Most preppers don’t know that FEMA runs a national survey on preparedness. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the only insight I’m aware of into what preparations average Americans have actually made — everything else you hear on the subject is somebody’s gut feeling.
I’d like you to look at it for a specific reason. Not to feel superior. Your neighbors’ readiness is an input to your plan, the same way the fault line under your county is. Here’s what the data says, and then what I think it means for you.
What the survey is
The FEMA National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness. The numbers below are the 2023 wave: 7,604 respondents, weighted to the U.S. adult population.
One caveat up front, because it matters for how hard you can lean on it. The survey is a national sample. It’s reliable at the national, Census-region, Census-division and rural/urban level. It is not a state, county or ZIP-level instrument — the sample simply isn’t big enough for all areas. Anyone quoting you a county figure from this survey is making it up.
FEMA’s own disclaimer applies too: FEMA and the federal government cannot vouch for analyses derived from the data after it leaves them. That includes mine.
As of this writing, the 2023 results are the most recent actual data we have. FEMA published the 2024 results summary report in 2025, but have never made the 2024 data available. They’ve not released a 2025 report on schedule and have removed all past reports and data from their website, so I suspect there will be no further data coming from them…
The numbers
Start with the headline, because the headline is the trap:
- 57.2% took three or more preparedness actions in the past year — FEMA’s headline readiness measure.
- 85.5% took at least one action.
- 63.1% are confident they could take steps to prepare.
- 53.8% say they or their family have lived through a disaster’s impacts.
Read only that and you’d conclude the country is doing fine. Now look at capacity instead of activity.
How long would your emergency supplies last?
- 53.7% — none assembled at all
- 1.7% — less than 3 days
- 8.4% — 3 days to 1 week
- 8.6% — more than 1 week
- 10.1% — more than 2 weeks
- 8.5% — more than 1 month
- 9.0% — more than 3 months
Do the arithmetic. 55.4% of American households are under three days. 63.8% are out inside a week. 82.5% are out inside a month. Only 17.5% of the country has more than a month of supplies.
Water — could you stay in your home if the supply were cut off?
- 14.4% — less than a day
- 28.5% — 1 to 3 days
- 24.0% — 3 days to 1 week
- 12.2% — more than a week, 8.8% more than two weeks, 5.7% more than a month, 6.4% more than three months
That’s 42.9% under three days on water, and one in seven households that can’t make it 24 hours.
Power — could you stay in your home without electricity?
- 8.6% — less than a day
- 21.2% — 1 to 3 days
- 24.1% — 3 days to 1 week, then 16% more than a week, 11.3% more than two weeks, 8% more than a month, 10.7% more than three months
Power is the best of the three: 70.2% could cope for three days or more. I worry that they are overestimating their capability and/or aren’t considering a power outage accompanied by extenuating circumstances such as extreme cold weather.
And a few singles worth noting:
- 51.9% have a household emergency plan.
- 36.0% have signed up for emergency alerts and warnings.
- 76.2% carry homeowner’s or renter’s insurance.
- 50.5% have high confidence that preparing would even help them get through a disaster.
My read
Five conclusions. These are interpretation, not data — feel free to disagree.
1. The headline measure counts actions, not capacity. 57.2% took three or more preparedness actions. 53.7% have no supplies assembled. Both are true at once, which tells you exactly how much a counted “action” is worth. Signing up for an alert is an action. So is having a conversation. Those are real and they’re not the same thing as being able to eat. Measure capacity, not activity — build the real thing with the preparedness framework, which is about what you can do, not what you’ve done.
2. Less than half the population is prepared in any meaningful sense, and their idea of “prepared” is thin. Given how general these questions are, most people who feel prepared are probably prepared for a local, short, likely event — a storm, a two-day outage. That’s not nothing. It’s simply insufficient for anything larger.
3. People overestimate their supplies. This is my experience talking, and I’d bet money on it. Ask someone how long their pantry lasts and they think about the food, not about the fact that half of it needs a stove, the fridge is a clock running down, and nobody accounted for water to cook it in. If I’m right, the real numbers are worse than the survey shows. These are self-reports.
4. Mutual aid is quietly double-counted. People lean on friends and family in an emergency; that’s expected and it’s mostly healthy. But if your neighbors are counting your pantry as part of their plan while you’re counting theirs as part of yours, the whole neighborhood is more fragile than the arithmetic suggests. Everyone’s plan is the same box of food.
What people expect to happen
The survey also asks which threats people expect to experience. The ranking is more interesting than the values:
- Power outage — 44.7%
- Thunderstorm — 41.5%
- Tornado — 41.1%
- Home fire — 39.2%
- Flood — 37.7%
- Active shooter — 37.4%
- Winter storm — 37.4%
- Pandemic — 36.4%
- Earthquake — 30.8%
- Hurricane — 29.4%
- Extreme heat — 29.4%
- Financial hardship — 21%
- Nuclear — 14.1%
- EMP — 10.2%
- Dam failure — 7.2%
Two things jump out.
The thing Americans most expect is a power outage — the boring, likely, survivable one. Good. That’s a population whose instincts are roughly calibrated, even if its pantry isn’t.
And only 21% expect financial hardship, which is almost certainly the most probable serious emergency in the average household’s life. I’ve written about that one, because I lived it. Meanwhile EMP — the threat that generates the most noise per unit of probability — sits at 10.2%. The prepper internet has the ranking upside down relative to the general public, and the general public is closer to right in my opinion.
Why this is a planning input
Here’s the part that turns trivia into preparedness.
Your Area of Operation is made of these households. When you draw your zones, you’re drawing a circle around a population where roughly half have no supplies at all and two-thirds are empty within a week. That single number drives a lot:
- The timeline of a local event. In a regional grid-down, the neighborhood doesn’t get hungry in three weeks. It gets hungry in five days. Plan your own posture around that clock, not around your pantry’s clock.
- Who’s a mutual-aid partner and who’s a dependent. Both are legitimate. You need to know which is which before the event, not during. If half your street is a dependent, that’s a real number you should be storing against — or a conversation you should be having now.
- Which neighbors are worth recruiting. 17.5% of the country has more than a month of supplies. Some of them are within a mile of you, and they’ve already done the work. Community is a prep, and this tells you the size of the pool.
- Your own honesty check. Half of the country has nothing. It is very easy to clear that bar and mistake it for being ready. Don’t grade against your neighbors. Grade against the threat.
If you want to see how this varies where you live, Preparedness Landscape puts the survey on a map by Census region, division, and rural/urban — and shows you where you stand against your own region. Just remember the sample limit: region and division are solid, state is rough, county doesn’t exist.
Bottom Line
The average American household has no kit, no plan, and less than three days of water. That’s not a joke about sheeple; it’s the operating environment your plans live inside.
Three things to do with this:
- Stop measuring yourself in actions. Measure in time — how many days of water, food, heat and cash, with no resupply. Actions are what FEMA can count. Days are what keeps you alive.
- Re-run your local timeline using five days, not three weeks, as the point where your area starts to get difficult. That changes some plans.
- Pick one household near you — a neighbor, a relative — and move them from dependent to partner. It’s the cheapest capability you can add, and it’s the only prep that also makes the number above go down.
You can’t fix the country. You can absolutely fix your street.