What to do if your home is flooded

Call 999 if anyone is trapped, injured, or in water they cannot get out of. Everything else on this page waits for that. Where there is no immediate danger to life, GOV.UK's guidance during a flood is to move family, vehicles, pets and important items to safety — upstairs or to higher ground — and to follow whatever the emergency services or your council tell you, including an instruction to evacuate. Those instructions are not advisory in the way people assume; they are usually issued because responders can see something upstream that you cannot.

Turn off the gas, electricity and water supplies if it is safe to do so. The qualifier matters more than the instruction. GOV.UK is explicit that you must never touch electrical switches while standing in water, and that includes the consumer unit. If the fuse box is in a flooded cellar, garage or under-stairs cupboard with water at the base of it, leave it and call your electricity network operator or the emergency services. A flooded house with the power still on is safer than a person reaching into water for a switch.

Stay out of the floodwater, and keep children and pets out of it. GOV.UK warns that floodwater may contain sewage and hides rubbish, wreckage, uneven roads and pavements, and broken drains and manhole covers. A lifted manhole cover in moving water is invisible and roughly the depth of a person. The same applies to driving through standing water on a road you know well, because the surface under it may no longer be there.

Once people are safe, report the flood so that the responsible body knows about it. In England the Environment Agency runs a 24-hour incident hotline on 0800 80 70 60, which GOV.UK lists as the route for reporting a flood or a possible cause of flooding. In Northern Ireland there is a single number for the public — the Flooding Incident Line on 0300 2000 100, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, where staff take your details and route them to whichever agency needs to respond. Floodline, on 0345 988 1188, is the 24-hour advice and warning line for England, Scotland and Wales, with a textphone service on 0345 602 6340.

Do not go back into the property, and do not restore any service, until you are told it is safe. GOV.UK's post-flood guidance is blunt: check with the emergency services that it is safe to return, and do not turn on your water, gas or electricity — get the utility company or a qualified engineer to check them first. People are hurt after floods far more often during the return than during the flood, because the water has gone and the house looks like a house again.

From this point you are running a 48-hour clock with three things on it: the call to your insurer, the photographic record of the damage, and — if you have had to leave — somewhere to sleep that your policy will pay for. Those three tasks, in that order, determine most of what happens over the following six months.

Floodline's single number, 0345 988 1188, hides the fact that it fronts three different national services and does not cover the fourth nation in the same way. GOV.UK's flood warnings page routes people differently by nation: England to the Environment Agency's own service, Scotland to a separate SEPA portal, Wales to Natural Resources Wales, and Northern Ireland to flood maps on nidirect rather than to a sign-up warning scheme. If you have just been flooded and want warnings for next time, the sign-up you need depends entirely on where the house is.

In England the Environment Agency runs the check-for-flooding service and the warning sign-up. You register an address and receive messages by phone, text or email. The single most important limitation is printed on GOV.UK and repeatedly missed: the service sends messages about flooding from rivers, the sea or groundwater depending on your area, and it does not cover surface water flooding — the flash flooding caused when rain falls faster than drains can carry it. A great many flooded homes are flooded by exactly that, and were never going to be warned.

In Scotland the Scottish Environment Protection Agency is the national flood forecasting, flood warning and strategic flood management authority. SEPA distinguishes two levels clearly: a flood alert signals possible flooding across a wider area and asks you to be vigilant, while a flood warning means flooding is expected and you should act now. Registration through myfloodline gives free messages by text, phone or email, and SEPA also publishes a Scottish Flood Forecast covering the next three days. SEPA is equally clear about who owns the defences — your local council is responsible for building and maintaining flood defences in your area, not SEPA.

In Wales, Natural Resources Wales issues flood alerts, flood warnings and severe flood warnings, runs the sign-up service, and publishes live warning pages and a five-day flood risk outlook. NRW also publishes Wales-specific guidance on what to do after a flood, which is worth reading in place of the English page because it points at Welsh support schemes and Welsh local authority routes.

Northern Ireland is the outlier, and the reason so many UK-wide flood articles are quietly wrong. There is no equivalent public sign-up warning service; GOV.UK sends Northern Ireland residents to flood maps to check risk instead. Responsibility sits with the Department for Infrastructure and its Rivers function, and the public-facing mechanism is reactive rather than predictive: nidirect publishes a single Flooding Incident Line, 0300 2000 100, available 24 hours a day and seven days a week, which handles flooding on roads, burst mains and blocked drains as well as flooded property, with staff routing each report to whichever agency needs to respond.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. Signing up at one address does nothing for another, warnings do not follow you when you move, and the service will not warn you about the surface water most likely to flood an ordinary suburban home. Sign up anyway — it is free, and Floodline can send warnings to a friend or relative on your behalf.

The insurer call is the first non-safety task and it should happen the same day. GOV.UK's guidance after a flood is to contact your insurance provider immediately to start a claim, and Natural Resources Wales sets out what happens next: the insurer assigns a loss adjuster who assesses the damage, typically within about seven days. In a major event that queue is long, so ring early and ask how soon an assessment can be scheduled rather than waiting to be contacted.

The instruction that saves the most money is the most counter-intuitive one, because every instinct after a flood is to start hauling ruined things outside. Do not. nidirect's guidance is explicit: do not remove or replace any damaged items without your insurance company's approval, and GOV.UK says to photograph the damage and consult your insurer about what can be discarded before clearing debris. An item thrown into a skip before the adjuster sees it is an item you may have to argue for, and sodden carpet is easier to argue about when it is still in the room.

Ask about emergency payments and alternative accommodation on the first call, not the third. nidirect notes that some policies cover temporary housing while repairs are carried out, and tells you to check your policy documents to confirm. If you are displaced, give the insurer your new contact details straight away, and keep a written log of every contact — date, time, who you spoke to, and what they agreed. That log is the backbone of any later complaint, and it is nearly impossible to reconstruct from memory six weeks in.

Ask two questions people forget. Will the insurer organise professional cleaners — nidirect suggests asking, and a yes removes the worst physical job from your list. And, as NRW recommends, will the insurer fund flood protection modifications as part of the repair? That second question leads to the Build Back Better allowance described below, and it is much harder to open once the repair schedule is agreed.

Understand which policy is doing the work before you argue with anyone. Buildings insurance covers the fabric — walls, floors, fitted kitchens, wiring. Contents insurance covers what would fall out if you turned the house upside down. If you rent, the landlord insures the building and you insure the contents, so a flood produces two separate claims with two excesses and two adjusters. Leaseholders in a block are usually covered by a policy arranged by the freeholder or managing agent, so that policy has to be triggered as well as your own.

If you have no insurance, say so early, because it changes which routes are open. NRW notes that where there is no insurer to arrange it, the local fire service may be able to help remove water from a property, and the Welsh and Northern Irish household schemes below are aimed at making an uninsured home habitable again. The National Flood Forum and the Scottish Flood Forum both run free helplines, listed in the contacts.

Mark the highest water line on the walls in permanent ink before the water drops or anything is cleaned. This is nidirect's first recommendation for building an insurance claim and it is the one piece of evidence you cannot recreate later. A pen mark with a date beside it in every affected room does more work than a hundred photographs, because it fixes depth, and depth is what determines whether plaster comes off at half a metre or a metre, whether the electrics below socket height are written off, and whether a council will accept that floodwater entered a habitable area.

Then photograph and video the damage room by room, before any clearing begins, with the waterline mark in shot. Photograph inside cupboards and under beds, and the outside of the building and the garden too, because the point at which water entered often matters to the adjuster's report. Both stills and video are timestamped by the phone, which is quietly useful when a claim is disputed months later.

Catalogue what was damaged, item by item, including contaminated food. nidirect's guidance lists exactly this, because a contents claim is settled off a list, not off a feeling. Work room by room and be boring about it: make and model where you know them, rough age, and replacement cost. Serial numbers on white goods and electronics are worth recording even if the item is underwater, because purchase records and warranties can be traced from them.

Keep every receipt for emergency work or purchases you pay for yourself. nidirect specifically advises keeping receipts for emergency repairs so that you can seek reimbursement. That includes a pump hire, a hotel night before the insurer arranged accommodation, dehumidifier hire, a taxi to move an elderly relative out, and replacement bedding. Reimbursement is normal; what is not normal is being reimbursed for something you cannot evidence.

The same evidence pack does double duty for public money. The Flood Recovery Framework in England defines an eligible household partly as one where floodwater entered habitable areas of the property, and a council assessing that will look at exactly the record you have just built. In Northern Ireland the district council inspects the property before paying the Scheme of Emergency Financial Assistance grant, so photographs taken before you cleaned are what stops a delayed inspection becoming a refused claim. Store the whole pack somewhere that is not in the house — cloud storage, an email to yourself, a copy with a relative.

Flood Re is a reinsurance scheme, not an insurer you can buy from. When you buy home insurance, your insurer can pass the flood risk element of your policy to Flood Re at a fixed price. If you then make a valid flood claim, your insurer pays it and Flood Re reimburses the insurer afterwards. You never deal with Flood Re directly, which is why most people at high flood risk have no idea whether their policy has been ceded to it.

It is funded by a compulsory levy. Flood Re states that every insurer offering home insurance in the UK must pay into the scheme, and that the levy raises £160 million every year. The price at which flood risk is ceded is based on your home's council tax band rather than on how badly your particular street floods, and the scheme applies a standard excess of £250 per policy. That council tax band linkage is the mechanism that stops a high-risk address being quoted an unpayable premium.

Eligibility is tightly drawn and worth checking against your own property before you accept a refusal. Flood Re's published criteria require an individual insurance contract for a private residential property in council tax bands A to H, occupied by the owner or their immediate family or left unoccupied, in a single-unit building or a building of two or three units — and, critically, built before 1 January 2009. The scheme covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and excludes the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

The exclusions catch people out. Buildings cover through Flood Re is not available for blocks of more than three residential flats, commercial bed and breakfast premises, company-owned housing, housing associations, or social housing — though contents cover may still be available in some of those cases. Properties generating commercial income through portfolio management are out, and so is anything built on or after 1 January 2009.

Some inclusions are more generous than people expect. Flood Re's criteria cover residential buy-to-let properties, holiday and second homes, farmhouses, and the contents insurance of tenants in large rented blocks — so a tenant in a twelve-flat building cannot reach the block's buildings cover, but their own contents policy may still be eligible.

Then there is Build Back Better, the part of Flood Re that directly changes your repair. Through participating insurers, a flooded household can claim up to £10,000 for property flood resilience measures on top of the cost of repairing the damage — flood doors, sump pumps and drainage, waterproof membranes, automatic air bricks, non-return valves, raised utilities and hard flooring. Flood Re publishes the list of insurers offering it, which at the time of writing includes Aviva, AXA, Admiral, Allianz, Ageas, Zurich, Hiscox, esure and NFU Mutual.

The order of operations decides whether you get it. Build Back Better is accessed through your insurer as part of the claim, so raise it on an early call and before the repair schedule is signed off. Flood Re's own advice to people buying cover is to ask whether the policy includes it before committing, because offerings differ — which makes it a renewal question as well as a claim question.

Start with the thing that trips up almost everyone reading about flood funding: the Bellwin scheme is not help for households. GOV.UK's Bellwin guidance describes emergency financial assistance available to local authorities, letting councils reclaim eligible emergency costs above an authority-specific threshold. When the government activates Bellwin for a storm, that is money moving to councils for their own response costs. None of it reaches a resident directly.

In England the household route is the Flood Recovery Framework, and it only exists when it is switched on. Defra's guidance for local authorities states that the framework is deployed when ministers decide support is appropriate following severe weather with significant impacts across multiple local authority areas — localised incidents typically do not trigger it, though exceptional cases can be considered. Lead local flood authority areas are now the qualifying administrative boundaries. In practice: check your lead local flood authority's website and your district council's, because if the framework has been activated they will be running the application scheme.

When it is activated, the core package is defined. Defra's guidance sets a Community Recovery Grant of £500 (indicative) per eligible household, and defines eligibility as a primary residence where floodwater entered habitable areas, or where the local authority considers the property uninhabitable because of access restrictions, damaged utilities or significant structural damage — whether or not the residents actually moved out. That last clause is important for anyone who stayed put in an upstairs room.

Council tax relief runs alongside the grant: a 100% discount for a minimum of three months, or for as long as the household cannot return to its primary residence if that is longer, plus 100% discount on temporary accommodation while displaced. Businesses have a parallel package — a Business Recovery Grant of £2,500 (indicative) for small and medium-sized enterprises with direct damage or demonstrable trade loss, and 100% business rates relief for at least three months or until trading resumes.

The Property Flood Resilience Repair Grant is the one worth chasing hardest, and the one most often missed because it is claimed later than the rest. GOV.UK announcements of flood support describe property owners applying for up to £5,000 through the scheme, administered through councils. It is not compensation for damage — it funds works that make the property more resilient when it is repaired, so that the next flood does less harm and you get back in faster. It stacks conceptually with Flood Re's Build Back Better, and the two together are what turn a repair into a genuinely better house.

Wales runs its own arrangement: Welsh Government funds local authorities to make payments to flooded households, with announcements describing support of between £500 and £1,000 per affected household. Natural Resources Wales additionally points flooded households towards the Emergency Assistance Payment, the business flood relief fund and community grants, and tells people to ask their local authority about council tax exemptions and alternative accommodation. The trigger is the same as in England: a specific storm has to be designated before the money exists.

Northern Ireland has the most predictable scheme of the four, and the tightest deadline. The Scheme of Emergency Financial Assistance pays £1,000 to individual householders who have suffered severe inconvenience from internal flooding of their property. The Department for Communities issues it through district councils, the property must be your main residence, and — the part that catches people — you must notify the district council within 31 calendar days of the last recorded date of the flooding. nidirect describes the process as contacting your council, the council inspecting the property, and payment following within days. It is explicitly practical assistance to make a home habitable, not compensation.

Whatever nation you are in, the operational advice is identical: ring the council, not the national body, and ring it in the first week. Councils administer every household payment described here, set their own application deadlines within the national scheme, and hold the list of who was flooded.

Dress for it before you start. UKHSA guidance specifies rubber boots, waterproof gloves and protective overalls, with a standard face mask and eye protection such as goggles, because floodwater is contaminated with sewage, chemicals and animal waste. Wash your hands with warm water and soap after any contact with floodwater, mud or anything that has been in it, and wash flood-exposed clothing separately on a hot cycle.

The carbon monoxide risk is barely mentioned outside the technical guidance. UKHSA states that petrol or diesel generators and other fuel-driven equipment should never be brought indoors or into an enclosed space, and that outdoor equipment should be positioned well away from the building with the exhaust directed away from windows and doors. Every flood recovery involves borrowed pumps and generators, and every one is a source of an odourless gas in a house whose ventilation has just been ruined.

Clean hard surfaces actively rather than waiting for them to dry. UKHSA advises household detergents or diluted bleach indoors, leaving bleach in contact for the manufacturer's stated time, and pressure hosing external surfaces while collecting the wastewater for disposal. nidirect's sequence is the same in plainer terms: an initial clean with a brush, hot water and household cleaning fluid, then disinfectant on everything that touched floodwater.

Nothing electrical goes back on until it has been checked. UKHSA states that electrical equipment should not be plugged in until thoroughly dried and inspected by a qualified electrician, and nidirect adds the gas half: if you use gas heating or appliances, a Gas Safe registered engineer must inspect them after a flood. That includes the boiler, often the most expensive single casualty of a flood because it sits at floor level.

Drying is the long part and it cannot be hurried by starting the repairs. nidirect warns that drying takes weeks or months depending on severity, and recommends setting central heating to 20–22°C with ventilation through open windows and doors. Dehumidifiers pull moisture from the air once the standing water has gone. NRW is explicit that the property must dry completely before repairs begin, and that this may mean removing wet carpets and plasterboard — plaster wicks water upwards well above the visible waterline, which is why the mark you made in permanent ink matters to the surveyor.

Food and water need their own decisions, and the thresholds are published. UKHSA advises discarding anything touched by floodwater; refrigerated food is safe for around four hours if the door has stayed shut and should be thrown out after that, and GOV.UK adds that frozen food should be discarded after 24 hours without power. Contact your water company if tap water is discoloured, tastes odd or smells unusual, boil water when your supplier advises it, and use boiled and cooled bottled water for baby formula if there is any doubt about the supply.

The last risk is human. NRW's post-flood guidance warns flooded households to watch for scams, verify trader credentials and get multiple quotes. A flooded street is a target, cash-in-hand offers to strip and re-plaster arrive within days, and work paid for outside the insurance process is work you may not be reimbursed for. Anything structural, electrical or gas-related should go through the insurer or a registered trade body, and everything should be quoted in writing.

Treat the mental health effect as a normal part of the event rather than a weakness. UKHSA's guidance states plainly that flooding commonly causes stress, anxiety and depression, and that distress lasting beyond about two weeks warrants professional help through your GP or NHS 111, including talking therapies services. GOV.UK's after-flood page points the same way, naming the NHS and Samaritans. The pattern people describe is a functional first fortnight followed by a collapse when the adrenaline goes and the house is still a shell.

Sign up for warnings at the address, now, while the paperwork instinct is still active. In England that is the Environment Agency's service, in Scotland Floodline registration through SEPA, in Wales the Natural Resources Wales sign-up, and in Northern Ireland it means checking the flood maps and knowing the Flooding Incident Line number, because there is no equivalent sign-up scheme. Floodline can also send warnings to a friend or relative on your behalf, which is the right answer for households where nobody wants to be woken by a text at four in the morning.

Get and stay on the council's list. Tell them you were flooded even if no scheme has been announced yet, ask to be told if one is, and ask specifically whether a Property Flood Resilience Repair Grant scheme is running for your event. Then use the free specialist help rather than fighting the insurer alone. The National Flood Forum is a charity that runs a helpline for people affected by flooding across England and Wales, covering insurance questions, recovery and community flood groups. The Scottish Flood Forum does the same in Scotland, and explicitly lists insurance advice and mediation, property-level flood protection and rogue traders among the things it handles. Both are independent of your insurer, which is the whole point of ringing them.

Spend the recovery on resilience, not just restoration. Between Build Back Better's £10,000 through a participating insurer and, where a scheme is running, the Property Flood Resilience Repair Grant of up to £5,000 through the council, a household can come out of a flood with flood doors, non-return valves, a sump and pump, raised sockets and hard flooring rather than an identical house waiting to be ruined again. The measures have to be specified while the property is stripped, so the conversation belongs in week two, not month six.

Keep the whole file well beyond the claim: photographs, the waterline record, the contents list, receipts, the loss adjuster's correspondence, the drying certificate, the electrician's and Gas Safe engineer's reports, and the council's grant decisions. It is what you need if the claim is disputed, what a future buyer's solicitor will ask about, and what makes a second flood an administrative event rather than a second catastrophe.