Homeowners in Pennsylvania will need to reveal more information about flood risk to potential buyers beginning as soon as 2028.
A new law requires that sellers disclose whether the home has flooded in the past and whether they’ve ever filed a flood insurance claim.
“A few inches of water on your first floor can be tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage,” said Steven Koller, insurance research and policy engagement manager at the nonprofit Insurance for Good and a research fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “If you move into a place and you’re not budgeting for those potential costs, that could be a very serious negative financial shock.”
Close to three quarters of U.S. states have some form of flood risk disclosure law, according to a 2025 analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Without them, home buyers can be left in the dark about how likely their new home could flood or how much they’ll need to pay for flood insurance.
Currently, home sellers in Pennsylvania are required to disclose, to the best of their knowledge, whether a property sits in a flood zone or has past or present flooding problems. The law signed Thursday goes further, requiring disclosure of the number of times and estimated dates of any past flooding incidents impacting a property, whether the home is in a high- or moderate-risk flood zone as designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whether the buyer will be required to purchase flood insurance, whether the seller has received government assistance for flood damage and whether they’ve filed a flood insurance claim.
Homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Instead, homeowners have to purchase flood insurance separately. Homes in high-risk flood zones with federally backed mortgages are required to carry flood insurance, but homeowners and renters living outside these zones can also purchase it. Still, just 2% of insured homes in Pennsylvania have flood coverage.
Flood insurance policies can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per year, Koller said.
“Just from a budgeting standpoint, that’s something that would be helpful for prospective homeowners to know,” Koller said.
Most realtors in Pennsylvania already reveal flood risk information during the home selling process because they use a property disclosure statement form published by the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors that asks seven questions about flood risk, including flood history and whether the property requires flood insurance, said Mark Kibbe, who chairs the association’s legislative committee.
When Kibbe was selling a home along a river in Erie, where he works as a realtor, he said he disclosed the home’s location in a flood zone and found that some potential buyers were turned off, while one couple who loved to kayak decided to purchase the house.
“They recognized that there was going to be some additional cost in doing that, but the reward was worth the added cost to them,” he said. “There were a lot of people that decided that was not the correct property for them. But there’s always somebody out there willing to [buy]. Because of being on the water, they’re willing to pay that extra cost.”
Kibbe said the new law will ensure that other types of real estate professionals and homeowners selling their homes themselves disclose the same information.
“It fills in the gaps,” he said.
