Flood pricing contains a guess. When an insurer calculates the flood component of a premium, it has to assume how far above ground the building's lowest occupied floor sits, and that assumption "can be 0.3 metres off the ground, 0.5 metres off the ground, 1 metre," according to James Knight (pictured), Aon's head of risk advisory for Asia-Pacific.
From January 2027, in Australia, the guess gets replaced by a measurement. Aon and Geoscape Australia are taking first floor elevation data national, covering what Geoscape estimates to be around 1.7 million properties sitting inside modelled floodplains and coastal inundation areas.
Aon's modelling on a sample of roughly 55,000 buildings across eight regions in Queensland and New South Wales found 13 per cent recorded a fall of more than 50 per cent in the flood-specific portion of the premium once the measured height replaced the assumed one. Knight is explicit that the sample is not the country, and that a national dataset "could tell a completely different story."
The arithmetic underneath that number is the part worth sitting with. "This data does not take away any risk, it does not reduce the risk," Knight said. If around one in ten flood-prone buildings turns out to sit above the assumed floor level and reprices downward, the risk that was previously absorbed inside the assumption has not gone anywhere. It becomes more sharply attached to the properties sitting at grade. Knight declined to predict how individual insurers would treat that second group, saying only that "that total risk pool remains the same."
Asked what intermediaries need to do to make sure clients benefit, Knight was unequivocal. "This is going direct into the insurers essentially, so that they can have a better understanding of flood risk. There is nothing anyone needs to do."
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His one piece of practical advice was directed at property owners rather than the people advising them. An elevated homeowner facing premium pressure can approach their insurer and argue the point without waiting for the dataset, he said, something that "might not be happening en masse."
How much of the 1.7 million is commercial risk is not established. Asked for a breakdown by property type, Geoscape head of product Tom Spencer said the figure moves as flood definitions change and council-level studies are redone, and that the split was not something he had to hand.
Geoscape chief executive Dean Capobianco framed the commercial proposition around differentiation between buildings: "Two homes in the same flood zone can face very different risks."
Not every market can run this calculation and the constraint is not the technology.
The United States has been redistributing on measured floor height for five years. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) introduced Risk Rating 2.0 for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in October 2021 and completed implementation in April 2023, making first floor height a rating variable alongside foundation type, distance to the flooding source and replacement cost, in place of a legacy method priced principally off flood zone and base flood elevation. Elevation certificates are no longer required to buy cover, with FEMA deriving floor height through modelling, although a surveyed certificate can still produce a more refined figure.
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The United Kingdom is building the same mechanism from the resilience side. Research commissioned by Flood Re and conducted by RAB Consultants and Sedgwick has established a standardised data template for Flood Performance Certificates (FPCs), combining property characteristics, flood hazard data and existing resilience measures, with a pilot due by the end of 2026 and integration into discounted premium structures targeted for 2028, ahead of the scheme's scheduled exit in 2039. Russell Burton, managing director of RAB Consultants, said the certificates could transform "how we recognise and reward flood resilience at property level."
Knight identified the UK as the closest analogue to Australia, on the basis that both markets hold policy and risk data at building level. The underlying dataset differs, he said, with the Ordnance Survey's MasterMap filling the role Geoscape plays locally.
Across much of Asia, there is nothing to redistribute between. "If you head up into Asia, the quality of that exposure data falls away and you might only have a regional understanding of where your policies are," Knight said. His conclusion was blunt: "having the first floor elevation of every building is useless for insurers in some countries."
The scale behind that is substantial. Swiss Re Institute's sigma 1/2026 research puts the flood protection gap across Asia at approximately 83 per cent, with insured flood losses in the region growing at an estimated 12 per cent a year, roughly twice the global rate. The global natural catastrophe protection gap reached US$424 billion in 2025.
Asked what the technology means in markets carrying residual or backstop schemes, including Canada's high-risk residential flood program, Knight would not be drawn on pricing outcomes for the properties left behind.
His emphasis fell elsewhere. The focus, he said, "needs to be put firmly on reducing the total risk of buildings in the floodplain that are there now."
