The good news: the lower 48 United States finished 2025 without a single hurricane making landfall. The bad news: the country still racked up more than $100 billion in damage from weather events. Thunderstorms and wildfires battered cities and towns during the year. The US had a record 21 thunderstorms that each caused at least $1 billion in damages in 2025. That's from Climate Central's data. It's a nonprofit group that tracks weather damage. Those storms caused $51 billion of the estimated $115 billion in total damage suffered by the country in 2025. Climate Central took over the US government’s disaster data last year. That's because the Trump administration announced it would no longer measure the impact of weather events. A further $61 billion stemmed from a single event. The Palisades wildfire destroyed large parts of Los Angeles in early 2025. Still, the absence of hurricanes helped make 2025 the lowest impact year since 2019. “Not having any billion-dollar severe storms or hurricanes in the fall was a nice break,” Adam Smith told The New York Times. He is a Climate Central scientist. He warned, though, that the impact of climate change requires cities and towns to be more careful now than ever. Some large cities "can get easily hit by a billion-dollar hailstorm,” Smith said. “Twenty or 30 years ago, that might not have been the case.” Meanwhile, surveys of severe weather data show shifting patterns across the US. Oklahoma became the nation’s top state for lightning strikes. It overtook Florida. It averaged 73 strikes per square mile in 2025. And Texas again led the nation in tornadoes. But fellow southern states like Mississippi and Alabama saw their twister numbers surge. Reflect: How do extreme weather events influence the way you think about where you live, how you stay safe?
