Midland's Seismic Design Category, explained

Under the seismic model IBC and ASCE 7 use for new construction, Midland is Category A. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and Midland sits at the 15th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Midland compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.062g, short-period spectral response 0.119g, 1-second spectral response 0.032g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Midland ranks 205 for seismic hazard, the 47th percentile within the state. About 143,687 people live in Midland, Texas.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Texas. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

What this means for insurance

Outside California, earthquake coverage is typically sold as an endorsement added to a standard homeowners policy, not a separate product - worth asking about directly when getting a home-insurance quote for a Midland address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Midland's numbers. The guide to what a Seismic Design Category actually means covers why a category is never a substitute for an engineer's assessment of one specific house.