WildfireRiskFinder

Ankeny, IA

How exposed is Ankeny to wildfire?

Moderate
25thpercentile nationally

Ankeny's 22,016 buildings earn a 25th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)

Separately from the risk score above, Ankeny's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 27th percentile nationally.

Where Ankeny's buildings actually sit

22,016Total buildings
10.8%Direct exposure
4.5%Indirect exposure
84.7%Minimal exposure

Only 10.8% of Ankeny's 22,016 buildings carry Direct exposure and 4.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 84.7% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 22,016 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.

How Ankeny compares

There's little gap between Ankeny's 25th national percentile and its 39th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ankeny ranks 23,506 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 621 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 620 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.

Ankeny and the insurance market

Ankeny's moderate rating (25th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.

Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it

Ankeny's 84.7% 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

Ankeny's 25th-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 Ankeny, see the exposure-zones guide.