Flood insurance elevation certificates are not needed in order to rate many flood insurance policies. If your home is a pre-firm home, meaning it was built prior to the first flood maps for your area, you can use an elevation certificate to help rate your policy but are not required. In some cases, if the elevation of your home is above the base flood elevation for your community, the elevation certificate will help to lower the rates on your policy. This is not the case for most homes in northern California. The elevations of many homes that are in high risk flood areas are considerably lower than the base flood elevation. Most homeowners would be inconvenienced and pay unnecessary expenses in order to get an elevation certificate on their home and it would not help decrease the premium on a homeowner insurance policy. A scenario in which an elevation certificate is useful to get lower rates on flood insurance is if you have built or purchased a home in an area that was determined to be a high risk flood zone at the time the home was built. Almost every city in California has standards in place to ensure that new construction in high risk flood areas is built at a higher elevation than the base flood elevation. So, if your home was built after your community was considered high risk, the elevation certificate would show that the lowest elevation of your home is higher than the base flood elevation. In this situation, you may wish to get an elevation certificate for your home. It would dramatically decrease the premium on your flood insurance policy. Call an experienced agent today that will give you an accurate quote. Get your quote online today or call 530.923.2930 License 0G13612.