Canadians now have far greater access to overland flood insurance than they did a decade ago, according to a new report from the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC).
The report, titled "The State of the Flood Insurance Market in Canada," found that approximately 94% of residential properties across the country are now eligible for the coverage, up sharply from a market that was largely inaccessible to consumers just over ten years ago.
The report found that Canadian household flood insurance take-up rose from 26% in 2017 to 71% in 2023, with 88% of overland flood policies now costing $300 or less annually.
IBC attributed the shift to major investment in flood mapping, catastrophe modeling, geospatial analytics and property-level risk assessment, which it said has allowed insurers to price flood risk more precisely and extend coverage to properties once considered uninsurable.
More than 30 insurers now offer some form of overland flood coverage in Canada, with individual carriers building out dedicated products, such as Co-operators' Comprehensive Water offering, which had reached 745,000 policies as of earlier this year.
As a result, the number of homes unable to access overland flood insurance has fallen nearly 45% over the past seven years, from approximately 1.5 million to roughly 850,000. The report also found that flood risk in Canada is increasingly concentrated, with about 2% of residential properties accounting for more than half of the country's total potential flood losses.
Liam McGuinty, IBC's vice-president, Federal Affairs, said just over a decade ago overland flood insurance was largely unavailable to many Canadians, and that today more than 30 insurers offer some form of overland flood coverage, with more than seven in ten homeowners purchasing it.
He said the market's growth demonstrates how innovation, competition and better risk assessment have substantially expanded consumer access to flood protection.
The report lands after a period of significant flood losses in Canada.
CatIQ data showed flood and water-related insured losses have risen more than 300% over the past 20 years compared with the two decades prior, with flood and water events now accounting for roughly 39% of the country's insured catastrophe losses. Insurers have paid an average of more than $2 billion annually in catastrophic weather claims since 2009, including record losses of $9.4 billion in 2024 and $2.4 billion in 2025.
That pattern has continued into 2026. Severe storms in Manitoba and Saskatchewan on June 9 and 10 caused more than $728 million in insured damage, according to CatIQ, while flooding in Montreal and surrounding areas on June 20 and 21 caused a further $409 million in losses, figures that do not yet include torrential rainfall that struck the Ottawa region on July 1.
IBC's finding that a small share of properties drives most flood losses aligns with the results of OSFI's Standardized Climate Scenario Exercise, in which the regulator's flood module covered eleven urban regions across Canada, including $3 trillion in insured property values and roughly 40% of the country's mortgages.
That exercise found flood risk concentrated in high-risk zones consistently representing 10% to 12% of exposures across deposit-taking institutions and P&C insurers alike, lending independent regulatory support to IBC's own risk-concentration data and underscoring why targeted solutions for high-risk properties, rather than broad market-wide measures, are increasingly the focus for both insurers and prudential regulators.
The report's release comes as Canada's long-promised national flood insurance program remains without a launch date. Ottawa pledged $450 million over five years toward the program, first promised in 2019 and most recently targeted for an April 2026 launch, but the federal government has not confirmed a delivery timeline as of mid-2026. IBC has proposed a federal reinsurance backstop structured through a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation subsidiary to extend affordable coverage to the highest-risk households still priced out of the private market.
McGuinty said the findings suggest Canada's flood challenge is increasingly a risk-reduction issue rather than an access-to-insurance one.
He said private insurers have expanded coverage to the vast majority of Canadian households and that the next step is reducing the underlying risks communities face through better land-use planning, more resilient infrastructure and targeted solutions for the small number of highest-risk properties.
To that end, the report calls on governments to strengthen land-use planning policies that discourage development in high-risk areas, invest in resilient public infrastructure, and improve the flood maps and flood-risk information available to governments, businesses and consumers, including through provincial participation in Canada's Flood Risk Finder tool. It also urges support for household-level mitigation through targeted retrofit programs, along with the development of targeted solutions, including strategic buyout programs, for properties facing the highest levels of flood risk.
IBC noted that flood insurance coverage, eligibility and pricing vary by insurer and policy terms, and encouraged consumers to review their policy wording and speak with their insurance representative to understand the protection available to them.
With private insurers now covering the large majority of Canadian homes, regulatory data corroborating where the remaining risk sits, and losses continuing to mount each storm season, the report positions the remaining 6% of ineligible properties, and the slow progress on a federal backstop, as the central unresolved piece of Canada's flood insurance picture.
