Argenta, MT
How exposed is Argenta to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Argenta at the 66th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 46 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Argenta at the 62nd national percentile — 4 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Direct exposure dominates in Argenta: 100% of its 46 buildings, versus 0% Indirect and 0% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
Argenta against the rest of the country
Inside Montana, Argenta sits at just the 34th percentile even though it scores 66th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Argenta ranks 10,596 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 31,027 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 313 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Argenta's 66th-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in Argenta
Argenta's 100% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Argenta's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Argenta's 10,596-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Argenta's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.