River flooding is one of the major and increasingly devastating disasters in Japan. In recent years, the society has recognized that it is essentially important in flood-prone areas to prepare for possible flooding rather than to merely prevent flooding. Under these circumstances, it has been becoming more important to prepare at individual and community levels for flooding. Meanwhile, it is assumed that not only objective burden but also a sense of burden, or perceived burden, among individuals such as time, expense and effort in practicing disaster preparedness is a major factor that hinders implementation of such practices. In the present study, we aimed to identify the influence of perceived burden of preparing for flooding on the actual disaster preparedness practices by developing a scale to measure perceived burden of disaster preparedness, assessing the levels of perceived burden using the scale and analyzing its relationships with the actual practices and related factors such as river environmental awareness. The data were collected through a webbased questionnaire survey with a consumer panel residing in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area (n = 487). Factor analysis on the 17 scale items of the perceived burden extracted three factors, namely perceived burden toward non-financial individual practices, financial individual practices and non-financial community level practices. Multiple regression and structural equation modeling analyses revealed that the perceived burden toward non-financial practices for disaster preparedness at individual and community levels has a strong negative relations to actual practices. Especially, the results suggest that feeling “bothersome to learn how to prepare for flooding” and “bothersome to prepare for flooding by sacrificing my daily life time” are major factors in these negative relations. Also, it was found that interests in river improvement can lower perceived burden of disaster preparedness.