About 8 million American households live in mobile homes. There's no basement, the walls are light, and a tornado that would damage a house can destroy one. Here's where they sit against three decades of tornado paths, and what the Storm Prediction Center's own records say about where people die.
Tornado deaths each year, by where the person was when the tornado hit. 2011 (553 deaths: Tuscaloosa, Joplin and the April 27 outbreak) is off the scale and is drawn cut off. The latest year is preliminary.
"Spot risk" compares the tornado-path odds at the average mobile home's location with the average home's in the same area: 1.30 means mobile homes sit where tornado paths are 30% more likely. Deaths per million are per decade, 1995–2025, all locations. "In mobile homes" is 2010 onward.
Tornado paths. Every tornado in the Storm Prediction Center's database from 1995 to 2025 (widths have been recorded the same way since 1995), about 39,000 state segments. Each path is drawn as its start-to-end line at its recorded width. That width is the maximum width, so path area runs high. The path area inside each county, divided by the county's area and 31 years, is the yearly chance that any given spot in the county sits inside a tornado's path.
Mobile homes. The Census Bureau's count of mobile homes (units in structure, ACS 2020–2024), summed from census tracts to counties. Multiplying by the path odds gives the mobile homes you'd expect inside a tornado path each decade, if tornadoes keep doing what they've done since 1995. That is exposure, not a forecast.
Where people died. SPC publishes a list of every killer tornado each year, and for each death, where the person was: mobile home, house, other building, vehicle, outdoors, or unknown. Those records start in this form in 2010 and are read here year by year. The latest year is preliminary.
A caution about the state table: the states with the most mobile homes are also some of the most tornado-prone. State death rates rise with tornado odds much more clearly than with mobile-home share, so the state numbers can't separate the two. The killer-tornado records can, because they say where each person was.