Oyster Bay Home Insurance: The North Shore Is Not One Market

One town, two very different flood records

The hamlet of Oyster Bay was first documented by the Dutch in 1639 and settled by the English under Peter Wright in 1653. It has served as the seat of the Town of Oyster Bay ever since, though the hamlet itself is far smaller than the town: 7,049 residents in the 2020 census, against a town whose population runs into the hundreds of thousands. Over time, several parts of the original settlement split off as their own incorporated villages, among them Mill Neck, Centre Island, and Bayville.

Bayville, incorporated in 1919, sits a few miles from the hamlet on the same Long Island Sound shoreline, facing Greenwich, Connecticut across the water. Both places front the same body of water. Their flood records do not match. Bayville's ZIP carries 1,383 NFIP claims on record, more than 12 times the 111 claims logged for Oyster Bay hamlet's own ZIP, per FEMA claims data.

What the FEMA map actually shows

The claims gap does not track cleanly with mapped flood zones, which is worth knowing before you assume anything from either number. Our July 2026 query of the National Flood Hazard Layer around Oyster Bay hamlet and its harbor returned 43 flood hazard polygons, 23 AE and 9 VE among them. A separate query of Bayville returned fewer, 32 polygons, including a couple of AO zones, FEMA's designation for shallow, sheet-flow flooding.

In other words, Oyster Bay hamlet has more mapped high-risk area than Bayville, yet Bayville has far more recorded claims. A flood-zone polygon count and a claims count are different measurements. Use both, and check your own address at msc.fema.gov, rather than treating either figure as a complete answer.

Sagamore Hill and the rest of the hamlet

The hamlet's best-known landmark sits about two miles northeast on Cove Neck: Sagamore Hill, built between May 1884 and March 1885 for Theodore Roosevelt, who used it as his Summer White House from 1902 to 1908. It became a National Historic Site on July 25, 1962. Closer to the harbor, Raynham Hall, a Revolutionary War-era home once owned by the Townsend family, now runs as a museum.

The hamlet's housing stock is old enough to matter for flood insurance too. The median home dates to 1957, before FEMA published its first flood insurance rate maps in the 1970s, the same pre-FIRM question that comes up across Long Island. Median value runs $695,500 per Census ACS 2024 5-year estimates, with 2,934 housing units.

North shore ZIPs, compared

2012 was Sandy's year, and it shows in both ZIPs' numbers, just at very different scales. The Long Island Press reported that day that there was no way in or out of Bayville, with roads flooded by early afternoon as waves crashed over a seawall. See the full ranked list in our Long Island flood claims table.

What this means for your policy

Flood, if you are near the water. A homeowners policy excludes flood damage everywhere on Long Island, hamlet or village. In the mapped AE and VE zones, a separate NFIP or private policy is mandatory with a federally backed mortgage. Start with our flood insurance guide for how NFIP and private options compare.

Wind, wherever you are. Expect a percentage hurricane deductible of 1% to 5% of your dwelling limit, under the uniform statewide trigger New York adopted in February 2026. Our hurricane deductible guide works through the math by home value.

If the market says no. We could not confirm whether Oyster Bay or Bayville fall inside C-MAP's eligibility band. The program's published criteria are written for the south shore, and nothing we found extends them to Long Island Sound in the same terms. Ask an independent agent directly, and treat NYPIUA as the confirmed fallback, with its 2% Nassau County hurricane deductible. A non-renewal notice starts a clock either way.

Carriers. Appetite varies by block, elevation, and claims history, and it can differ sharply between two ZIPs on the same stretch of Sound, as the numbers above show. We do not publish carrier lists because they go stale. An independent agent who writes the north shore regularly can tell you what is available for your specific address.

Oyster Bay by the numbers