The Survey Deadline Is August 1: What Louisiana Homeowners Should Do This Week

If you’re a Louisiana homeowner with unrepaired damage from Hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta, Ida, or the May 2021 severe storms, and you haven’t completed the Restore Louisiana initial survey — do it this week.

The state has set August 1, 2023 as the deadline to complete the initial survey for 2020-21 disaster events. The survey is the gateway to everything else in the program: without it, you can’t be invited to apply, which means you can’t be awarded funds, which means no Solution 1 or Solution 2 project.

What the survey is

The survey is the first step. It’s a short online form that asks about:

The property address
The dates and disasters that caused damage
What damage remains
What insurance you received
Whether any repairs were completed

It takes 10–15 minutes if you have your information in front of you. It’s at restore.la.gov.

The program published a specific survey-deadline announcement about this date earlier in the year — worth the click.

What happens after the survey

Completing the survey doesn’t award you any money. It gets you into the pool of homeowners the program can invite to submit a full application. The application is longer and requires documentation.

If your survey shows you’re likely eligible, the program will invite you to apply — generally on a rolling basis, prioritized by need.

The math, for borderline cases

Eligibility was expanded earlier this year — the FEMA damage threshold dropped to $3,000 and the insurance ceiling rose to $50,000. We wrote about that in May.

If you were previously told you didn’t qualify, those thresholds may have moved you back in. Take the survey anyway — it’s how the program re-evaluates.

Documentation to have ready

For the survey itself, most of what you’ll need is basic — address, dates, damage descriptions. For the application that follows, you’ll want:

Proof of ownership (deed, tax records)
Proof of occupancy as of the date of the storm (utility bills, mail)
FEMA registration number
Insurance claim paperwork, including any settlement documents
Photos of damage — time-stamped if possible
Receipts for any repair work you’ve already paid for out of pocket

You don’t need all of this to file the survey. You do need it for the application.

If you’ve already started Solution 2 thinking

A lot of homeowners we talk to have been thinking about Solution 2 since we wrote the explainer last year. If that’s you, the order of operations is still:

Complete the survey.
Accept the application invitation when it comes.
Complete the application.
Receive the program’s Estimated Cost of Repairs.
Then choose a contractor and draft a Project Plan.

You don’t pick the contractor before the ECR. The ECR is the budget; it shapes the conversation with the contractor. Trying to run the process backwards is how people end up signing contracts that don’t match what the program will fund.