Auburn, WA
How exposed is Auburn to wildfire?
USFS scores Auburn at the 17th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 25,844 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Auburn at the 19th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Auburn's buildings actually sit
Auburn rates 51.2% Minimal exposure against just 8.6% Direct and 40.2% Indirect — of 25,844 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 25,844 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Auburn against the rest of the country
Auburn's risk sits at a similar level relative to Washington (24th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (17th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Auburn ranks 26,113 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 485 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 479 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Auburn and the insurance market
Auburn's low wildfire rating (17th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Hardening a home in Auburn
Auburn's 51.2% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 25,844 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Auburn. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Auburn, see the exposure-zones guide.