Global flood impacts have risen in recent decades and are projected to increase due to climate change and socio-economic expansion. While increasing exposure was the dominant driver of surging impacts, counteracting vulnerability reductions have been detected, but were too weak to reverse this trend. To assess the progress on vulnerability reduction in the 21st century, we combine newly available satellite observations of flooded areas for 913 events with four global disaster databases, and spatially-explicit data on structural and socio-economic characteristics. Event-specific flood vulnerabilities for assets, fatalities and displacements reveal a lack of progress in reducing global flood vulnerability from 2000—2018. Going beyond previous analyses on the income dependency of vulnerabilities, we examine their dependencies upon human development index, flood experience and local structural characteristics linked to the quality of governance. We find that vulnerability levels are significantly reduced in areas with better structural characteristics, while the effect of flood experience is limited to a reduction in flood mortality. Vulnerabilities are higher in low developed areas, but overall the effect of increasing socio-economic development was insufficient to significantly reduce vulnerabilities over the study period. Nevertheless, the strong dependence of vulnerability on structural characteristics reveals further potential for adaptation through vulnerability reduction.