How long does FEMA take to approve a disaster declaration?

What the data shows

• The instrument decides the speed, not the disaster. Median time from request to decision was 0 days for a fire management assistance grant (36 of them), 1 day for an emergency declaration (21), and 53 days for a major disaster declaration (35).
• Nine states received both kinds in the same year, which makes the comparison like-for-like. Kentucky's emergency request was answered in one day; its major disaster request took 113. Montana: 3 days against 82, 87, 106 and 107. Washington: 2 against 76. South Carolina: same day against 42.
• Major disaster declarations are not issued as they are decided. All 35 landed on just eight dates, and three of those days — 7 April, 29 May and 30 June — carry 26 of the 35.
• The spread is enormous. Fastest: Mississippi and Louisiana, 3 days. Slowest: New Mexico’s DR-4918, requested 22 October 2025 and granted 251 days later on 30 June 2026. Half of all requests fell between 33 and 80 days.
• The waiting is mostly federal. States take a median of 34 days after an incident begins to file a major disaster request, because a joint damage assessment has to be done first — but the federal side is still the larger share of the total for 26 of the 35, and a median 57% of the whole incident-to-declaration clock.
• Nothing is moving right now. As of this data refresh on 29 July, no major disaster has been declared since 30 June. In those 29 days FEMA issued 10 other declarations — 7 fire management, 3 emergency — every one of them answered in a day or less.

The data

Download CSV 92 rows · 12 columns · free to reuse with credit

How this was built

OpenFEMA publishes two disaster-declaration datasets and the well-known one is the wrong one for this question. DisasterDeclarationsSummaries (v2) is what most people find; it is one row per county and it does not carry a request date, so differencing it can only ever produce an incident-to-declaration figure that blends the state’s own preparation time with the federal decision. The older FemaWebDisasterDeclarations (v1) is one row per declaration and it does carry declarationRequestDate. That single field is what makes this table possible.

We queried every record with declarationDate ge '2025-10-01', which returns 92 declarations running from 22 October 2025 to 26 July 2026. All 92 carried a request date; none needed to be dropped. For each one we computed two whole-day differences: days from incident to request (incidentBeginDate to declarationRequestDate), which is the state’s clock, and days from request to decision (declarationRequestDate to declarationDate), which is Washington’s. Quartiles are linear-interpolated. No record was excluded, smoothed or weighted.

The API response carries its own rundate, which is how we can say that an absence of recent major disaster declarations is a real gap and not a publishing lag: the dataset was refreshed on 29 July 2026 and simply has nothing after 30 June.

What this does not show

• This is declarations, not requests. OpenFEMA publishes what was granted; there is no public feed of what is pending or what was turned down. A state that appears nowhere in this table may have asked and be waiting — West Virginia has had a request in since 21 July and an expedited one since 25 July — or may never have asked at all. An absence here is never evidence that nobody asked.
• One fiscal year, 92 records. The medians are descriptive of FY2026 and should not be read as a long-run service standard.
• A declaration can be amended later to add counties or programmes; this table measures the first decision only.
• declarationRequestDate is the date FEMA records the request as received, which need not be the date a governor announced it.
• Fire management assistance grants are a genuinely different instrument — they are decided while a fire is burning and are meant to be same-day — so their 0-day median is a design feature, not a benchmark the other two should be judged against. The comparison that carries weight is emergency against major disaster within the same state.

Use it

This table is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Republish it, chart it, or build on it — commercially or not — as long as you credit The Fold and link back to this page.

The Fold (2026). "FEMA disaster declaration decision times, FY2026." https://fold-news.com/data/fema-disaster-declaration-decision-times-fy2026 (updated July 29, 2026).