (34 cm). <\/p>\n![\"Potential](\"https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/surge-miami-cat3-cat4.png\")
Figure 3. Potential inundation for a near worst-case Cat 3 hurricane hitting at high tide (left) and a Cat 4 (right) for Miami and Miami Beach. The coast has very deep water offshore, which makes Miami much less prone to high storm surges than the Gulf Coast. (Image credit: NHC storm surge risk portal<\/a>).<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/costliest-disasters-top-10.png\")
Figure 4. The top costliest weather disasters in world history are all U.S. events, with hurricanes taking nine of the top 10 spots. Damages are total (insured plus uninsured), from Climate Central<\/a>, based on techniques originally developed at NOAA. A repeat of the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane would easily move into the top spot, based on modeling efforts from four different groups.
\nA repeat of the 1926 hurricane could crash the Florida economy<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/yaleclimateconnections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/return_mjrhurr.png\")
Figure 5. The average number of years between landfalls of a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane on the U.S. coast. (Image credit: NHC)<\/p>\n