Flood Zones
in Tennessee
and Mississippi
Put in an address and FEMA will tell you the zone it sits in. Below that, what flooding has actually cost across Shelby and DeSoto County — which is not the same story the zone map tells.
Check Your Flood Zone
Flood claims in Shelby and DeSoto County, by the numbers
Between them, Shelby County TN and DeSoto County MS hold a long federal record of flood losses. This is what it says.
- 1,294
- flood claims across the two counties since 1978
- $31.6M
- paid out, across 1,017 of them
- $31,039
- average paid claim
- 47%
- of claims were rated outside the high-risk zone
- 2014
- worst year: 176 claims, $6.0M paid
Computed from FEMA's OpenFEMA NFIP redacted claims dataset: every claim recorded in Shelby County, Tennessee and DeSoto County, Mississippi with a loss date from 1978 through 2025, counting building and contents payments. The 47% is the 603 claims rated in a moderate-to-low-risk zone as a share of all 1,294 — the same basis as FEMA's national 29%.
A zone letter is not a verdict
FEMA maps flood risk and gives every property a zone. A zone beginning with A or V is a Special Flood Hazard Area — the high-risk designation your lender acts on. X, B and C are the moderate-to-low zones, where cover is rarely required and prices at its lowest.
What the map does not say is that nearly half the flood claims filed across these two counties came from the moderate-to-low zones. FEMA's national figure for that is 29%. Here it is 47%. Being outside the mapped floodplain lowers your price; it does not settle the question.
The reason is local. Most of the damage in the Mid-South is not a river leaving its banks. It is drainage — heavy rain with nowhere to go, backing up through streets and yards that no flood map marks.
Where the water actually comes from
In Shelby County the mapped floodplain follows the Mississippi along the western edge, the Wolf River and the Loosahatchie across the north, and Nonconnah Creek along the south. The claims tell a tighter story than the map: 151 of the county's 1,014 — roughly one in seven — were filed from a single ZIP code in Millington.
In DeSoto County the risk sits in the Horn Lake Creek and Coldwater River basins, where rainfall upstream drains toward Memphis. Southaven and Horn Lake account for two thirds of the county's flood claims between them, and Olive Branch adds most of the rest.
The Army Corps of Engineers is studying Nonconnah Creek, Horn Lake Creek and the Coldwater River for flood control, which is the same list from the other direction.
What to do with the answer
If the box above puts you in an A zone and you have a mortgage, your lender will normally require flood insurance for the life of the loan — and the premium quoted in their letter is often not the cheapest available. We quote it privately and through the NFIP and show you both numbers.
If it puts you in X, nobody is going to make you buy anything. Whether it is worth it is a question about your street and your drainage, not your zone letter, and the claim record above is the honest place to start. Call (901) 402-0779 and we will go through it with you.
County by county
Each county has its own page, with its full claim record, the ZIP codes the losses cluster in, and what a map revision means if your lender has just written to you.