Yes, in places, and the places are not a mystery. About one postcode in six carries a high rating on at least one flood measure. Hundreds of individual properties sit somewhere on the river and sea risk mapping. The town centre stands above the Axe and the risk sits below it, which makes this a question about an address rather than a question about a town. Ask it about the house you are actually buying.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping puts about 7% of the area's postcodes inside flood zone 3, the highest-probability band. Zone 2, which is the additional medium-probability fringe beyond zone 3 rather than a wrapper around it, covers none of them. That is a concentrated shape rather than a smeared one. The ground that floods here is the same ground each time.
The town's own history is worth reading alongside the map. There are 18 recorded flood events on the historic record, and about 5% of postcodes fall inside an area that has flooded before. The most recent recorded event, in July 2012, came from an ordinary watercourse exceeding its channel capacity, with no raised defences involved. Not the river everyone watches. The ditch nobody does.
Adding the climate allowance shifts the zone share by about half a percent of postcodes. That is a small forward adjustment rather than a redrawing of the map, and the mapping remains a model of probability rather than a promise about the next thirty years.
For insurance, the practical effect is rarely that cover vanishes. It is that the premium and the excess become specific to the address, and the paperwork gets longer. Get an indicative quote on the exact postcode before instructing a solicitor, and ask the seller directly what they have paid and what they have claimed. A vendor who has never had water in the house answers that question immediately. A vendor who has takes a moment to choose the wording.
Folding surface water in alongside rivers and sea, about 17% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one measure, about 16% medium and about 28% low. Those bands overlap the flood-zone figures rather than adding to them, so nothing here should be stacked on top of the 7%.
Counted as homes instead of postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 583 properties carrying some level of risk, spread across 22 postcodes, and only postcodes carrying some risk appear on that list at all. Within it, 202 properties are rated high, 67 medium and 23 low, and 166 of the high-rated ones are residential. Two hundred-odd homes is a figure a buyer can picture. A percentage never quite manages that.
On whether anything stands between the water and the building, about 3% of postcodes sit inside a modelled high-risk extent with no defence present, and about 3% sit inside one where a defence is present in the model. Present in the model is a description of the model, not a description of your house. A modelled defence is a structure that somebody has to fund, inspect and maintain to a standard, indefinitely, on a council budget.
The whole area sits under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy across the twenty, fifty and hundred-year horizons is managed realignment: the intention is to let the shoreline shift in a controlled way rather than hold every existing line. An intention on paper is not a defence in the ground. The coast is about 6 kilometres away at the nearest point and about 7 kilometres at the typical one, so that policy shapes the estuary below the town more than it shapes the town.
At Devonport, the nearest tide gauge with a long record, the measured rise across the 1962 to 2015 record runs at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a historic rate from an instrument rather than a forecast, and at this distance inland it reads as context.
Of everything a buyer has to weigh in Axminster, flooding is the item that drags hardest on the answer. The town in general is fine. The specific address is the entire question, it has a real and knowable answer, and the time to get it is before anyone falls in love with the garden.