Mostly no, but the risk isn't evenly spread. A small slice of the town sits in the river-and-sea flood zones. Rain running off the hills is the bigger everyday issue. The sea is very close to some streets and a long way from most. Dover is a town where you check the street, not the postcode district.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones take in about 3% of the area's postcodes in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and a further 5% in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The two bands don't overlap. Zone 2 is the extra ring of land outside zone 3, not a larger area that contains it. Together they cover a small part of the town, mostly the low ground by the harbour and along the valley.
Surface water, meaning heavy rain that the drains and the ground can't take quickly enough, isn't captured by the flood zones at all. In a town built into a valley between chalk hills, that is the measure worth watching. It's folded into the postcode-level figures further down rather than reported on its own here.
Looking ahead, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted zone takes in about 18% of postcodes. That is the modelled extent once allowances for future rainfall and sea levels are added, and it is the figure to keep in mind if you plan to stay for decades rather than years.
Insurers price the individual address, not the town. A home well outside the zones should insure normally. One inside zone 3, or on a street where surface water collects, may face higher premiums or extra questions. Get an indicative quote on the exact address before paying for a survey, not after.
Taking every indicator together, surface water included, about 13% of postcodes rate high risk on at least one measure, 17% medium and 33% low. These bands overlap with the zone figures above because they measure something wider, so the two sets shouldn't be added together.
Counted as properties, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists about 2,200 properties in the postcodes that carry any risk. Of those, 174 are at high risk, 314 at medium and 753 at low. Postcodes with no river or sea risk don't appear in that count at all, so it describes the exposed part of town rather than the whole of it. About 91 of the high-risk properties are homes.
Whether anything stands between the water and the house is a separate question. About 3% of postcodes sit in the high-risk extent with no defence in the model, and about 3% sit in the high-risk extent with a defence present. A modelled defence means a wall or barrier exists in the calculation. It doesn't mean the house behind it is safe, and it tells you nothing about the defence's condition on the night it's needed.
About 14% of postcodes lie within 500 metres of the coast, the threshold this measure uses. The closest is about 13 metres from the shoreline, while the typical postcode is about 1,400 metres inland. Most of Dover looks at the sea without having to live with it.
The shoreline management plan's policy for this coast is to hold the line over the next 20, 50 and 100 years. That means the stated intention is to keep defences where they are. It's a plan, not a guarantee, and it depends on funding that hasn't been promised yet.
The Dover tide gauge recorded sea level rising at about 2 millimetres a year over its record from 1961 to 2010. That is a measured historic rate, not a forecast, and it's slow enough that it matters over a mortgage term more than over a winter.
There is no recorded historic flooding within the area. That is reassuring, though it proves only that nothing made the record, not that water has never been where it shouldn't.
Dover's flood risk is middling: low for most of the town and real for a small, well-mapped part of it. Put the exact address through the checks before you fall for the view.