Most of the town is not, and the part that is knows exactly who it is. About one postcode in eight rates high on at least one flood measure. A river empties into the sea at the bottom of the town. Everything else sits back from the water on rising ground. Flood risk here is not a town-wide condition, it is an address-level one, and the gap between the two is a few hundred metres of downhill.
For river and sea flooding, the Environment Agency's flood zones cover about 7% of the town's postcodes in zone 3, the higher-probability band, and about 3% in zone 2, which is the additional medium-probability fringe sitting beyond zone 3 rather than wrapped around it. The geography explains itself: the River Otter reaches the English Channel at the town's beach, crossing a low-lying coastal plain to get there. Two flood events are on the recorded register, the most recent in July 1968, logged as a main river event where channel capacity was exceeded with no raised defences in place.
Surface water is folded into this site's postcode indicators rather than published as its own separate share, so there is no standalone surface-water figure to give here. What that means in practice is that the postcode ratings further down this answer already include water that arrives off roads and saturated ground, not just water arriving from the Otter or the sea.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted mapping raises the flood zone footprint to about 11% of postcodes. That is the same low-lying ground, modelled with more water in it.
For insurance, this is the kind of profile where the answer depends entirely on the individual address rather than the town. A property inside the mapped zone can expect underwriters to ask questions, price the risk, and in some cases route the cover through the industry's flood reinsurance arrangements. A property on the higher ground should see nothing unusual. Anyone buying near the beach or the river mouth should get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor, not after the survey.
At postcode level, taking all measures together, about 13% of the town's postcodes rate high on at least one flood indicator, about 9% medium and about 22% low. These bands overlap with the flood zone figures rather than adding to them, because a single postcode can appear in both counts for the same water.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping identifies 634 properties across the postcodes that carry any risk at all, of which 113 sit at high risk, 42 at medium and 41 at low. Seventy-one of the high-risk properties are residential. Postcodes with no risk do not appear in that list, so this is a picture of the exposed end of the town rather than the whole of it.
On whether anything stands between the water and those homes, the modelled extents are unflattering. The high-risk extent covers about 7% of postcodes with defences counted, and about 7% without them. The presence of a defence in the model does not shrink the footprint here, and a defence present in a model has never yet kept water out of a kitchen on its own.
The coast is close enough to be part of daily life and part of the risk. Every postcode in the town falls within a shoreline management plan area, about 52% sit within 500 metres of the coast, the median distance to the water is around 472 metres, and the nearest postcode comes within about 39 metres of it.
The shoreline management policy is the part buyers tend not to read. For the twenty-year, fifty-year and hundred-year horizons, the modal policy across the town's coastline is no active intervention, meaning the plan does not commit to building or maintaining coastal defences there. That is a stated planning position rather than a promise in either direction, and it is not the same as a defence existing today.
On sea level, the nearest tide gauge at Devonport recorded a rise of about 2.35 millimetres a year across its record from 1962 to 2015. That is a measured historic rate at a gauge along this coast, not a projection for this beach.
Flood risk here lands squarely in the middle: unremarkable for most of the town, genuinely material for the streets nearest the river mouth and the sea front. The number that should decide your view is not any of the town-wide shares, it is what the mapping says about the single address you are actually thinking of buying.