Climate change is projected to heighten flood risk. To adapt to this higher flood risk, catchment-wide flood risk management (FRM) plans have become increasingly popular. These plans aim to implement risk reduction measures (RRMs), usually in rural areas on privately owned land, with the goal of reducing the vulnerability of downstream/urban regions. These interventions can have ramifications for rural/upstream areas as they restrict such areas’ spatial and economic growth. Despite these unequal outcomes of distributive justice, reasons for using the countryside/upstream areas are multifaceted, such as lowering the costs of implementation or attaining further co-benefits. In this paper, we aim to analyse how anticipated futures are used to legitimise the unequal distributive consequences of catchment-wide FRM. We combine insights from future studies involving a future perspective (expected, preferable, and probable futures) and the distributive justice literature to examine the debate on large-scale catchment-wide FRM plans in Austria and the Netherlands. In both countries, futures are rarely discussed with reference to justice-related concerns, even though the subsequent decisions can have substantial repercussions for the distribution of burdens and benefits; this is particularly problematic because ‘keeping options open’ and delaying decisions by halting growth have strong justice-based implications but play only an implicit role in the discourse.