Yes, in patches, and the patches are bigger than the river maps suggest. Only a few postcodes sit in the river flood zones. More than a quarter are at high risk on at least one measure. The model has no defences shrinking the high-risk area. In Cranleigh you check the address, not the village.
Start with rivers and the sea. In the Environment Agency's mapping, about 6% of Cranleigh's postcodes are in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and a further 3% are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. Zone 2 is the smaller number because it only counts the land outside Zone 3. The water here comes from Cranleigh Waters, which drains the village before running north-west to join the River Wey at Shalford. The one recorded flood on file is from December 1968, when the main river overtopped its channel with no raised defences to stop it.
Surface water is where the risk spreads out. Most of the ground around the village centre is slowly permeable, seasonally wet clay, and rain sits on that kind of soil instead of draining through it. There is no separate surface-water share among these figures. It is included in the postcode picture below, which is why that picture looks much worse than the river zones alone.
Looking ahead, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zones take in about 13% of Cranleigh's postcodes, compared with 6% in today's highest zone. That is a modelled future footprint, not a forecast for any particular house, and it's the one the lender's surveyor is increasingly likely to ask about.
Insurance follows the address. A home well outside the mapped extents should be routine to insure. A home inside them is likely to pay more, face a bigger excess, or get fewer quotes. Buyers who find that out after exchanging tend to discover the cost at renewal, one year at a time. Get a quote before instructing a solicitor, not after.
Now the fuller measure. About 28% of Cranleigh's postcodes are at high risk on at least one flood measure, with surface water included, about 21% at medium and about 44% at low. These bands overlap with the river-and-sea zones above rather than adding to them. A single postcode can be low on rivers and high on surface water, and it will count as high here.
The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping also counts properties rather than postcodes, and it only lists the 76 postcodes that carry some risk. Across those, 1,615 properties are listed. Of them, 276 are at high risk, 235 of which are homes, 85 are at medium risk and 206 at low. Those numbers are more use to a buyer than a percentage, because one of those 276 could be the house on your shortlist.
On defences, about 7% of postcodes fall inside the modelled high-risk flood extent whether or not defences are included in the model. In other words, the defences in the model don't shrink Cranleigh's high-risk footprint. And a "defended" label only means a defence exists in the model. It says nothing about whether it will keep water out of any particular house. Nothing in these figures suggests that anything stands between the stream and the lowest streets. About 11% of postcodes sit inside the undefended low-probability extent.
The nearest tide gauge is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose by about 2 millimetres a year across the record from 1962 to 2023. That is a measured historic rate, not a prediction. Cranleigh is inland, so its problem is rain and a small river, not the tide.
Flood risk is Cranleigh's weak spot: limited in the river zones, widespread once surface water is counted, and concentrated enough that two houses on the same road can have very different answers. Buy with the address-level map open, not the estate agent's reassurance.