Yes, and materially so. Pevensey is a former bay that never fully stopped being one. About a third of the area sits in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. About one in seven postcodes register high on the surface-water grid. Just over half of the area sits in the climate-adjusted future zone. Nothing on this page is going to soften those numbers.
River and tidal risk is the headline. Around 36% of the area falls within Environment Agency Flood Zone 3, the top category for fluvial and tidal flooding, and under one percent sits in Flood Zone 2, the lower-probability tier. Those figures reflect a settlement built on drained marshland behind a shingle beach, with the Pevensey Levels stretching inland and the sea sitting a few metres from the front of some postcodes and about a mile from the median postcode in the parish. About a third of postcodes sit within half a kilometre of the coast. Roughly 45% of postcodes fall inside the Pevensey and Cuckmere Internal Drainage Board area, the modern successor to the sluice-and-ditch system that has kept the Levels drained since the marsh was first walked on. The drainage board is not decorative infrastructure. It is why houses stand where houses stand.
Surface-water flooding is the risk that comes from above rather than from either side. About one in seven postcodes register in the high band on the surface-water grid, another one in eight in medium, and roughly three in ten in the low band. Historically, about one in twelve postcodes has actually flooded on the historic-events layer, so the modelled risk has been paying out on real streets rather than sitting theoretical. The pattern is what you'd expect on flat, low-lying, drained land: rainfall that can't run off fast enough finds the low points, and the low points are lived in.
The climate allowance is where the picture gets sharper still. Just over 55% of the area sits inside the climate-adjusted flood zone, which is the Environment Agency's forward projection of how the flood footprint expands as sea levels rise and rainfall patterns shift. The nearest tide gauge shows sea levels rising at around 2.2 millimetres a year. The coastal management policy for this stretch is Hold the Line at the 20-year, 50-year, and 100-year horizons, meaning defences will be maintained rather than realigned inland. Read that as a policy commitment, not a certainty about what the next century actually delivers.
Insurance is where the abstraction meets the standing order. High flood-zone properties attract higher premiums, higher excesses on the flood peril, and in some cases a refusal to quote at all. Any offer that comes in from a mainstream insurer needs reading carefully for what the flood excess actually is, because the headline premium sometimes hides a large deductible on flood claims. A specific address matters more than the parish average, so anyone serious about buying in Pevensey needs the flood report for their exact postcode and the insurer's answer to the flood question before the survey, not after.
Pevensey scores one out of five on flood risk and earns it. This is a village where the flood question is the biggest single question a buyer has to answer, and pretending otherwise is how people get caught out.