Fortnite Storm Phases: Damage and Timings Per Zone

Everyone who plays Fortnite knows the storm gets worse. Almost nobody can tell you by how much, or how long they actually have when a circle appears.

Our rotation guide is honest about the shape of it — leave early, read where the zone pulls, late storm is a genuine threat — but it never puts a number on anything, and neither does our Storm Surge explainer, which deliberately skips figures on the grounds that they move between patches. Fair enough. But they are published figures, and knowing them changes decisions: whether you can loot one more chest, whether that 40-health run across the open is survivable, whether hiding in the storm is a plan or a suicide.

So here is the timetable. Every number below is the Fortnite Wiki's Storm phase data, which the page states is current as of update v41.20. Epic's own v42.00 update notes — the patch that opened Chapter 7 Season 4 on August 20, 2026 — record no Battle Royale storm value changes — their only storm-pacing note concerns a new Reload map, covered below — and the wiki's Battle Royale storm change log has no v42.00 entry, so v41.20 is still the last recorded revision at the time of writing.

The Battle Royale storm, phase by phase

Two clocks run in every phase. Time between phases is the wait — the circle is drawn on your map and the storm has not moved yet. Resize time is the shrink itself. Damage per second is expressed as a percentage of your maximum health.

Three things fall out of that table that are worth saying out loud.

Add every wait and every shrink together and the whole storm timetable is 22 minutes 38 seconds, from phase 0 forming to the final circle closing at zero metres. That is the outer bound on match length after the drop, not a typical game — most lobbies are decided several phases earlier.

The front half is generous and the back half is not. Phases 1 through 3 alone hand you 8 minutes 45 seconds of combined waiting and shrinking. Phases 10, 11 and 12 give you a one-second wait each: the circle appears and the storm is already moving. If you are planning to reposition on the countdown, that plan stops working at phase 10.

The damage cliff is phase 7, not phase 6. Damage stays flat at 1% for five straight phases, doubles to 2% at phase 6, and then more than doubles again to 5% at phase 7 — a 150% increase in a single step, the steepest proportional jump on the table. Phase 6 storm is an inconvenience. Phase 7 storm is a countdown.

What those percentages cost you at 100 HP

Percentages are awkward to act on mid-match. At the standard 100 maximum health, the percentage is simply health per second, so the numbers become obvious:

Ten seconds. That is the entire budget for a phase-9 storm run at full health, before Storm Sickness gets involved. It is why a mobility item in the late game is worth more inventory space than a third gun, and why a healing item you can throw or eat on the run is worth the slot.

Note the wiki describes storm damage as damage to your HP, and the figure scales with your maximum health rather than your current health, so a full shield bar does not change the phase clock above.

Storm Sickness is the real deadline

The per-second numbers are only half of it. Fortnite also tracks cumulative storm damage across the whole match, and the wiki's general description of the mechanic crosses three lines:

Two consequences. First, at phase-1 rates — 1 damage per second at 100 max health — you would need 600 seconds of storm exposure to trigger Storm Sickness, which is a lot; early storm really is cheap. Second, once it applies, the multiplier is 3x base storm damage, so a phase-9 storm goes from 10 per second to 30, and dipping back into the eye for a moment does not clear it. The wiki is explicit that briefly returning to the safe zone while Storm Sickness is already active does not cure it.

The practical version: the old trick of healing off inside the storm to place high is not a strategy any more. The wiki's own strategy notes say so directly, crediting the mechanic's introduction with killing it.

One scope warning on those three numbers. They come from the wiki's general Storm Sickness section, which does not name a mode — but the same page's Reload change log records an August 27, 2024 hotfix that cut Reload's Storm Sickness damage threshold from 600 to 100 and raised its additional damage per second from 2% to 4%, and no later Reload entry reverses either. Nothing published reconciles the two, so treat 500 / 600 / 800 as the Battle Royale figures and assume Reload punishes storm exposure sooner.

Storm Surge only fires when enough players are alive

Storm Surge is a separate system that gets confused with storm damage constantly, because both drain you when nobody is shooting. It has a gate our existing explainer describes only qualitatively: it can activate during a phase's wait period only if the number of players still alive exceeds a per-phase limit.

The sequence is the useful part: the bar falls from 90 down to 30 by phase 9 and then stays flat. Warnings are issued during the resize, and if you are still under the damage threshold when the storm finishes shrinking, Surge activates in the following wait phase. The surge tick itself is 25 damage every 5 seconds, and in team modes a Storm Surge elimination is instant rather than a knock, so there is no reboot to play for.

The damage threshold — how much damage you personally need to have dealt to stay off the list — is not a published number, which is exactly why our Storm Surge guide refuses to quote one. The alive-count gate above is published, and it is the half you can actually read off your own HUD.

Storm Surge exists in Battle Royale, Reload and Fortnite OG. The wiki does not list it for Blitz.

Reload, Fortnite OG and Blitz run different clocks

Same mechanic, three genuinely different pacings. These are the full recorded tables.

Reload — the same 12 shrinking phases as Battle Royale, closing in 19 minutes 55 seconds total:

Reload's damage ladder is identical to Battle Royale's — 1%, 2% at phase 6, 5%, 8%, then 10% — but it starts inside a 1000 m circle instead of 1500 m and gives you zero wait time from phase 9 onward. One caveat with a date on it: v42.00 added Mini-Venture to the Reload map rotation with a 24-player cap, and Epic's notes state its storm pacing is faster. Epic published no numbers for it, so treat the table above as standard Reload pacing and assume Mini-Venture is quicker by an unstated amount.

Fortnite OG — only 9 shrinking phases, 23 minutes 5 seconds, and it hits 10% damage far earlier:

That first phase is the whole personality of OG mode: 6 minutes 20 seconds of combined wait and shrink before anything is urgent, off the biggest starting circle of any mode at 1850 m. Then it compresses hard — 2% arrives at phase 3 and 10% at phase 6, against phase 6 and phase 9 in modern Battle Royale.

Blitz — 6 shrinking phases, and the entire storm timetable is 5 minutes 10 seconds:

Blitz is the outlier by a distance. Phase 5 deals 20% per second and phase 6 deals 40% — double and quadruple anything Battle Royale ever reaches. At 100 maximum health that is a 2.5-second life expectancy in a phase-6 Blitz storm. There is no rotating out of it and no healing through it; if you are outside that circle, you are done.

Where the wiki disagrees with itself

The phase tables above are what the Fortnite Wiki publishes as current. Reading them against the same page's change log, ten of the twelve Battle Royale rows reconcile exactly, and every Reload row touched by its July 31, 2026 hotfix matches. Five cells do not reconcile, and you should know which ones before you plan a rotation around them.

The June 6 revert is worth spelling out because it is what makes the rest of the table trustworthy. Update v41.00 shipped a full storm retune and a hotfix disabled all of it hours later. You can verify the revert took: every "from" value in the later v41.20 hotfix notes matches the pre-v41.00 numbers, including phase 11 sitting at 10 m and phase 12 still existing — both of which v41.00 had changed. So the revert is real, which is precisely why phase 1's radius still reading 950 m looks like a leftover.

None of the five is load-bearing for how you play. Phase 1 is the one phase where nobody is under pressure, ten seconds of phase-2 timing will not decide a match, and whether Blitz phase 6 kills you in 2.5 seconds or 2 seconds is a distinction without a difference. The two Fortnite OG cells matter slightly more, because they move that mode's total: resolve both the change log's way and OG's timetable comes out at 22 minutes 45 seconds instead of 23 minutes 5 seconds. Flagging them anyway, because a table you have checked is worth more than one you have not.

Storm behaviour that is no longer running

Old guides and old videos will tell you about storm features that have been switched off. Three of them, with the update that killed each:

• Dynamic Storm shortened the wait and resize times by around 30 seconds when the lobby thinned out early. The wiki records it as disabled in all playlists as of v41.30. Do not plan on a short-handed lobby speeding the clock up.
• Storm Surfing, the Chapter 7 Season 1 mechanic where a storm wave carried players in instead of the Battle Bus, was removed in v40.00.
• The triangle storm shape, which spent most of Chapter 7 Season 1 bouncing between a 0.1% and a 100% chance of replacing the circle, was disabled in the July 27, 2026 v41.20 hotfix.

The 22 minutes 38 seconds above is therefore the published timetable regardless of how many players are left in the lobby.

Quick Action Checklist

• Know the two clocks. The wait is your planning window; the shrink is your travel window. Phases 1 through 3 give you 8:45 of both combined
• Treat phase 7 as the cliff. Damage goes 2% to 5% in one step there — the biggest jump on the table
• Stop banking on the countdown at phase 10. Phases 10, 11 and 12 have a one-second wait
• Count 10 seconds of life in a phase-9 or later storm at 100 HP, less once Storm Sickness applies
• Watch 800 cumulative storm damage. That is an instant elimination regardless of your health bar
• Check the alive count against the Surge gate — 90 players at phase 2 falling to 30 by phase 9
• Re-learn the clock for Blitz. 5:10 end to end, 20% per second at phase 5 and 40% at phase 6