The coverage of flood maps can include all of these jurisdictions: Counties/Parishes/Boroughs, Tribes, Territories and municipalities.

For standard identification purposes, FEMA assigns a six-digit Community Identifier (CID) to all active participants in the NFIP. Flood maps may contain flood hazard information on one or multiple communities, identified by CID on the Map Panels.

Some older flood map sets may only cover one community. If that community is the unincorporated part of a county, flooding information is shown only for the areas under the jurisdiction of the county government. This means you will not find flooding information for incorporated areas (e.g. tribes, towns and cities) on the flood map panels produced for the unincorporated areas of a county. Separate flood map sets were prepared that contain flood map panels for these incorporated areas.

More recently, FEMA transitioned to producing Countywide flood maps. These flood map sets show flooding information for all of the geographic areas of a county, parish or borough, including tribes, and incorporated municipalities. The State of Louisiana divides jurisdictions into Parishes and the State of Alaska divides their districts into Boroughs. Since these are administratively equivalent to Counties, we will use the general term “Countywide flood maps” when discussing these products in this course.

When a flood map panel includes multiple communities, a list of the affected communities, by name and Community Identification number (CID), is listed on the title block of that panel.

To determine the geographic coverage of your community’s flood map you can visit FEMA's Map Service Center at https://msc.fema.gov, email FEMAMapSpecialist@riskmapcds.com or call 1-877-FEMA-MAP (1-877-336-2627) to consult a Flood Map Specialist.