Do I Need a Flood Performance Certificate? What England's New Flood Certificates Mean for Homeowners

The short answer

No. As at 9 November 2026 you do not need a Flood Performance Certificate, you cannot buy one, and no organisation has been named to issue them. Flood Performance Certificates are at the pilot stage in England. The Government and Flood Re announced the pilots on 13 October 2026, the certificate template has not been published, and no decision has been taken on whether certificates will ever be required when a home is sold or let.

What has already changed is the data they will be built on. The Environment Agency’s National Assessment of Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk, published 17 December 2024, put around 6.3 million properties in England in areas at risk of flooding. Around 4.6 million of those are at risk from surface water - a 43% increase on the previous assessment. That new data went live on the public flood risk service on 28 January 2025.

So the useful question is not “do I need a certificate?” It is “what will a certificate say about my home, and can I do anything about it before it does?” The rest of this article answers that.

What is a Flood Performance Certificate?

A Flood Performance Certificate is a proposed standard record of a property’s flood risk and what has been done to reduce it, intended to work in the way an Energy Performance Certificate does for energy efficiency. The Government’s announcement of 13 October 2026 describes certificates that “provide clear, standardised information on flood risk” and resilience, “reflecting the steps taken to protect them and where further action is needed”.

Be careful with the details, because very little of it is settled. The announcement says the pilots will test “approaches such as a ‘Flood Performance Rating’, which breaks a property’s flood risk down to categories such as exposure, characteristics and resistance”. Note the two hedges in the Government’s own wording: the rating is one approach among several being tested, and the three categories are given as examples. The announcement does not define exposure, characteristics or resistance, and no definitions have been published by the Government, by Flood Re, or in Flood Re’s roadmap.

The Government is explicit that what has been shown so far is provisional. Its notes to editors state that “The mock-up of the FPC is for illustrative purposes only”, that “the final design, content and format is still being developed”, and that “A final Flood Performance Certificate template will be published at a later date”.

There is also an earlier structure that does not match. Flood Re’s own commissioned blueprint, produced by WPI Economics in December 2020, proposed “an A to D rating, which reflects both the likelihood of flooding and the potential impact if a flood did happen”. That is a different architecture from exposure, characteristics and resistance. Anyone telling you confidently today what an FPC will look like is reading further into the announcement than the announcement supports.

When will Flood Performance Certificates be available?

Work on the pilots starts in 2026 and grows through 2027. The Government’s announcement says work on pilots to test the certificates “will start this year in areas at risk of flooding”, “with a growing number of pilots also taking place throughout 2027 and beyond”. Flood Re’s Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 2026 puts it as “Piloting is planned from the second half of 2026”.

The underlying scoring work is partly built. Flood Re’s published roadmap records that the first phase of the scoring work is complete, based on a pilot area in Kent. The same roadmap confirms that the rating categories are not yet defined, that Flood Re has still to decide “whether an FPC should use a banding system”, and that no issuing body has been named — Flood Re says only that it “will work with partners to agree a certification system”.

One development since the announcement. On 2 November 2026, Flood Re announced it is acquiring the BeFloodReady brand from Cornwall Council to build a UK-wide online flood resilience platform, backed by Defra, with an inaugural conference on 22 April 2027. Flood Re’s stated long-term plans for the platform include “supporting the development of Flood Performance Certificates”.

For a homeowner, the practical timetable is therefore: nothing to obtain in 2026, pilots you are unlikely to be part of in 2027, and no published date on which certificates become generally available.

Will a Flood Performance Certificate reduce my insurance premium?

Nobody has promised that it will, and the only source to state the position plainly is a broker-facing one. RiskSTOP’s update of 21 October 2026 says that “there is currently no guarantee that obtaining a certificate or improving a property’s rating” will “result in reduced premiums, lower excesses or changes to insurance availability”.

What Flood Re has actually committed to is narrower than most coverage suggests. In its 10-year reform announcement of 1 July 2026, Flood Re said it will “introduce premium discounts for households that obtain an FPC or complete an equivalent self-assessment”. That commitment carries no date. A target of 2028 for building certificates into premium structures appears in insurance trade reporting and in competitor commentary, but we could not find it stated as a commitment in any Flood Re primary source, not in its Annual Report, its Our Future page, its ReThink pages or its roadmap. We flag that as a gap rather than repeat it as fact.

One Flood Re price change is firmly dated, and it is easy to misread. From April 2027, Flood Re will “more than halve the premium that it charges insurers” to cede a Council Tax Band A or Band B contents policy into the scheme, “reducing it from £58 to £25 from April 2027”. That £25 is what Flood Re charges the insurer, not what a homeowner pays. Flood Re says insurers are expected to pass the savings on. It has not said what a Band A or Band B household’s contents cover will actually cost.

The honest sequencing answer, which is the question people are really asking: if you are weighing up whether to fit flood resistance measures now or wait for a certificate that might reward them, fit them now. Resilience measures reduce damage in a flood whether or not a certificate exists, and Flood Re’s commitment runs to households that obtain a certificate or complete an equivalent self-assessment. There is no published mechanism by which waiting improves your position.

Do Flood Performance Certificates apply in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland?

The pilots are in England. No equivalent scheme has been announced for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The Government’s announcement is framed around homeowners “across England”, and the FloodReady action plan that sits behind it is an England document that says its findings will be shared with the devolved administrations.

That creates a split worth understanding, because Flood Re itself is UK-wide. A homeowner in Cardiff or Glasgow can be ceded to Flood Re by their insurer today, but has no route to the certificate that Flood Re intends to attach discounts to. Flood Re’s new BeFloodReady platform is described as UK-wide, which may be the mechanism that closes the gap, but nothing has been announced.

Where to check your flood risk outside England:

Two cautions on those services. The Natural Resources Wales map states that it “has no official status for planning purposes”. The SEPA pages are currently served on a beta site, with the map viewers on a separate host. Our experience of flood mapping across all three mainland nations is that the differences are substantive, not cosmetic. SEPA released new surface water flood maps in March 2025, which for the first time include small watercourses; our own comparison of the 2023 and 2025 Scottish pluvial mapping sets out how much changed.

Can my insurer help pay for flood resilience measures?

Possibly, if you have to claim after a flood. Flood Re’s Build Back Better scheme, introduced in April 2022, offers up to £10,000 on top of a flood claim. The money pays for property flood resilience measures to be fitted while the home is repaired, so it isn’t just put back to the same level of risk.

Speaking at The Flood Resilience Conference 2026, Flood Re’s Head of Research, Jonathan Kassian, gave a simple example. If a standard replacement door costs £500 and a flood door costs £1,500, the extra £1,000 can come from Build Back Better.

The catch is that most people don’t use it. Kassian said more than 70% of the insurance market has signed up, but only around a third of eligible properties have received it. Part of the problem is communication: insurers report that customers don’t want the measures, while customers say they didn’t know they were on offer.

Build Back Better is not mandatory for insurers. If you make a flood claim, ask your insurer directly whether it offers the scheme before repairs are agreed.

If you aren’t sure which measures would make the biggest difference to your home, a Flood Vulnerability Assessment sets them out before you spend.

Is my home covered by Flood Re, and what if it is not?

Flood Re is the industry-funded scheme that has kept flood insurance affordable for higher-risk homes since 2016. More than 742,000 properties have been ceded to it since it began, and it is due to close in 2039. Flood Re describes its own job as “a time-limited intervention with a planned transition to risk-reflective pricing by 2039”, and has committed to managing that transition “so that a cliff edge is not created when Flood Re ends”.

A large group of homes is already outside it, and those owners are the ones for whom evidence matters now rather than in 2039. Flood Re’s published eligibility criteria exclude:

The 2009 cut-off is the one that surprises people most. A home built in 2010 in a known flood risk area has never had access to Flood Re and is priced on its own risk today. A pre-2009 home that was demolished and rebuilt keeps its eligibility.

If your home is in one of the excluded categories, a Flood Performance Certificate is not currently available to you either — no public route to join a pilot has been published. What is available is a property-specific assessment of your actual risk and the measures in place, which is the same evidence a certificate is designed to carry.

Why has my flood risk changed when nothing has changed about my house?

Because the maps improved, not because the weather did. This is the single most common question we are asked by homeowners, and the Environment Agency’s own answer is unusually direct. On the 43% rise in surface water figures, the Environment Agency states that the change “doesn’t reflect a real-world increase in risk” and is “almost entirely due to improvements in” its data, modelling and use of technology. It adds: “We do not think that risk has been significantly under-estimated until now.”

The risk was already there. The mapping simply did not resolve it.

The scale of the change in the December 2024 assessment:

Note the direction of travel in the middle row. River and sea risk went down slightly. The entire increase is surface water, which is rainfall that cannot drain away fast enough, and which can affect a property nowhere near a river or the coast. That is why it catches people out.

Note also what “mid-century” means. The Environment Agency says “mid-century”, not 2050. Its modelled epochs are ranges: 2040 to 2060 for surface water and 2036 to 2069 for rivers and the sea. Coverage that pins the 8 million figure to a single year is tidying up a range.

On public awareness, the figure most often quoted is old. Environment Agency analysis publicised in November 2021 found that over 60% of households living in flood risk locations did not believe they were vulnerable to flooding. We have not found a refreshed Environment Agency figure for 2024 to 2026, so we cite the 2021 one with its date rather than present it as current.

Am I one of the newly identified properties?

You may be, and you are more likely to be if any of the following apply. Surface water risk follows topography and drainage, not distance from a river.

• Your home sits at the bottom of a slope, or in a dip in the road
• Nearby roads, gardens or car parks hold water after heavy rain
• You have a basement, lower ground floor or sunken patio
• You last checked your flood risk before 28 January 2025, when the Environment Agency’s public service was updated with the new data
• You are buying, selling, remortgaging or renewing insurance, and a flood search has flagged something you did not expect

The 28 January 2025 date is the one to focus on. If your recollection of your flood risk predates it, you are remembering a different map. Separately, the Flood Map for Planning; a different service, used for development rather than for homeowners; was updated shortly afterwards, on the date the Environment Agency gave as 25 March 2025. The two services are often confused.

How do I check my property’s flood risk today?

Five steps, in order.

1. Check the Government service. Enter your postcode on GOV.UK’s “Check the long term flood risk for an area in England”. Look at rivers and the sea and surface water as separate results, and switch on the climate change view.
2. Read the band, and know what it means. The Environment Agency’s bands are: high, greater than 3.3% chance each year (greater than 1 in 30); medium, between 1% and 3.3% (1 in 30 to 1 in 100); low, between 0.1% and 1% (1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000); and very low, less than 0.1% (less than 1 in 1,000). The thresholds are the same for rivers and sea and for surface water, but surface water has no “very low” band, it is not assessed below low, so a surface water result will never read “very low”.
3. Understand what the service does not do. The Government’s own page warns that it does not tell you how likely it is that an individual property will flood. It is an area-based, strategic picture. It does not know your floor levels, your door thresholds, your air brick heights, your driveway levels, or any protection already fitted.
4. Sign up for flood warnings where they are available for your area.
5. Outside England, use the Natural Resources Wales, SEPA or DfI Rivers services instead.

What can a desktop flood assessment actually tell you and what can it not?

This matters more than it sounds, because of how the certificates may be produced. The law firm Hamlins, writing on the announcement on 16 October 2026, reads it as proposing “a tiered three-level assessment framework” in which “desktop review and the use of automated data will primarily be used”, rather than relying “solely on mandatory on-site physical assessors for every single home”.

That is a law firm’s reading, not published scheme design. Neither the Government’s announcement nor Flood Re’s roadmap describes tiers. But if it is right, it matters a great deal, because the announcement does say the certificate will “draw on flood risk information already available through the ‘Check Your Flood Risk’ service”, and a rating built from national data alone inherits the limits of national data.

A desktop assessment, done properly, can establish: which sources of flooding are credible at the location; the modelled probability band from each source; indicative depths from national modelling; how risk changes under climate projections; the history of recorded flooding nearby; and whether the property sits in a critical drainage area, where the lead local flood authority has published one.

A desktop assessment cannot establish: the finished floor level of the building relative to the modelled flood level; the threshold heights of doors and air bricks; whether a cellar, light well or sunken patio creates an entry route the model does not see; whether existing resistance measures were specified and installed correctly; local drainage behaviour that national modelling smooths over; or whether a highway gully, culvert or private drain is the actual cause of water arriving at the property.

Flood Re’s own thinking points the same way. Its Head of Research told The Flood Resilience Conference 2026 that Flood Re has been developing data standards for household-level flood risk. The characteristics it considers important include property age, construction type, floor area and the lowest ingress point: the place where water is most likely to get into the home. That is information a national map does not hold and a site visit does.

Those omissions are not marginal. They can be the difference between a property that floods and one that does not on the same street. A home shown at risk may be fine because its floor level sits well above the road. A home shown at low risk may flood repeatedly through a basement light well. A rating generated without a visit will reproduce the map’s view, including the map’s blind spots, and that is the single most important thing for a homeowner to understand before a certificate lands with a rating on it.

What if the rating is wrong? Can I challenge it?

No appeal route has been published, because no issuing body has been named. Flood Re’s roadmap leaves the certification system to a later phase. As at 9 November 2026 there is no published mechanism for disputing a Flood Performance Rating, and we would expect one to be among the harder design problems the pilots surface.

What is already possible is challenging the underlying map, and it works. National surface water mapping is modelled, and it can differ from what a site specific survey and local site specific model can show at a given property. In our Woking case study, detailed survey and 2D modelling showed that the surface water flooding on the national map stayed within the surrounding road and did not affect the plot, and the Lead Local Flood Authority raised no objection to the application.

The practical point for a homeowner: the evidence that would correct a flood map is the same evidence that would correct a certificate. Survey levels, local hydraulic modelling, drainage records and documented resistance measures. Gathering it is useful now and will not be wasted.

What should I do before Flood Performance Certificates arrive?

1. Check your postcode on the Government’s flood risk service, looking at surface water separately from rivers and sea.
2. Do not treat a map as a finding about your house. It is a finding about your area.
3. If you are outside Flood Re for buildings cover, a post-2009 home, a block of more than three flats, a commercial or housing association property, act on the basis that risk-reflective pricing already applies to your buildings insurance. If you are a leaseholder or tenant in a larger block, your own contents cover may still be eligible.
4. Fit resilience measures on their merits, not in anticipation of a discount nobody has dated.
5. Keep the evidence. Product specifications, installation certificates, survey levels and photographs. A certificate scheme that rewards resilience will reward documented resilience. Flood Re has acknowledged that resilience improvements are not yet consistently tracked, so your own records may be the only proof they exist.
6. If you make a flood claim, ask your insurer whether it offers Build Back Better before repairs are agreed.
7. Get a property-specific view before you spend, particularly before buying, remortgaging, renewing insurance, or committing to flood protection works.

How Aegaea can help

A national map tells you an area might flood. A property-specific assessment tells you whether your home would, how deep the water could get, and which measures would make the biggest difference.

• Flood Vulnerability Assessment - a detailed review of the flood risk to a single property from all sources, including fluvial, tidal, surface water, groundwater, reservoir and canal, with resilience recommendations. Used before a purchase, after a flood, or where an insurer has asked for evidence.
• Independent advice across three nations - our consultants assess flood risk in England, Scotland and Wales, and have handled surface water map challenges where the national dataset was wrong.

Evidence of a property’s real flood risk and the measures in place is exactly what Flood Performance Certificates are designed to record. Assembling it now puts you ahead of a scheme that has not yet published its template.

Concerned about your property’s flood risk? Get a quote for an initial review.

Frequently asked questions

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