Albert Lea, MN
Albert Lea, MN's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Albert Lea at the 33rd national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 8,635 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Albert Lea at the 31st national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Albert Lea's buildings actually sit
Albert Lea rates 89.4% Minimal exposure against just 10.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 8,635 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 8,635 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Albert Lea ranks
There's little gap between Albert Lea's 33rd national percentile and its 42nd percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Albert Lea ranks 20,986 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,929 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 533 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 33rd national percentile, Albert Lea rates moderate for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Albert Lea's 89.4% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Albert Lea's 33rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Albert Lea, see the exposure-zones guide.