Individual Assistance Housing Registrants - Large Disasters

Individual Assistance (IA) is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to individuals and families who have sustained losses due to disasters. It is intended to meet basic needs and supplement disaster recovery efforts.

Homeowners, renters, and business owners in designated counties who sustained damage to their homes, vehicles, personal property, businesses, or inventory resulting from a federally declared disaster may apply for disaster assistance. For more informantion, see: https://www.fema.gov/assistance/individual/program/eligibility

Disaster assistance may include grants to help pay for temporary housing, emergency home repairs, uninsured and underinsured personal property losses, and medical, dental, and funeral expenses caused by the disaster, along with other serious disaster-related expenses.

Disaster assistance grants are not taxable income and will not affect eligibility for Social Security, Medicaid, medical waiver programs, welfare assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, or Social Security Disability Insurance.

This dataset contains detailed non-PII data on the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). FEMA provides assistance to individuals and households through the IA program, comprised of two categories of assistance: Housing Assistance (HA) and Other Needs Assistance (ONA). For more information, see FEMA's IHP unified guidance document: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/IHP_Unified_Guidance_FINAL_09272016_0.pdf

The data is derived from the National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS). The system has been used since 1998 to process all cases for FEMA's Individual Assistance (IA) program as the system of record. The Large Disasters dataset contains a curated set of disasters for which individuals applied for Individual Assistance. This dataset only contains some of the largest disasters. No new disasters will be added to this dataset. It differs from the IHP Valid Registrations dataset in that it contains invalid registrants and includes the Census Block Group. The Valid Registration dataset contains all disasters, but only for those individuals that are approved or valid.

The data can be used to analyze FEMA's IA program response attributes. This could particularly help local and state governments and non-governmental organizations administer applications for funding from the Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program for rebuilding efforts during and after major disaster declarations. This data was instrumental in Hurricane Sandy community rebuilding during the costliest hurricane season of 2017.

OpenFEMA users can comprehensively identify data trends that demonstrate needs of particular communities. For example, large numbers of households with elderly residents in areas susceptible to flooding who may need specific design considerations in home elevation, or low-income renters concentrated in communities where additional assistance may be needed to improve recovery.

Please note that there may be some inconsistent address format and systems, address and location reporting translation/miscues, and standard FEMA Geolocation algorithms ill fitted to O-CONUS addresses. Addresses in Puerto Rico and the way they are reported or even understood by survivors and local officials do not match well with the standard use Geocoders (algorithms that take an address and assign it to its coordinate (x, y/latitudal, longitudinal location on the earth)). When geocoders cannot find an on structure/parcel/point match they tend to place a point at the geographic center of various polygon boundaries (zip code, City/barrio, Municipio, etc.), this at least puts the point in the vicinity of the address provided. This is done from a spatial analytics perspective which will still allow the point to be count in an aggregate and still be useful in helping to formulate the bigger picture.

This is raw, unedited data from FEMA's National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS) and as such is subject to a small percentage of human error.

Any financial information is derived from NEMIS and not FEMA's official financial systems. Due to differences in reporting periods, status of obligations and how business rules are applied, this financial information may differ slightly from official publication on public websites such as usaspending.gov; this dataset is not intended to be used for any official federal financial reporting. This dataset is not intended to be an official federal report, and should not be considered an official federal report.

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For answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the OpenFEMA program, API, and publicly available datasets, please visit: https://www.fema.gov/about/openfema/faq.

If you have media inquiries about this dataset, please email the FEMA Press Office at FEMA-Press-Office@fema.dhs.gov. For inquiries about FEMA's data and Open Government program, please email the OpenFEMA team at OpenFEMA@fema.dhs.gov.